If you are a left-leaning US expat in Europe, whoever you voted for in the primary – if you voted – I bet it felt fantastic to finally be able to do something politically positive for once.
Though not all the results are in yet, Clinton is ahead and Obama has pledged to take it all the way to the convention. The margins are narrow and small numbers could make a difference.
But did your overseas vote even count?
According to The Register and an American academic at the University of Bath whoever you preferred, Clinton or Obama, your vote may not have counted and there’s no way to tell:
Joanna Bryson, an American citizen living in the UK, used the system to cast her ballot on Tuesday, and the experience has left the computer science lecturer at the University of Bath questioning how anyone could possibly verify its accuracy, should it ever come to that.
Upon casting her ballot, Bryson says she got a message encouraging her to print out a receipt of her vote. That’s a common enough technique in elections that’s designed to aid poll workers in the event of an audit. What was unusual in this case is that the receipt contained only one piece of information: the candidate she voted for. There was no bar code, serial number or other mark to distinguish her receipt from thousands of others that might be printed out by other American expatriates.
Typically, receipts contain additional information that provides a unique identifier while still preserving a voter’s anonymity. In the event fraud is suspected, auditors check a small sample of the receipts against the recorded results and look for irregularities. It’s unclear what the benefit is of a receipt that records nothing other than the chosen candidate.
“Either they’re incompetent or it’s an empty gesture,” Bryson says.
Doubts have been expressed already about the reliability of primary voting technology. Our old friends Diebold and optical scanning are still in use and as unreliable and easily subvertable as ever. Add to that a new online voting system shown to be unverifiable and you’ve got a trust problem.
A canny candidate could use such a situation to their advantage – after all, how did Bush get elected not once, but twice?
I name no names and make no accusations but the Clinton campaign, for example, has shown itself quite ready to go as far as to challenge the right to cast a ballot in order to gain immediate political advantage. Not many scruples there.
It’s funny, Bush the Elder was all about the process too – I wonder if Bill learned something while they swanned about the globe together on their bipartisan world tour & photop mission of mercy post-Aceh?
More on the reliability or otherwise of Democrats Abroad’s primary voting process here.
