Election Day: America’s Biggest Accounting Challenge?
November 4, 2008 by Lela Davidson
Filed under Finance
What does accounting have to do with politics? A lot. One citizen, one vote. That’s our system. (Well sort of, but that’s a topic of discussion for another blog!) A national election is really nothing more than a huge inventory. Today we the people are responsible to come up with an accurate inventory of only two items: McCain and Obama.
The Importance of Inventory
McCain’s a cog, Obama’s a widget, and we have to count them. While a manufacturer relies on an accurate accounting of parts in storage to make crucial business decisions and investors use the same information to analyze the balance sheets, voters today will choose the leader of the United States of America. Inventories are important.
Have you ever been in a big retail store when the employees are conducting an inventory? It’s a mess. Counting things is cumbersome. It takes time and there are a lot of ways to mess it up. Inaccuracies typically fall into one of two areas:
- Human error
- Fraud
Low Tech vs. High Tech Inventory
We all remember the troubles of 2000 when an aging population combined with antiquated technology to introduce the term ‘hanging chad’ to the general public. If more people handle the votes, does that increase the accuracy of the count or just the opportunity for human error?
High tech voting comes with its own set of troubles.
In a controlled setting, Rice University students created multiple hacks on voting machines to manipulate results. In the world of business, accounting firms objectively attest to the accuracy of inventory counts. Politics is business too, especially for makers of electronic voting machines who make big profits selling their technology to state and local governments. While the federal government offers a voluntary accreditation program for consulting firms that test and certify voting machines, problems are rampant in the emerging electronic voting industry.
In the winner-takes-all world of politics, counting the vote is the everything. Your single vote is your decision and your investment.
How confident are you that America’s most important inventory is accurate?
