I want to clear up a few points about my recent post on e-voting fraud.

First of all when I claim that electronic voting fraud is checked by polling I mean that individual or small groups of fraudsters couldn’t get away with turning an obvious loser into a winner. The examples people keep wanting to give about discrepancies between polls and results are all cases where the polls all agreed the race was close. So sure maybe e-voting fraud can shift who wins in someplace like Florida or Ohio but it would have been very hard for a small band of fraudsters to have shifted California to the republicans in 2004 without being detected.

My claim is essentially that polling would stop a small group from shifting a race polling at 60-40 to the 40% canidate. Not that it couldn’t change who wins tight races like Bush v. Kerry. Also even if you think someone could shift a 60-40 election and get away with it they are unlikely to be able to do so repeatedly and certainly not repeatably on a national scale.

In other words I am arguing that if we gave the republicans (or the democrats) a permanent 10 percent handicap in elections then in the long run the country wouldn’t be much worse off. This might sound like an incredible thesis but plenty of irrelevant things affect how people vote and we someone manage through all that. Despite being pretty damn conservative my paternal grandfather voted democrat his entire life because of Roosevelt. African Americans insisted on voting republican until about 50 years ago or so because Lincoln had been a republican. Ironically JFK and Johnson were probably elected because of the converse bias of southern whites towards the democrats. In other words having the voting system be free of arbitrary bias, even quite significant arbitrary bias, doesn’t seem to be essential.

So how can that be? An answer comes from basic political science. Even if one canidate is guaranteed to get 10% of the vote for free it doesn’t alter the strategy for a two person election. Both canidates still want to maximize the number of people voting for them and they can best do this by moving to the center. While this is a simplified model and real world canidates shouldn’t always position themselves as perfect moderates in the long run this effect is very real at the party level. Parties are run by the people who win elections and if the country shifts to the left then both parties will follow it because that is what will win more elections.

Additionally if this evoting fraud doesn’t occur consistently it won’t make much of a difference at all. If the parties select their canidates and the canidates make their promises thinking the election will be fair the fraudster can only choose between two fairly mainstream canidates. Thus unless you suspect that Diebold could get away with hard coding a permanent 10% advantage for republicans into the system our elected officials will still be very mainstream.

In other words what is important in the long run is not whether our public officials come from the right or left but whether they follow the changes in mood of the country. Even if you think that evoting will be exploited to create a permanent 10% advantage for one party of another it still won’t undermine the structural pressure to follow the mood of the American public. It might shift our policy a bit to the left or right of what the electorate favors but by an amount that is no bigger than other random factors affecting people’s votes.

On the other hand I think there are more concerning things like safe districts and long term barriers to certain groups voting that are more of a concern. These sorts of effects can make certain (non-random) segments of society totally irrelevant to the voting process. Safe districts mean that the canidate need not worry about appealing to anyone but the hardcore supporters of his party. Felon disenfranchisement or systematic failure to provide polling places in certain neighborhoods allow canidates to ignore significant sections of society. Unlike randomly reassigning 10% of the vote keeping groups with common interests from effectively voting removes/reduces the incentive for politicians to appeal to that group.

Finally I should clarify that in my last post I was only talking about the sort of fraud that evoting uniquely makes possible. Of course evoting, just like paper ballots is vulnerable to machine politics and organized corruption. These sorts of voting scams can truly make elected officials immune from public oversight not just bias things a bit.

However, this sort of long term massive, organized voting fraud (which is much less common since the rise of the accurate poll) isn’t possible without massive organized corruption. Relying on the polls to find problems only works if you have an essentially honest system which will acknowledge fraud it stumbles upon. If the organization running the election is essentially corrupt I acknowledge that polls aren’t going to fix the problem (though they may help). However, I don’t see how evoting is any worse than paper voting in this situation. In both cases the week link the corrupt scheme isn’t the security of the voting machinery but the people in on the scam.