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On election integrity
Loosely inspired by this story about the Pence-Kobach Voting Integrity Commission, and the quotation
(In case it's not obvious, Adams is a commission member, apparently offended that several Democratic members of the commission complained that they haven't been informed of the commission's meeting schedule and agenda.)
I agree with the sentiment, however hypocritical it may be in the instance quoted above. Election integrity should be an issue of bipartisan concern: every patriotic American should want our elected officials to actually represent the will of the people.
So how can that fail? What can go wrong with an election? Several things:
1) The reported vote counts fail to match the actual votes cast. For example, voting machines could be hacked, ballots could be created without any actual voters, ballots could be "misplaced", or officials could simply announce different numbers than they see.
2) People who shouldn't be allowed to vote in a given election do.
3) People who should be allowed to vote in a given election don't.
4) People cast votes based on inaccurate information.
Any of these can happen on either a small-scale, "retail" level or a large-scale, "wholesale" level.
Any of these can happen either by accident or with malicious intent to change the outcome of an election.
Any of them is probably not a concern if it happens in few enough cases that it doesn't change the outcome of elections (e.g. if three people in a state of 10,000,000 vote illegally, it's unlikely to matter). Even if the numbers are large, it's also not much of a concern if it happens in a "random" way that approximates how the legitimate vote count would have looked (e.g. if there are 100,000 extra or missing votes in that state, but they have the same R/D/3P distribution as the legitimate votes, it doesn't change who wins or loses).
Accidental errors, while regrettable, are usually "random" and unlikely to change the outcome of elections, so they're a lesser concern. So what we really need to worry about is intentional, large-scale, politically biased failures of any of the four types described above.
There is abundant evidence that #1 can happen, both with old-fashioned paper ballots and with high-tech electronic voting machines, but very little evidence of it actually happening on a large scale in recent years in the U.S. Nonetheless, it's a serious concern because it can be done on a large scale, intentionally, with political bias, and undetectably (e.g. by hacking electronic voting machines that produce no voter-verifiable paper record).
There is very little evidence of #2 happening on a significant scale, much less in an intentional or non-random way, in recent years in the U.S.
We know for certain that #3 happens on a large scale, both voluntarily (people don't care enough to go to the trouble of voting) and involuntarily (people are scared away from the polls, or still standing in line when the polls close, or have their registrations cancelled against their will). Voluntary non-voting is a legitimate (if unfortunate) expression of voter preference, but involuntary non-voting is another story. There's abundant evidence that voter intimidation, polling-place underresourcing, and voter-roll purges happen intentionally, on a large scale, with a substantial racial and socioeconomic bias, which in most parts of the country corresponds to a political bias. So this is a serious election-integrity problem we need to address.
#4 is unavoidable as long as votes are cast by fallible human beings, but if the inaccurate information is randomly distributed, it's unlikely to change the outcomes of elections. We have good evidence that, at least in the 2016 Presidential election, the inaccurate information was not randomly distributed: a foreign government used its cyber-espionage agencies to acquire and release damaging information about one major party and not the other, and used an army of trolls and bots to amplify fictitious negative news stories about one major party and not the other. Indeed, one major Presidential candidate (perhaps jokingly) invited that foreign government to hack the other major party, and members of his campaign staff hinted at upcoming releases of damaging information shortly before the foreign government did exactly that, suggesting (though not proving) conscious collusion between the campaign and the foreign government. So this is a serious election-integrity problem we need to address.
Although remarkably little information is available about the Voting Integrity Commission (see the article at the top), whether to journalists filing FOIA requests, members of Congress filing oversight requests, or even Commission members themselves asking when the next meeting is, it seems clear that the leadership of the Commission are exclusively concerned with #2, and not at all with #1, #3, or #4, all of which are more realistic threats to democracy.
A truly non-partisan Election Integrity Commission would take as its mandate to investigate all four of these possible failures, gather objective data on how widespread they are, draw conclusions about what to prioritize, and recommend remedies based on those conclusions. The Commission we actually have appears to be doing the reverse: the desired remedies are racially- and socioeconomically-biased voter-ID laws, polling-place selection, and hurdles to voter registration, so the "conclusion" must be that #2 is a serious problem and the others aren't, so facts must be found or invented to support that conclusion.
