Engineering Out Systematic Oppression: Disenfranchisement, Discrimination, and Solutions for Election Systems

This comparative analysis reviews literature from the perspective of legal, sociological, political and engineering disciplines. The interdisciplinary approach allows for a holistic examination of what problems persist in commissioning of elections. In many cases, practical engineering considerations are forced to defer to legal precedent. I blend both historical and contemporary issues regarding elections and democracy in the United States, and I trace the failures of the election system to achieve full enfranchisement. I discuss these legal battles in the context of maintaining secure elections. I review technological aspects of elections and various election systems. A newly developed tool, the Perspective On Issues Map, analyzes and illustrates the compendium of these aspects of the voting system in one graphic. Finally, I ask questions for future research.No embargoAcademic Major: Industrial and Systems Engineerin

Electoral Due Process

Elections and their aftermath are matters left to the states by the U.S. Constitution. But the Supreme Court has made clear that the right to vote is federally protected, and fiercely so. When an election failure takes place and deprives citizens of their votes, challengers must resort to state law remedies. Many states have procedural requirements for election challenges that are stringent to the point of being prohibitive. This Note argues that the due process concerns raised by these burdensome state procedures are amplified by their voting rights context. Where a voter must take to the courts to vindicate her right to vote, she should not be further deprived by an unfair process. Federal courts hearing cases about unfair election-challenge procedures have been reluctant to interfere and are thus overly deferential to the states. This Note offers a new approach for “electoral due process” claims—an approach that is properly preservative of voters’ substantive rights and their rights to a fair hearing

Voting: What Has Changed, What Hasn't, & Why: Research Bibliography

Since the origins of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project in the fall of 2000, there has been an explosion of research and analysis on election administration and voting technology. As we worked throughout 2012 on our most recent study, Voting: What Has Changed, What Hasn’t, & What Needs Improvement, we found many more research studies. In this research bibliography, we present the research literature that we have found; future revisions of this research bibliography will update this list.Carnegie Corporation of New Yor

Rethinking Transparency in U.S. Elections

Bush v. Gore catapulted this country into a crisis of confidence in the management of our elections. Despite reforms since 2000, public confidence in election administration continues to wane. Are dead people on the rolls? Are noncitizens voting? Are provisional ballots wrongly rejected? State election transparency statutes meant to reassure the public that elections are producing legitimate results are often conflicting, vague, and even nonexistent. Exacerbating the problem, the last two decades have witnessed huge changes that offset the transparency balance. Dramatic changes in how Americans vote, how elections are administered, and who scrutinizes the election process call for a recalibration of election transparency norms. It is not immediately clear, as some are beginning to sense, that unqualified openness serves the fundamental goals of election transparency, that reactive access policies boost public confidence, or that current state transparency architectures tap the full potential technology offers. Circumstances demand not just statutory revision, but revisiting traditional assumptions about election transparency to accommodate radically changed circumstances. This paper contains a proposal pairing an increase in public access to election materials with penalties for harmful uses of election data. We have an opportunity to craft a modern transparency regime trained on the core goal of ensuring public confidence in election outcomes. Developing state transparency regimes that address—and take advantage of—modern realities is critical in an era when election controversy is the new normal

Modeling and Analyzing Faults to Improve Election Process Robustness

This paper presents an approach for continuous process improvement and illustrates its application to improving the robustness of election processes. In this approach, the Little-JIL process definition language is used to create a precise and detailed model of an election process. Given this process model and a potential undesirable event, or hazard, a fault tree is automatically derived. Fault tree analysis is then used to automatically identify combinations of failures that might allow the selected potential hazard to occur. Once these combinations have been identified, we iteratively improve the process model to increase the robustness of the election process against those combinations that seem the most likely to occur. We demonstrate this approach for the Yolo County election process. We focus our analysis on the ballot counting process and what happens when a discrepancy is found during the count. We identify two single points of failure (SPFs) in this process and propose process modifications that we then show remove these SPFs

Judicial Protection of Popular Sovereignty: Redressing Voting Technology

My analysis seeks to underscore the gravity of technologically threatened constitutional voting rights and values, implicating both individual rights to vote and the structural promise of popular sovereignty. Resolution of the dispute over the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment17 principles properly derived from Bush v. Gore18 will be pivotal to assuring meaningful voting rights in the information society. If the Court should hold the Fourteenth Amendment to embrace a deferential standard of review or arduous intent requirements, allowing state political branches to persist in choosing voting technologies based on scientifically unfounded premises that do not achieve classic components of voting rights, the American Republic’s future is seriously endangered.19 The argument proceeds in two parts. Part I traces illustrative empirical findings of the two comprehensive, definitive voting systems studies, offers evidence derived from actual election calamities that substantiates the experts’ findings, and translates these findings into concepts meaningful for voting rights and election law. Part II considers the judiciary’s failures thus far to understand the legal import of the scientific studies of voting systems when adjudicating the structural legal sufficiency of deployed voting systems20 and identifies questions on which scholarship is critically needed. Throughout, owing to space constraints, the argument is illustrative rather than comprehensive

Final Report of the Cuyahoga County Election Review Panel

The Panel was charged with identifying the deficiencies in the May 2, 2006 Cuyahoga County election, ascertain the causes and contributing factors of those deficiencies and provide recommendations to remedy the deficiencies

Voting Technology and the Quest for Trustworthy Elections

This chapter reviews four dimensions of the still-unresolved voting technology quandary. It begins by briefly reviewing the Florida Bush v. Gore background that, combined with the tradition of state governmental control over election administration, spawned the contours and limitations of new federal regulatory apparatus. It also surveys some illustrative voting system malfunctions and their consequences surfacing predominantly from 2009–12. The second part of this chapter, Federal Compulsion to Adopt Software-Based Voting Technologies, explains the misconceptions about software and digital equipment that led to both the flawed federal mandates and the ineffectual regulatory structure. The third part of this chapter, Litigation and Enforcement Strategies, focuses primarily on the curious omission of Federal enforcement of HAVA\u27s voting technology standards. This part also considers private party litigation that has sought to invalidate the use of allegedly defective voting machines. The final part of this chapter examines Federal Promotion of Problematic Internet Voting. The chapter concludes by advancing recommendations for preparing the legal system to realize voting rights despite the wide deployment of problematic voting technologies

Voting Technology and the Quest for Trustworthy Elections

This chapter reviews four dimensions of the still-unresolved voting technology quandary. It begins by briefly reviewing the Florida Bush v. Gore background that, combined with the tradition of state governmental control over election administration, spawned the contours and limitations of new federal regulatory apparatus. It also surveys some illustrative voting system malfunctions and their consequences surfacing predominantly from 2009–12. The second part of this chapter, Federal Compulsion to Adopt Software-Based Voting Technologies, explains the misconceptions about software and digital equipment that led to both the flawed federal mandates and the ineffectual regulatory structure. The third part of this chapter, Litigation and Enforcement Strategies, focuses primarily on the curious omission of Federal enforcement of HAVA\u27s voting technology standards. This part also considers private party litigation that has sought to invalidate the use of allegedly defective voting machines. The final part of this chapter examines Federal Promotion of Problematic Internet Voting. The chapter concludes by advancing recommendations for preparing the legal system to realize voting rights despite the wide deployment of problematic voting technologies