Prior to 2000 there were very few computer scientists involved in the election industry. There were, to be sure, a few that were actively involved and also critical of electronic voting machine. But the big explosion happened after 2000 and more so after 2002 when Bev Harris and others raised awareness of unauditable DREs.

The work of these academics has been taken as the gold standard of what is good and bad in the industry. I believe that conclusion is wrong. What I want to explore here is what we should learn from these people and what we should ignore. There a few things often overlooked with their involvement in the election field.

 Vested Interests:  

1. Professors have an obligation not only to teach, but to publish and to provide public service. For many of them they use their involvement in elections as a way to satisfy their requirement for both public service and for publishing. So they aren’t always doing this out of the goodness of their heart, or for their concern for democracy. The growing controversies regarding election technology are fertile ground for academics and, since nature abhors a vacuum, they swept in to make their mark.
2. Remember too that the vast majority of academics belong to just one political party. Let’s be honest for a second here; the so called “Election Integrity” movement is dominated by Democrat leaning voters, and not Republican leaning voters. That’s just a fact. It bothers me that so many activist sites claim to be non-profit and non-partisan when they are obviously partisan. Now it’s true that there is a bit more balance in the sciences than in the humanities, but it is still heavily weighted even in these departments. As a result, many computer scientists should be treated very cautiously because of their political leanings and activist tendencies. The reality is that quite a number of them have a political axe to grind and they do so all the while proclaiming a more objective stance.
3. The fact that people have vested interests does not mean their conclusions can be ignored. I’m not claiming that. I am claiming that their involvement in our business is often not filled with the right motives. It does potentially call into question the kinds of methods that they use, as well as color their overall integrity and you should use them at your own peril. Be sure to check their personal blogs before you hire them as experts, otherwise you might just get skewered for hiring someone with a clear preconceived ideological stance with respect to voting systems.

Criticism vs. Production

 1. Most computer scientists are critics of the status quo in the election industry (mostly the technology side). So let’s talk a bit about what “criticism” is and how it differs from what I call “production.” Think a bit about the movie business. There are those that make movies—directors, actors, producers and so forth. Those actions I call “production.” Then there are movie critics—think Roger Ebert et. al. Now these are two very different activities and you would be wise not to confuse the two. What do I mean here? 

Many movie critics don’t know the first thing about actually creating a movie. They may know next to nothing about how a movie is produced or directed. They may not even know the tools of the trade used in movie making. Instead, their efforts are aimed the end result—what is shown on the screen. Now I’m not suggesting that critics are bad or unnecessary. They provide a very useful service. But don’t ever think that a critic knows about how movies actually are made. And it would also be really dumb to think that you should hire a movie critic to show you how to make a movie. The few critics that have tried have failed miserably. Take Roger Ebert for example—he tried his hand with a film called “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” ( not Valley of the Dolls). It was a miserable flop and a terrible film. Well, what do we learn from this? We learn that just because you are a great critic does not mean you can actually create the things you criticize. The same applies to food critics, music critics, etc.

Now how does this relate to our computer science professors? Well, most of them have been critics of election technology. You know the spiel: the software is shoddy, the security is lax, the programming is amateurish, etc. We hear this over and over.

The point is this: you make a big mistake if you think that because they are good at criticizing election systems, that they would be capable of creating election technology!! The proof is in the pudding. Is there any election technology that has been widely accepted, used, bought or sold, or even played with that has been the creation of these professors? I can’t think of one. They claim to be working on some open source software for tabulation, but nothing like a real life product has been created, or if it has, it has remained a pretty low profile product.

