Honest Voting

This article from the Rocky Mountain News shows how things could have gone in California if California’s secretary of state had let money play the leading role in whether electronic voting machines remained in use. This June 7, 2008 article sums up a lot of action in a few paragraphs; my hat’s off to the author, Myung Oak Kim.

In 2005, Colorado’s then-Secretary of State Gigi Dennis adopted new election standards, known as Rule 45. In early 2006, Dennis approved machines made by four manufacturers - ES&S, Sequoia, Diebold (recently rebranded as Premier Election Solutions) and Hart InterCivic. However, voting activists sued Dennis, saying that the machines weren’t sufficiently trustworthy. In September 2006, a Denver judge said Dennis violated state law by not establishing minimum security standards for the machines, and ordered stricter criteria and a redo of the testing.

The retesting fell to the new secretary of state Mike Coffman, who took office in early 2007. He set up a panel that rewrote Rule 45, tested Colorado’s voting machines, and revamped election directives and guidelines till they were even stricter than the federal rules. In December 2007, Coffman decertified all equipment made by ES&S. He decertified paper ballot scanners made by Hart Intercivic (used in about 47 counties), and direct vote recording equipment made by Sequoia (used in four counties, including Denver). He approved all Premier (Diebold) machines - used in 14 counties. Shortly afterward, Coffman issued a press release saying paper ballots still were more trustworthy. A lot of work in a short time.

But the Colorado county clerks said that going to paper ballots would be too expensive, and that the electronic voting machines worked just fine. Shortly afterward Coffman reversed his position — he even fought against a bill pushed by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter and other top legislators that would have mandated a return to paper ballots. A new bill from the legislature gave Coffman more room to reapprove the electronic voting machines. In March, Coffman recertified all the state’s voting machines.

Now, instead of decertifying voting machines, Coffman’s office has imposed numerous restrictions on their use and scheduled audits and tests to prevent and detect sabotage and counting errors. His office also has required all voting systems to be rebuilt with software that has been federally tested and deemed safe [as far as that testing goes - K.]

These days Coffman reportedly says every voting method has its issues, including paper ballots.

Writes Kim, “‘There is no such thing as a perfect voting system,’ he said.”

There’s a man whose thought processes I wish I could hear.

Just a quick backgrounder today.

Here’s what the OSDV says about themselves:

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) is a volunteer community of the best and brightest technology and policy experts in the computer technology sector including members of academia, commercial, and public administration segments, and is led and managed by a small full-time team of highly experienced technologists serving as architects and project leads.

Two Silicon Valley technologists, E. John Sebes and Gregory Miller, founded the group to tackle an insufficiently studied question: the lack of technical guidelines and specifications for determining truly high assurance, high veracity voting devices.

They’re using the open-source community model to attack this problem. Everything they do, including any software or hardware they create, will be free. (”In the future, OSDV may offer some public services that leverage reference technology we develop, but the work product of OSDV will remain free.”)

If you’re interested in getting involved, they invite you to read their FAQ and get in touch.

Zimbabwean election officials say results from the country’s troubled runoff elections on Friday will be delayed — officials now hope to announce the winner on Sunday, according to the BBC. Mugabe was the only official candidate in Friday’s run-off vote, and unsurprisingly, he is expected to be announced as the winner.

Lance Guma, in an SW Radio Africa report in AllAfrica.com, writes: “As results trickled in from some of the polling stations a clear picture is emerging of many people spoiling their ballot papers in protest. A polling station in Highfields recorded 266 votes for Mugabe, 184 for Tsvangirai while 150 votes were spoiled. The pattern repeated itself countrywide especially in opposition strongholds.”

Preparations for Mugabe’s swearing-in ceremony on Sunday are reportedly already underway.

Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai says he will push for negotiations with President Robert Mugabe on a new constitution and fresh elections. Tsvangirai intimated that Mugabe could remain as a ceremonial head of state. He said his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party would use its parliamentary majority, which it won in elections in March, to force negotiations over a transitional arrangement.

Parenthetically, there’s an interesting op-ed in the June 2008 New African, written by its editor, Baffour Ankomah. I’m sorry the entire article isn’t available on line. Ankomah wonders what many non-Westerners must wonder when they read only curtailed, sensationalized coverage of their region, much less their country. International election coverage is no exception:

Why was the Western media so interested in the Zimbabwean elections but just gave a passing glance to both the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean elections held last year? More so when 200 people died in pre- and post-election violence in Nigeria?

That’s something to think about, isn’t it. Why focus on a few countries above others? Unfortunately the first question needs to be “Whose national and economic interests are being served by this coverage?”

