MILLARD ZIMET ... Do They Know How You Voted? (Aspen Daily News Op-Ed)

Can they find out 
how you voted?

Aspen Daily News

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Mick! Marilyn! SEX! Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about your rights under the Colorado Constitution to have a secret ballot election.

I recently filed a complaint asking the Aspen Election Commission to determine whether Aspen’s May 2009 election was a secret ballot election. I want to talk to you about that, and not about Mick or Marilyn (or sex).

They know where you voted and they know when you voted. Each precinct has a log, where you are signed into the system in the order that you entered. That log is a public document, and the campaigns of all the serious candidates monitor the logs so they can keep track of who voted and who didn’t.

Can they find out how you voted? Decide for yourself. The city’s election contractor, TrueBallot, scanned all the ballots. That scan created data (called the “strings”) showing how each ballot was voted. The city then publicly released the strings.

Unfortunately the city and TrueBallot didn’t “shuffle”, or otherwise randomize, the ballots or the strings. And so the city released non-randomized voting data, meaning that if I can find my string I can probably see how the people around me on my log voted (and vice versa).

More importantly, I learned recently that one of the Council members may have found his string. So now we have a situation where a sitting Council member could potentially see how the people listed on the log near him voted.

How hard is it to find your string? Not very if you remember how you voted and where you voted. Approximately 88 percent of the strings are unique and not matched by another voter. And the strings are conveniently packaged by precinct into separate fields, so you’d only have to search one field of the strings and not the whole thing.

In its defense the city says they cut the ballots several times. But if I had a new deck of cards I’d have to cut it a lot of times in order to randomize the order. Perhaps that’s why most people shuffle.

The city also correctly points out that some voters would naturally vote faster than others, and that in the general course of handling the ballots there would have been some ballots mixing. So there would not be a perfect correlation between the strings and the logs because there would be some disturbances to the order.

While that is true, it is also true that because the ballots and strings were never shuffled there will be many places where there is a correlation between the strings and the logs. That’s especially true for early voters (like me), and for voters who used a polling station at a low traffic time (such as right when the polls opened), as no “faster voter” would have then been present.

The bottom line is that since the city and TrueBallot didn’t shuffle the ballots or the strings this was not a secret ballot election for all Aspen voters. To me this is a civil liberties matter, as I believe the government just violated our constitutional rights.

But to the local political elite, who are obsessed with The Mick & Marilyn Show, any inquiry into the May election is strictly off limits. And so they say the city will remember to shuffle next time and there’s no need to look into this move along nothing to see here move along; the election is over, and just because we are good progressives who might otherwise support organizations like the ACLU doesn’t mean we actually care about civil liberties here in Aspen and too bad so sad about your voting rights but thanks for playing.

Be that as it may, if we don’t defend our constitutional rights we will lose them. I respect the fact that there are those in the community who disagree with me, and who prefer non-secret ballot elections.

Millard Zimmet is an attorney in Aspen