On October 18, the Voting Technology Project released this 84-page report on technical problems with voting in the United States. The California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology jointly have been working on this report since 2001. Here is a news story about the report.

The authors measure the quality of voting systems by studying the “residual vote”. The authors compared the number of people who participate by casting a ballot, with the number of votes recorded for any particular race. The report notes that in 2000, 2% of the voters went to the polls but no presidential vote was recorded for them. The report notes with satisfaction that in 2008, only 1% of the voters went to the polls and yet were not recorded as having cast a vote for President.

The authors seem oblivious to the problem that sometimes, in certain states, the presidential candidate preferred by that voter is not on the ballot. One assumes the residual vote in Oklahoma this year, for President, will be high, because Oklahoma voters are not permitted to vote for anyone for President other than President Obama and Mitt Romney. The authors should have mentioned the ballot access issue. The residual vote in California next month will probably also be very high for U.S. Senate, because voters are not permitted to vote for anyone except the Democrat and the Republican (again, write-in space is missing), and many voters will simply leave that race blank because they prefer someone else.

The authors also seem oblivious that some jurisdictions permit write-in voting but then don’t count the write-in votes, not even for declared write-in candidate (this is a problem in the District of Columbia, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming). Also certain other states require that all write-in votes be counted, but in practice do not follow their own laws (this is especially a problem in Pennsylvania).

The report recommends that voting by mail be discouraged. The report finds that the residual vote problem is higher with mail ballots. This is because when a voter fills out a ballot at home, he or she is more likely to make mistakes that go uncorrected. By contrast, voting at the polls gives the voter an opportunity to ask a question, and also technology for voting at the polls sometimes alerts a voter that the voter’s ballot has not been properly filled out. For instance, most vote-counting systems will sound an audible alert if the ballot inserted into the machine is unreadable for some reason, and the voter is given a chance to try again. The report also recommends against internet voting.

The report suggests that electronic poll books be used, and also suggests that the poll books link to a picture of the voter, to solve the contentious voter-ID controversy. Most voters have drivers licenses or other state-ID, and an electronic poll book could link to the picture of that voter in the state records. For voters without such state ID’s, the report recommends that a picture of the voter be taken at the polls. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link to the Report.