Ankomah says it more bleakly, as someone who has rolled these thoughts around in his head for years and come to no good conclusion:

But throughout the printing age or since the beginning of newspapers in Europe, the Western media has always been true to its core beliefs – follow the flag or government lead in foreign policy matters; objectivity and balance end where national interest begins; ideological leaning determines the size and play of domestic reporting; advertisers (and to some extent, readers) pull the strings from behind the scenes; historical baggage, political and economic interests determine the reporting of Africa and other foreign lands, etc, etc.

Wish I could argue with him.

This site makes me salivate, and not just because nerds and geeks are hot the lifeblood of our economy. In fact, it’s a lot of what this webpage here would be like in an ideal world, a world where all of my multiple personalities had doctorates, videocameras, terabytes of memory, and USB ports.

Caltech President David Baltimore and MIT President Charles Vest established this project in December 2000 “to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election.” Specific tasks of the project include:

• Evaluate the current state of reliability and uniformity of U.S. voting systems
• Establish uniform attributes and quantitative guidelines for performance and reliability of voting systems
• Propose specific uniform guidelines and requirements for reliable voting systems

At the top of the Voting Technology Project (VTP) page the reader can branch to specific category headings — Voting Technology, Election Audits, Election Management, Election Fraud, Threat Risk, and Convenience Voting — for working papers, reports, and conference listings in that general topic area.

Off to the left, you can delve into specifics by data type: types of publication, elections listed by year from 2004 to 2008, datasets, photos, testimony by project members and affiliates. Of course there’s a blog.

The VTP isn’t sitting on its hands. Co-director Michael Alvarez says that the VTP is conducting the evaluation of the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s 2004 Internet voting project (SERVE); the VTP shortly will have a website devoted to its research on Internet voting. Another co-director, Jonathan Katz, co-authored a well-known paper on the effect of voter identification laws on election turnout (referenced in an earlier post). Yet another co-director, Ted Selker, has made a name for himself not only as a VTP member but as director of MIT’s Context Aware Computing Lab and as director of Counter Intelligence, a forum discussing kitchens and domestic technology, lifestyles and supply changes as a result of technology.

Put the VTP into your blogroll if you’re interested in cutting-edge election technology information.

From the video “Caging List Blues” by the Singing News Network:

“Caging” is not merely a “direct-mail term” for separating addresses that “may be good versus addresses that may be bad,” as Monica Goodling tried to narrowly define. Caging has been used to target specific groups of people in various states like Arkansas to bump U.S. citizens from the voting rolls so they will have to vote by provisional ballot until their registration can be proven. Some states are better at properly counting provisional ballots than others.

The caging list in the picture above comes from one of 500 emails sent by Tim Griffin to GeorgeWBush.org in August 2004. Unfortunately for Griffin, he really wanted to send those emails to GeorgeWBush.com. The owner of GeorgeWBush.org sent those emails on to BBC reporter Greg Palast, who publicized the story that Griffin was involved with “caging” operations. These caging lists revealed that military personnel were among the voters targeted for possible removal from voting rolls.

More on Griffin: In December 2006, as a reward for his faithful service, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, working with Karl Rove, removed U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins of Arkansas and replaced him with Griffin. This was technically an interim appointment, but Gonzales chose not to seek Senate confirmation for this and other U.S. attorney appointments, under a new provision in the March 2006 revision of the PATRIOT Act. Gonzales’ action angered Arkansas’ senators so much that they pushed for Gonzales’ resignation. In February 2007, after testimony in the resulting Congressional investigation that Cummins had been dismissed in order to put Griffin in the attorney job, Griffin announced he would not seek a permanent appointment to the post. On May 30, 2007, after Palast sent copies of Griffin’s 500 emails to the House Judiciary Committee, Griffin resigned as U.S. attorney.

So kids, don’t cage votes!

That’s one way in which caging lists can be used. But let’s not forget about a type of caging list that’s right out in the open. Take a look back at my post about vote suppression in Louisiana. Notice where Dennis A. DiMarco, the registrar of Jefferson Parish, says they’re going to send mail to registrants whose registrations have been called into question by the Democratic Party’s voter registration drive? Whereas in another parish the registrar says they’ll just telephone the voters to clear up any registration form errors? Which parish do you think will clear up registration issues more quickly, with fewer provisional ballots at polling time?

Back to more serious matters.

The first person to mention caging lists in my hearing was Greg Palast. But other authors have been pointing out the extensive use of caging lists in politics, most often and most documentably by the Republican Party.  Here’s the Wikipedia description of what “caging” means:

With one type of caging, a political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn’t present for delivery, or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent.

(To be continued shortly.)

The Internet is a very big place, as a friend reminds me every so often. Do we need to rely solely on dusty facts and outrage to force ourselves into the poll booth? We do not. Besides, frankly, I can use a laugh/smile/ironic raised eyebrow right about now, can’t you?

In the “I can’t believe I had to remind myself of this one” category, back in May 2007 the lingerie company Triumph International Japan announced a new concept bra called the “Voter Turnout Lift-UP! Bra.” The brassiere is made of silver vinyl, with the Japanese characters for “ballot box” written on the front.

