It’s easy to criticize the Nevada Republican Party’s thus far unsuccessful attempt to sandbag the counting of mail ballots in Clark County. It’s easy to point out that the existing statute requires written plans to accommodate members of the general public — not political parties — to “observe the delivery, counting, handling and processing of ballots at a polling place, receiving center or central counting place.” Consequently, it’s easy to point out that Clark County election officials don’t owe the Nevada Republican Party — nor the Libertarian Party of Nevada, nor the Nevada State Democratic Party, nor the Independent American Party of Nevada, nor any of the other myriad political parties in this state — so much as a courtesy phone call.

Election officials throughout Nevada are required to put together a written process to ensure members of the general public may observe the handling and counting of ballots. They even may ­— not shall, but may — record or “cause to be recorded” the ballot count so long as doing so does not interfere with the counting of ballots. These requirements, however, do not extend to political parties. We know that because, if they did, the relevant statutes would explicitly say so, like they do where they authorize “at least two of the principal political parties” to examine voting machines. 

Why not? Political parties aren’t members of the general public — they’re organizations created and joined into by the general public, just like corporations and nonprofit news organizations that publish opinion columns. If political parties have the fundamental right to place their own video recording equipment in government offices to observe the ballot counting process, then so do corporations that exist solely for the purposes of harvesting personal information for advertising purposes. 

If there’s a good reason why the Nevada Republican Party should be allowed to record my ballot from start to finish — including whatever personal information might be visible from afar using a high-definition camera with optical zoom and sophisticated image processing software — but Amazon shouldn’t, I’d love to hear it. At least Amazon sends me mail I value and only when I ask them to. Can the Nevada Republican Party say that?

(No, it most emphatically cannot.)

As entertaining as it might be to dedicate the remainder of today’s column space to arguing in favor of granting commercial organizations direct access to our ballots to improve online search results, I have been informed by reliable sources (our poor, beleaguered editors, mostly) that I should avoid being performatively edgy solely to amuse myself and annoy everyone else. Instead, I should (apparently) say what I mean and mean what I say. 

This, sadly, will lead to a considerably duller but substantially more informative column. 

Let’s talk about voting integrity. 

Ideally, for our electoral process to have integrity, we want to guarantee the following when our votes are cast:

1. We are eligible to vote in the election.
2. We are casting our own vote, not someone else’s.
3. Our votes are secret. 
4. Everyone who has a right to vote has an equal opportunity to cast their vote.
5. We are only voting once.

Many of these, however, are considerably more complicated than they might appear at first glance.

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Let’s start with voting eligibility. 

Voting eligibility is primarily a state responsibility. Federally, there are no constitutional provisions positively defining voting eligibility. Instead, there are only prohibitions against states restricting voting eligibility. The Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth amendments to the federal Constitution, put together, prohibit states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, previous condition of servitude, sex, failure to pay any poll tax or other tax, or age for any citizen eighteen years of age or older. Additionally, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly grants birthright citizenship and prohibits states from abridging the privileges or immunities of both naturalized and birthright citizens. 

Statutorily, federal voting rights are considerably more prescriptive, but the focus still remains on preventing states from unduly restricting voting access. Title 52 of the U.S. Code includes, among other things, prohibitions against literacy tests and voter intimidation, as well as requirements for states to meet accessibility requirements for the elderly and handicapped and provide absentee ballots for overseas voters. Additionally, states are required to allow voters to register by mail, to register when they are applying for a driver’s license, and to register in person at voter registration agencies. States also must allow voters who are registered at least 30 days prior to an election to vote. 

Interestingly, states are not required to confirm citizenship of prospective voters. Until anti-immigration sentiment (and Ku Klux Klan membership) swelled in the 1920s, many states, in fact, explicitly allowed non-naturalized immigrants to vote in order to encourage immigration. The last state to allow non-citizens to vote was Arkansas, which abandoned the practice in 1926 — less than a century ago.

If Nevada ever adopted that practice, however, it abandoned it by 1913, which brings me to Article 2, Section 1 of the Nevada Constitution. It allows any American citizen who has lived in Nevada for at least six months and is 18 years of age or older to vote, with two exceptions — felons whose civil rights have not been restored and those legally deemed mentally incompetent. Additionally, the voter must have lived in the district or county they’re voting in for at least thirty days prior to the election. 

Please note that none of these rights are conditional upon having a Nevada-issued identification card, nor even upon having federally issued identification (not that Social Security cards were ever designed to be such). If you’re at least 18 years old, were either born in the United States or are a naturalized citizen, and moved to Nevada at least thirty days prior to the election, you have the right to vote in the election here per federal and state law. That’s why, if you read Nevada’s voter registration application carefully, you’ll notice the presence of a checkbox for those who have not been issued state or federal identification. 

Also note that neither the secretary of state’s office nor your county election official’s office is contacting your landlord, mortgage broker or the post office to confirm that you’ve been living at your residence for at least thirty days, nor is anyone running a background check on you before your voter registration paperwork is filed. You simply sign an oath that you’re eligible and hope nobody challenges your eligibility to vote at some point in the future.

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Let’s assume you’re eligible to vote (even if you only have an out-of-state driver’s license) and you do so. How do we know you’re casting your own ballot on your own behalf without compromising your ability to cast a secret ballot?

In Nevada, the short answer is some very primitive two-factor authentication. 

Authentication generally relies upon at least one of at least three factors — something you know, something you have, and something you either are or do. When you log into your bank account or your email, you’re probably relying upon at least a username and a password — both are something you know so only count as a single factor of authentication. If your bank also sends your cell phone a text message, they’re asking you to confirm something you have (your cell phone) in addition to something you know (your username and password). That is two-factor authentication. 

