To a technologist, law and policy debates sometimes seem to be held in a kind of bizarro world, where words and concepts lose their ordinary meanings. Some technologists never get used to the bizarro rules, but some us of do catch on eventually.

One of the bizarro rules is that you should be happy when the other side accuses you of lying or acting in bad faith. In the normal world, such accusations will make you angry; but in bizarro world they indicate that the other side has lost confidence in its ability to win the argument on the merits. And so you learn to swallow your outrage and smile when people call you a scoundrel.

Which brings us to Brigid Schulte’s electronic voting article in this morning’s Washington Post. The article reports that the computer scientists’ campaign for more secure (and less secret) electronic voting technology is getting some real traction, especially in light of the recent Johns Hopkins report detailing severe flaws in a Diebold e-voting product. The computer scientists’ progress is certified, bizarro style, by none other than the head of the Federal Election Commission’s Office of Electrion Adminstration:

“The computer scientists are saying, ‘The machinery you vote on is inaccurate and could be threatened; therefore, don’t go. Your vote doesn’t mean anything,’ ” said Penelope Bonsall, director of the Office of Election Administration at the Federal Election Commission. “That negative perception takes years to turn around.”

You can’t buy that kind of bizarro endorsement!

Eugene Volokh offers an interesting post on “guided voting,” a simple idea with important implications.

Voters often rely on the recommendations of others, such as political parties, interest groups, or well-informed individuals. For example, if I have a friend on the local school board and I trust her judgment about school-board matters, I might follow her advice about how to vote in the next school board election. This may be a perfectly rational decision for me to make – my friend’s choices may advance my beliefs more than my own decisions would, if the differences between her political views and mine are outweighed by her superior understanding of school board issues. Many voters would probably feel the same way about taking voting advice from political parties or interest groups.

Prof. Volokh suggests that if voting is done over the Net, then some centralized web site could provide guided voting services to users. The user would tell the site how his vote should be determined, and the site would then prepare a little computer program designed to cast the user’s votes in accordance with his preferences. A voter might choose to accept advice from several sources, with some procedure for resolving disagreements among those sources.

From a purely technical standpoint, guided voting could be used with any voting technology. With non-electronic technology, a guided voting service could print out a sort of checklist that the voter could take into the voting booth. With electronic voting technology, the guided voting service could print out some kind of bar code, which the voter might feed into a scanner in the voting booth.

This might seem at first like a questionable idea, but it doesn’t differ much from what many people already do. Most people make up their minds before they reach the polling place. And most people, I would expect, rely heavily on the recommendations of others in deciding how to vote. Guided voting is just another step down a well-trodden road.

The more problematic aspect of Prof. Volokh’s post is in his suggestion that recommenders collect and use statistics about how many votes they are influencing.

Moreover, guided voting would for the first time let groups actually measure exactly how influential its recommendations are. The [system’s] organizers can tell each group how many voters in each district followed its recommendation. They can even count the votes in which this group’s recommendation made the difference, rather than just being redundant of the other recommendations that the voter was following.

So when group X comes to a legislator to lobby him about some issue, it won’t just say “We have 2000 members in your district” or “We’ll spend $30,000 in your district on this issue.” Rather, it will for the first time be able to say “Our recommendation last election changed 15,000 votes in your district. What will you do to make sure that we recommend you next time?”

These kinds of statistics are not a necessary consequence of guided voting. Although Prof. Volokh’s centralized-website system would gather these statistics, a less centralized guided voting system need not do so. And in my view, it’s important to maintain the secrecy of each vote, so that nobody can tell for sure who is voting for which candidate.

In any case, some kind of guided voting seems inevitable, given the complexity of many ballots and the advance of technology.