"Once upon a time election integrity was bipartisan,” Adams wrote. “Apparently not all agree. That’s a shame.”
(In case it's not obvious, Adams is a commission member, apparently offended that several Democratic members of the commission complained that they haven't been informed of the commission's meeting schedule and agenda.)
I agree with the sentiment, however hypocritical it may be in the instance quoted above. Election integrity should be an issue of bipartisan concern: every patriotic American should want our elected officials to actually represent the will of the people.
So how can that fail? What can go wrong with an election? Several things:
1) The reported vote counts fail to match the actual votes cast. For example, voting machines could be hacked, ballots could be created without any actual voters, ballots could be "misplaced", or officials could simply announce different numbers than they see.
2) People who shouldn't be allowed to vote in a given election do.
3) People who should be allowed to vote in a given election don't.
4) People cast votes based on inaccurate information.
Any of these can happen on either a small-scale, "retail" level or a large-scale, "wholesale" level.
Any of these can happen either by accident or with malicious intent to change the outcome of an election.
Any of them is probably not a concern if it happens in few enough cases that it doesn't change the outcome of elections (e.g. if three people in a state of 10,000,000 vote illegally, it's unlikely to matter). Even if the numbers are large, it's also not much of a concern if it happens in a "random" way that approximates how the legitimate vote count would have looked (e.g. if there are 100,000 extra or missing votes in that state, but they have the same R/D/3P distribution as the legitimate votes, it doesn't change who wins or loses).
Accidental errors, while regrettable, are usually "random" and unlikely to change the outcome of elections, so they're a lesser concern. So what we really need to worry about is intentional, large-scale, politically biased failures of any of the four types described above.
There is abundant evidence that #1 can happen, both with old-fashioned paper ballots and with high-tech electronic voting machines, but very little evidence of it actually happening on a large scale in recent years in the U.S. Nonetheless, it's a serious concern because it can be done on a large scale, intentionally, with political bias, and undetectably (e.g. by hacking electronic voting machines that produce no voter-verifiable paper record).
There is very little evidence of #2 happening on a significant scale, much less in an intentional or non-random way, in recent years in the U.S.
We know for certain that #3 happens on a large scale, both voluntarily (people don't care enough to go to the trouble of voting) and involuntarily (people are scared away from the polls, or still standing in line when the polls close, or have their registrations cancelled against their will). Voluntary non-voting is a legitimate (if unfortunate) expression of voter preference, but involuntary non-voting is another story. There's abundant evidence that voter intimidation, polling-place underresourcing, and voter-roll purges happen intentionally, on a large scale, with a substantial racial and socioeconomic bias, which in most parts of the country corresponds to a political bias. So this is a serious election-integrity problem we need to address.
#4 is unavoidable as long as votes are cast by fallible human beings, but if the inaccurate information is randomly distributed, it's unlikely to change the outcomes of elections. We have good evidence that, at least in the 2016 Presidential election, the inaccurate information was not randomly distributed: a foreign government used its cyber-espionage agencies to acquire and release damaging information about one major party and not the other, and used an army of trolls and bots to amplify fictitious negative news stories about one major party and not the other. Indeed, one major Presidential candidate (perhaps jokingly) invited that foreign government to hack the other major party, and members of his campaign staff hinted at upcoming releases of damaging information shortly before the foreign government did exactly that, suggesting (though not proving) conscious collusion between the campaign and the foreign government. So this is a serious election-integrity problem we need to address.
Although remarkably little information is available about the Voting Integrity Commission (see the article at the top), whether to journalists filing FOIA requests, members of Congress filing oversight requests, or even Commission members themselves asking when the next meeting is, it seems clear that the leadership of the Commission are exclusively concerned with #2, and not at all with #1, #3, or #4, all of which are more realistic threats to democracy.
A truly non-partisan Election Integrity Commission would take as its mandate to investigate all four of these possible failures, gather objective data on how widespread they are, draw conclusions about what to prioritize, and recommend remedies based on those conclusions. The Commission we actually have appears to be doing the reverse: the desired remedies are racially- and socioeconomically-biased voter-ID laws, polling-place selection, and hurdles to voter registration, so the "conclusion" must be that #2 is a serious problem and the others aren't, so facts must be found or invented to support that conclusion.