This is the way it should be. Critics typically aren’t producers. What is troubling is that we often ask them what good election technology SHOULD look like. This is much like asking an alcoholic or drug addict to describe normal functional living. It’s somewhat odd that we use former addicts and alcoholics to lecture current addicts about how to live. The problem here is that most addicts don’t have a clue about how ‘normal’ functional people live. They assume that it must be the opposite of whatever they did wrong. So if they did X and it got them into trouble, then a normal person should do NOT-X. Wrong. This is why they are so stuck on this idea that a normal or functional life must include absolute sobriety of all sorts. Since alcohol or drugs got them into trouble, the answer must be an alcohol free life. Again, this is just wrongheaded and unhelpful, and it explains why treatment in this country is such a failure. 

I don’t mean to digress here, but the same can be said of our computer science pals. They examine a voting system and remark that it is bad since it contains feature X, then they conclude that a correct system must have NOT-X. Again, it is one thing to be a critic and it’s another thing to be a producer. Don’t confuse the two. Don’t think that computer scientists will create or produce or contribute to a commercially successful voting system.

Often they don’t know much about elections

Let’s face it, our computer scientists know about computers and software, but they often don’t know much about elections. A number of them might turn out to not even vote. This is certainly likely when professors use their graduate students to assist in evaluating our systems. How many of those young kids in their 20s actually vote? Probably not that many. But here we are using them as the “gold standard” for evaluating our voting technology. This makes election administrators madder than anything. The largest complaint about their work is that they simply don’t know much about the complex nature of elections—they don’t know election law, election practice, or the history of it all. As a result they peer into this in a very isolated and insulated way.

 It has been remarked more than once that poking around with voting machines in the lab isn’t really all that telling, and certainly you can’t conclude much if you ignore the totality of election practice. Election administrators always liken it to being able to rob a bank provided the doors are open, the bank is empty and the vault is wide open. It isn’t quite the same, but this does illustrate the frustration that elections administrators have with our good professors looking at this equipment in isolation. 

No Voting System will ever please all Computer Scientists

If we go back to our analogy with movie critics we can easily see that some critics are almost never pleased with any film they review. And some of the harshest critics are the best known. One wonders if any voting system will ever please these people. After all, they are experts in showing and discovering flaws in systems. Give them any bit of software, and they will design a Trojan horse, or a virus that will allow vote changing to take place, etc. Show them the source code and criticism will be sure to follow. It is very unlikely that some voting system will come across their path and they will be completely enthralled with it and conclude that it is entirely safe, secure, accurate and user friendly. It just isn’t the nature of their business to reach such conclusions.

Some of it is due to competition. These professors have to compete with each other, and with other institutions for grants and funding. If you have noticed, quite a number of them have received funding from various sources (including the federal government) to investigate voting systems. It has become a cash cow for many of them. As a result they have a vested interested in raising concerns and undermining public confidence in the election industry.

 Final Remarks

I once asked one of these professors, who was critical of optical scan systems, why he didn’t attack the very optical scan systems used in education. After all, I reminded him, many of his own students came to that university after taking such tests as the ACT and SATs. Those tests are filled out and graded using optical scan technology. Why isn’t there uproar about auditing those tests? Why don’t students ask to see them and make sure they are accurate?  Where are the “re-counts” in standardized tests?  Why such faith there but no faith in the election business? 

Doesn’t it seem odd to anyone that people who are supposed to be experts in computer science seem to love computers in just about every other area of life, except elections? Now if there is something really just different about elections from every other use of technology, then fine. But I’m not sure I see that. And it would be up to them to make that argument. Yes, elections are not like banking and they are unique in many respects; but that fact alone does not dictate that they must be free of any computerization.

 It all leads up to a simple observation that since HAVA, elections have proven easy pickings for academics (of all sorts actually). I’m not suggesting that their conclusions have been wrong, or that there aren’t huge issues with the quality of the hardware and software used in our business. We know there are issues. I remain convinced that they are just one voice out of many that should be listened too and we need to understand them and their work for what it really is.

 It’s great to have them as critics and foils against the status quo in this business. But it is a dangerous thing to give them greater credit than this and to use them in roles that are better suited to those who really understand, and who have worked in, our industry.