By Paul Weiser
Zimbabwe, as this is written, highlights the problem with publicizing election results: secrecy and openness must coexist, facilitating fraud. The proper balance is subtle.
In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's thugs hide ballots from public scrutiny - no doubt because they tampered with them. As an American political boss quipped, "As long as I get to count the votes, what are you going to do about it?" The answer is, eventually, civil war. If this seems irrelevant to America, remember 2000's Democrat attempts to lawyer Al Gore into office: I'm law- abiding, but I was counting my ammunition.
The problem is that if the timing is wrong, no result or a palpably cooked result completely delegitimzes the announced winners. The usual corrupt practice is to add or subtract votes by manufacturing/"chad-counting" ballots or burning/"invalidating" them, respectively.
Years ago I wrote software for what we called "the voting machine." This was a primitive time-sharing network which openly displayed the exact vote count for, against, and abstaining on an issue... but, until every registered input device was at one of those settings, showed only the numbers voting and not yet voting. It worked very well.
For national elections, the endpoint is closing of the last polls rather than 100% of voters having voted, but the concept is identical. We must avoid all projections and partial counts - which are really the problem in corrupt polities like Zimbabwe and Chicago because they tell counters/media how many votes to fiddle/influence. Every ballot must be validated and counted blind first, without counting by candidate. Once this total is announced, counting by candidate proceeds... with everyone watching, no ballot boxes or absentee ballots vanishing, and no boss sneering, "What are you going to do about it?" Because the answer to that, sooner or later, is counting by bullets.
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