American electoral results are tabulated by machines, while in Canada national elections are still counted by hand. Should we follow the US lead?

by Jon Dykstra

Chuck Hagel was supposed to lose. In 1996 Hagel ran for an open US senate seat and while he wasn’t an unknown, he didn’t have the name-recognition of his opponent, the sitting Governor of Nebraska. So Hagel was supposed to lose.

Instead he pulled off a big upset, winning with 56 per cent of the vote and becoming the first Republican to win a Senate seat in Nebraska in twenty-four years.

How did he do it? Was it his TV ads, his campaign literature, or maybe his interviews with the press? How did Chuck Hagel sway the electorate so successfully?

Or did he sway them at all? Up until 1995 Hagel had been the CEO of American Information Systems Inc, the company that supplied the paperless voting machines that were used to count approximately 85 per cent of the votes in Hagel’s senatorial race. When this news came out years later, a host of websites sprang up denouncing the election as a fix, with several doing so using a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin:

“The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election; the people who count the votes do.”

Fodder for conspiracy whisperings

Chuck Hagel’s race wasn’t the only one to spawn conspiratorial whispering. The 2000 presidential race was decided in the state of Florida, which George Bush narrowly won. But on election night, in Volusia County, Florida, a Global Elections System voting machine used in the 216th precinct where 412 people voted gave the Socialist candidate 10,000 votes and gave the Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore a negative vote count of 16,022 votes.

This error was caught on election night, and corrected, but the incident provided more fodder for the conspiracy theorists. Someone, it seemed, had hacked the machine. And if it could happen in Volusia County, why not elsewhere too? If it could happen elsewhere, how do we know it isn’t happening everywhere?

The difference between Canada and the US

This last question showcases the difference between federal elections in Canada versus the US – how do we know that election fraud isn’t happening? In the United States it is at least conceivable that it could occur. Electronic voting machines that have shown themselves liable to error and tampering count roughly 80 per cent of the national vote. The software that runs these machines are commercial secrets that no one outside the companies that make and sell the machines are allowed to see. Some of these machines employ touch screen technology, using an entirely paperless system, so if an error or fraud does happen, there are no paper ballots with which to double check the results. So, in a very real way, voters simply have to trust that their vote is being accurately tabulated.

In the documentary Hacking Democracy David Dill, a Stanford professor of computer sciences, explains just how crazy an idea this is, comparing it to trusting your vote to some guy behind a curtain:

“Supposing… there was a guy behind the curtain who would write down your votes. So you just dictate them, he writes them down and when you’re done you leave without being able to look at the ballot. Most people in their right mind would not trust this process. The guy behind the curtain could be incompetent, he could hear your votes wrong and record them improperly or it could be he doesn’t like your political affiliation and would prefer to see your votes cast for someone else.”

Is it any wonder then, that some Americans aren’t confident in simply trusting this system?

In Canada, however, you don’t hear conspiracy theories about how an election was stolen. That’s because our system is transparent and has clear, simple checks and balances.

The Canadian system

Instead of entrusting our vote tabulation to machines, the more than 13 millions ballots cast in the 2008 Canadian federal election were counted by hand, and it was done quickly with results completed within fours hours of the polls closing. Instead of one machine counting a poll, the totals in most Canadian polls are counted by at least four people. Two of these tabulators are with Elections Canada. They are the Deputy Returning Officer, who shows the group each vote, and the Poll Clerk who keeps track of the running total. The other two or three or even more people watching the vote are scrutineers recruited by, and representing, each of the different candidates. So in most ridings there are people with at least 3 different perspectives counting the vote:

1)  the (hopefully neutral) Elections Canada staff
2)  a Liberal scrutineer
3)  a Conservative scrutineer
4)  often a New Democrat scrutineer (if the have the manpower)
5)  a scrutineer from other parties, or independent candidates

After the poll is counted these scrutineers phone in the results to their party headquarters where these numbers are added to the totals coming in from the other polls.

Conclusion

The point here is not to argue that at some time in the past an American election has been fixed, but only to show that American voters have good reason to worry that in the future one just might be. Their dependency on electronic voting machines means their system is based on trust – trust that the machines will work as they are supposed to, and trust that the people making and programming the machines are competent and always honest.

The Canadian system, on the other hand, recognizes that it is foolish to trust overmuch, that we are fallen and depraved creatures. Of course election officials have never stated it in such explicitly biblical terms, but that is the difference nonetheless. Instead of trust, we have verification, with two, three and even more vote totals from the different parties available to check against the official results.

From a Reformed perspective then, the Canadian hand count is vastly superior to the American voting machine count. And yet, in more and more Canadian municipal elections, electronic voting machines are being used, and at the provincial level there have been discussions about introducing these machines to modernize our voting process.

Our system doesn’t need modernization – it works, and it works far better than anything our nearest neighbor has come up with. Rather than following the Americans’ lead, we should be exporting our system to the US. The Americans would do well to take a lesson from Canada and introduce an electoral system that is trustworthy because it doesn’t trust anyone overmuch.