In England, by contrast, it’s men’s underwear that seems to affect voting patterns, according to an article in the Daily Mail, “Boxers or briefs: Why a man’s underpants are the bloodstream of our country.” Let’s not look too closely at the headline — it conjures up far too many uncomfortable images. But the article’s author, Quentin Letts, says that the United Kingdom is “surely the only country in the world where the result of not one but two general elections may have been influenced by party leaders’ choice of drawers.”

The United States, on the third hand, assumes a candidate will wear underwear, enjoys speculating on the contents of a candidate’s underwear, but so far has not let an election hinge on anyone’s choice of undergarments. …Well, okay, bloggers and comedians often riffed on Romney’s religious garb, but it was his speeches and public appearances that did him in.

In Russia, far from undoing a politician’s career, underwear has been enlisted in the aid of the government. (”In Russia, underwear tries to convert *you*!”) Witness this pro-Putin underwear offered by a young Russian designer.

That’s all I can wrap my head around right now.  It’s only a few years until someone offers underpants with embedded electroluminescent wire that spells out a candidate’s name.  If the light’s too bright election officials might have to ban EL underwear from polling places on the grounds it would constitute electionneering.

It’s nice to have something to look forward to.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Zimbabwean opposition party Movement for Democratic Change, announced on Sunday that the party will pull out of the country’s runoff elections because of violence and arrests targeting his party and its supporters.

CNN reports that the United States and Britain want a special U.N. Security Council meeting to address the situation in Zimbabwe.

According to CNN, Patrick Chinamasa, Zimbabwe’s justice minister, denied the MDC’s allegations of intimidation and said Tsvangirai was dropping out to avoid “a humiliating defeat.”

In the MDC’s official statement on the presidential runoff, Tsvangirai described what he called “an elaborate and decisive plan by Zanu PF to rig the elections through the following measures”:

i. Commandeering the uniformed forces to use the postal ballot and forcing them to vote in front of their superiors.

ii. The prevention of MDC election agents to get to the polling stations through roadblocks and arrests.

iii. The three Mashonaland provinces have been identified as rigging centres where ballots are going to be stuffed.

iv. Villagers are having their national identity cards confiscated denying them their right to vote.

v. There is a plan to record the serial numbers of ballot papers so as to intimidate voters.

vi. The holding of forced pungwes (overnight meetings) where MDC supporters are beaten and forced to undergo “re-education”.

vii. The abuse of traditional leaders.

viii. The use of massive violence as a weapon to influence the ballot.

The Zimbabwean government plans to go ahead with the coming election even without the participation of the MDC.

A Superior Court judge in Trenton, New Jersey agreed to revise a previous order and ruled on Friday that computer experts may publicize the results of their examination of New Jersey’s Sequoia Voting Systems electronic voting machines. Judge Linda Feinberg’s proposed pact will also allow the public to view and check the veracity of electronic voting machines lacking a receipt or paper trail.

The Coalition for Peace Action and the American Civil Liberties Union had sued the state, arguing that the public should be privy to the results before the presidential election. Judge Feinberg had previously forbidden the experts from releasing the results, saying they would unfairly expose Sequoia’s trade secrets.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that the tests, conducted by Princeton University computer experts, will begin on June 30. The final report will be released in late September, roughly one month before the November election.

CourierPostOnline.com reported that Sequoia Vice President Michelle Shafer said “Sequoia has no qualms” with the ruling, except for Feinberg’s stance on “derivative works” — adaptations of an existing product for a different purpose.

“This voting equipment examination is supposed to be focused on how the machines currently operate, not on how they could operate if they are tinkered with and loaded with rogue software in an attempt to simulate a chess game on a machine, for example,” Shafer said.

While I was transferring episodes of Simply Quilts off the DVR the other day, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a tie-in to voting and elections.

A quilter named Lauren Austen, who was director of the University of Syracuse Community Folk Art Gallery at the time this episode of Simply Quilts was filmed, makes quilts that tell stories — she also collaborates with a storyteller/oral historian named Vanessa Johnson. (She currently is Community Artist in Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.)

In this episode of Simply Quilts, Austen explained the story behind her quilt “Lucy Goes to Vote.”

Austen says, “I made it to commemorate when South Africa changed and black people got the right to vote there. And it made me remember stories of my family talking about in the South, when black people got the right to vote.”

She describes the quilt: “Lucy is walking to vote in the hot sun, and she’s taking her baby with her, because it is important that he see his mama and her people making history.” The text on a strip of cloth goes further: “Walking to the poll place, she could hear the anthem being sung softly by those already waiting in the hot sun. They hurried to catch up. It was a good day.”

You can see the quilt on Austen’s web page in the Art Quilts section.

Just a reminder that access to free elections is a personal, emotional experience as well as an abstract civil right.