The Tarrant County Election Board Tuesday approved an initiative to use pre-numbered ballots in the general election in November.
In a briefing to the county commissioners ahead of the board’s vote, Tarrant County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig said that pre-numbered ballots would increase election security and allow for more accurate auditing in the case of voter fraud inquiries.
The practice, however, is outdated, largely unused by electoral authorities elsewhere in the United States and, contrary to proponents’ claims, could actually facilitate voter fraud, rather than prevent it, according to legal, political and computer science experts.
Ballots in Tarrant County already receive a unique identifying number at the moment of voting, and adding more identifying information to voters’ ballots could potentially make it easier for bad actors to commit fraud like vote buying and voter coercion, according to David Kimball, a political scientist and ballot design specialist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
“The best thing preventing vote buying is the secret ballot,” he said in a phone interview.
Ballots in federal elections are available for public viewing for 22 months after the election. If a person’s vote is tied to a specific number, then someone who has bought or coerced votes could use the pre-numbered ballot list to confirm that they got their bribe or intimidation obtained the desired result.
Kimball said that pre-numbering ballots is “extremely rare” in the United States and that most ballots cast in the country have no identifying numbers at all on them. “I don’t know that anybody does it,” he said. “You want the ballots to be anonymous.”
Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University who has done extensive research on voting machines, pointed to the same risks associated with serial numbers on ballots.
“The secret ballot is pretty important as a principle, since well over 100 years ago, to prevent people from being paid or coerced to vote a certain way,” he said in a phone interview.
The best way to prevent ballot stuffing and other types of fraud mentioned by proponents of pre-numbered ballots is to staff polling places with a sufficient number of adequately trained election workers, Appel said.
“The standard practice is to have enough confidence in your poll workers and to pay enough attention to poll worker training,” he said, adding that staffing polling places with multiple election workers is another age-old tactic for avoiding fraud. “One dishonest poll worker can’t stuff ballots, because there’s another poll worker that can keep an eye on that.”…