Nevada’s voting system also relies upon two-factor authentication, only the two factors used in Nevada are your name and registered address (which you know) and your signature (which you “do”). If you vote in person, you’ll be asked for the information you know; if you vote by mail, your successful receipt of your ballot confirms that information. If you vote in person, you’ll be asked for your signature before you approach a voting booth; if you vote by mail, you sign a detachable piece of paper on your envelope. If your name, address, and signature all match, your vote is authenticated as your own and it’s counted.

Sounds simple, right? 

Maybe. In practice, signatures frequently change over time. Arthritis, strokes, eyesight changes, and other medical conditions can alter signatures from one year to the next. A broken dominant arm can prevent someone from signing anything at all. Trans individuals, meanwhile, might have an entirely new name and a new signature to go along with it. These, among other reasons, are why the ACLU generally frowns upon signature matching laws.

From a technical standpoint, meanwhile, there’s the challenge of defining what a “signature match” even is. Matching signatures is more subjective than objective — it’s similar to the difference between legitimate and spam email. No two signatures are exactly alike (go ahead and test this at home if you don’t believe me). Fortunately, computers can and routinely do automate the verification process, just as they automatically sort our emails, but the same problems still apply. If you make the automatic process too restrictive, human beings will have to do more of the verification instead — if you think that’s not potentially problematic, you’ve never had to clean up after a coworker clicked a link in an email that asked for their work password. If you don’t make the automatic process restrictive enough, on the other hand, you let signatures through that might have raised suspicions if viewed through human eyes. 

Put succinctly, signature verification has some obvious flaws and vulnerabilities. 

On the other hand, signature verification does have some benefits. Most of us aren’t going to forget our signature the way we might forget a password (especially for something we only authenticate into every two years). It’s also considerably more accurate, and far less prone to racial bias, than facial recognition, which has many of the same drawbacks of signature verification anyway. 

Additionally, any information we authenticate with must be stored by the organization we’re authenticating against. If we switched to facial recognition, for example, it would require the secretary of state to either store a database of voter faces or be able to quickly and reliably access a database of voter faces — and either would have to be protected from hackers and nosy government officials. The same holds true for passwords, passphrases, retinal scans, cell phones (which most people tend to replace at least once per election cycle anyway), fingerprints, or DNA samples. 

With an annual budget of approximately $20 million, of which 21 percent was dedicated towards elections administration in the last budget, the data of each of Nevada’s nearly two million voters is protected by no more than four dollars’ worth of resources per year — and that’s only if all of the Secretary of State’s elections administration budget went solely to data protection, which it most emphatically does not. 

Given that, it’s probably for the best if none of us give the secretary of state’s office any information we possess which we value at more than four dollars. A signature we happily scribble on receipts in gas stations and a home address people can probably find on a search engine is honestly pushing it. 

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Your name, address, and signature match what’s on file. You vote. How do we keep your ballot secret while simultaneously guaranteeing your ballot is counted? 

This, like everything else thus far, is a more complicated question to answer than you might think at first glance. Who are we keeping your ballot secret from? Is it enough if it’s merely secret from those you don’t choose to reveal it to? Or must it be secret from everyone?

On the one hand, state law expressly forbids the general public from photographing someone while they’re voting, including themselves; this, ostensibly, prevents people from selling their vote. On the other hand, there’s nothing prohibiting a mail-in voter from letting someone look at a ballot over their shoulder while they fill it in. Besides, it’s not like many of us are particularly shy about discussing who or what we vote for both prior to and following an election. 

If anything, the real challenge is getting Nevadans to shut up about their votes. 

There also are those who require assistance to cast votes. Perhaps they don’t see very well (if at all), perhaps they have limited mobility, or perhaps they just don’t live conveniently close to a mailbox. Each of these people are eligible to vote in Nevada, and possess the legal right to exercise their franchise, but are physically or logistically incapable of casting a ballot that’s fully secret from everyone else’s knowledge. 

Once again, without even discussing the technical processes which allow us to receive text messages which inform us when our ballots are counted without compromising the secrecy of our ballots, we are faced with a series of compromises, trade-offs, and cost-benefit analyses. Blind, immobile voters are still eligible voters and have just as much right to vote as the rest of us. In fact, as previously discussed, federal law requires us to make accommodations for them so their voices are also heard and accounted for. 

Put another way, just as voting eligibility is partially on the honor system and signature verification is a compromise between efficacy, privacy and cost, the secrecy of our ballots has never been absolute. So-called “ballot harvesting” might or might not be a step in the right direction (for whatever definition of “right” you might be operating under), but it’s certainly not an unprecedented compromise between the rights of Nevadans to conveniently cast their ballots and the need to ensure ballot secrecy in order to reduce coercion and fraud within the voting process. 

It is, at worst, another compromise on the list — one that conveniently also allows caregivers of the elderly to collect ballots for their patients in a pinch. 

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From start to finish, our election process, like everything else in life, is the product of compromise applied to irreducible complexity. There are ways to reduce complexity in certain directions; Estonia’s e-Identity system is frequently lauded as a step in the right direction among the more technically minded. Even Estonia’s system, however, has drawbacks — it’s been insecure in the past; older Estonians have historically been reluctant to fully participate in it; it’s not free to implement; and it frankly works better in a unitary jurisdiction which possesses all necessary information about each individual it governs, as opposed to our uniquely American system of fractiously divided government. 

Oh, and it requires universal computer and internet access, something which Nevada clearly does not already enjoy.

Political partisans can and sometimes do highlight important issues to Nevadans. However, before we take their (or my, for that matter) words seriously, we should ask ourselves two important questions:

Are they letting perfect be the enemy of good? If so, what do they expect to gain by doing so?

In the case of the Nevada Republican Party, both answers are transparently obvious.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].