Honest Voting

This isn’t the only state to start making claims of voter fraud all of a sudden. You’d almost think this was coordinated.

Other states where accusations of voter fraud have suddenly hit the news: Nevada, Alabama, and Texas. (I’m only counting stories from recognized news organizations, by the way.)

For the record, let me restate what I’ve mentioned on this blog before: the voter fraud allegations I’ve seen so far have totaled small handfuls of voters per state. It’s nothing like the large-scale vote suppression and caging tactics seen in paces like Ohio. There’s no question which is a bigger threat to voting integrity.

Here’s something I didn’t expect to see anytime soon: someone knowledgeable who feels the state of election technology is actually improving. Aviel “Avi” Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, has badmouthed electronic voting systems for years — in 2006 he wrote a book called Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting, which heavily criticized e-voting machines for security and reliability shortcomings.

However, as more and more states switch to paper records and voter verified ballots, Rubin’s view has brightened. Todd R. Weiss interviewed Rubin on electronic voting and the 2008 presidential primaries for Computerworld earlier this month — you can read an edited version of the interview here.

Here’s Rubin’s response to those who poohpooh concerns about voting security and auditability:

I would ask those people if they would be willing to allow their bank accounts to be unauditable. And if they would be willing to forgo monthly statements for their bank accounts that show where the money came in and where it came out and if they would give up on getting any confirmation of their ATM transactions.In my opinion, votes in this country are just as important as money, but we have the anonymity requirement so we can’t get a monthly statement about our votes and who we voted for. So we need to have a system that accommodates the ability to audit to be sure that the machines got the right result.

Apparently I missed this earlier. On July 2nd, 2008, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) introduced S.3212, the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform Act. Feinstein’s press statement on the bill calls it “the culmination of extensive efforts over several months to come together to craft a bipartisan election technology bill capable of achieving broad support from members of both parties.”

Josh Richman of the Oakland Tribune writes:

Joining Feinstein in introducing the bill was U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah — the ranking Republican on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which Feinstein heads — who said this bill both ensures high security standards and encourages continued innovation in election technology. The committee is expected to hear the bill next month.

While 2007’s Ballot Integrity Act would’ve required reforms to take effect by elections in 2010, this bill pushes the date to Jan. 1, 2012, or even to 2014 if a state gets a waiver.

Thanks for the empty gesture, Senator Feinstein. That’d push the effectiveness date till well after your gubernatorial run.

The good news about Florida counties switching to optical scanners was that they no longer used touch-screen systems. The bad news, however, is that current Florida law only permits hand recounts in a small percentage of cases. Jim Stratton writes for the Orlando Sentinel:

When legislators passed the new law, they made no provision for a full hand recount, rendering the paper trail of optical-scan systems virtually useless. The law requires that only ballots with too many or too few marks — so-called overvotes and undervotes — be reviewed by hand. The rest won’t be checked.

“By law, humans can’t look at that paper record,” said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. “The system is sort of bass-ackwards.”

State law mandates *machine* recounts for any race decided by less than half a percentage point. So the votes are run back through scanners again. If after that process the margin drops to one-quarter of a percent, a hand recount is ordered — but only for ballots showing undervotes or overvotes. The rest of the ballots can’t be reviewed unless a candidate sues.

Florida’s secretary of state, Kurt Browning, had wanted a provision for a full hand recount, but relented when county officials demurred. Florida has one of the shortest voting certification periods in the nation, 12 days, and many felt that wasn’t enough time to provide a complete recount. Voting activists hope this will be changed, along with what they call insufficient auditing procedures.

PS to any readers from Florida: Today was the deadline for registering to vote in the Aug. 26 primary election.

The National Campaign for Fair Elections has an interesting blog full of tidbits like the ones you find here. Occasionally they’re better tidbits — hey, I’m not proud.

For example, I haven’t seen this story anywhere else. Marcia Johnson-Blanco followed up on a press release from the Brennan Center for Justice: A federal court in Florida has refused to stop the disenfranchisement of more than 16,000 of the state’s residents because of how they spell their name.

The overly stringent law has been previously challenged in federal court and requires that the name written on a voter registration form must be identical to that found on record from their driver’s license or social security number. The mistype of a single letter by an election worker is all it takes to disenfranchise a voter. As if that weren’t enough, a voter cannot even produce an alternate form of ID to prove his or her identity.

(The National Campaign for Fair Elections is an initiative of the Voting Rights Project, which is in turn a program sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group “created at the request of President John F. Kennedy in the summer of 1963 following a meeting of 244 lawyers in the East Room of the White House.”)

The law of unintended consequences (at least I hope they were unintended): Voting officials in Ohio, a voter-ID state, are concerned about the effect of the national wave of foreclosures upon the voting rolls. Voters who recently lost their homes may, understandably, not be making voter registration their first priority.

Ohio’s foreclosed voters may matter more than others, since Ohio is as a crucial state for the November 2008 elections as it was in 2004. As the CBS News article notes:

“In 2004, the Ohio Republican Party challenged more than 31,000 newly registered voters statewide after letters it mailed out came back as undeliverable. The challenges failed, but Brunner said a new state law requiring counties to mail their own notices to all registered voters could lead to another round of pre-election challenges.”

It’s not as though I needed to sleep anyway.

The article How to steal an election by hacking the vote, by Jon Stokes, explains in seven acid pages “how one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America’s private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents’ basement.” Stokes reminds us that election security and information security have merged — and anyone who looks at the Risks Digest knows how cocked-up *that* is. Far too little has changed since the following was written in October 2006:

The problem is much deeper than most people realize. The standards are extremely weak (1990 and 2002 both), and VOLUNTARY. The systems are built to minimum standards rather than attempting to be meaningfully secure. The evaluations are commissioned and paid for by the vendors, and are proprietary. The entire voting process consists of weak links—registration, voter disenfranchisement, voter authentication, vote casting, vote recording, vote processing, resolution of disputes (which is essentially nonexistent in the unauditable paperless DREs), lack of audit trails, and so on. You cannot begin to enumerate the badness of the present situation.

Have a great weekend!

This small but active group is a project of the International Humanities Center, and organizes on issues surrounding voting and elections in the 21st century. NYVV strongly favors paper ballot based ballot marker and scanner systems over direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems.

Concerned New Yorkers can find a list of verified voting resources for New York state here. But everybody will find something of interest in the blog of Bo Lipari, the group’s executive director. Lipari’s post on Thursday the 24th describes how it has become patently obvious that the state’s new voting systems will not be able to complete state certification testing in time for the scheduled 2009 rollout.

The state sets the highest bar in the nation for approval of voting machines, one that vendors have never been required to meet before. Their performance in New York demonstrates that they are a long, long way from understanding that the public will not stand for poorly designed, badly tested and outrageously overpriced equipment, and a business philosophy of let the customer be damned.

Prosecutors in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County have accused Premier Election Solutions Inc. (the rebranded Diebold company) of breach of contract, fraud and negligence, saying they intend to recover funds lost on a botched election.CNN’s AP story says the county quit using Diebold voting machines after problems during the November election. The touch-screen machines cost $22 million.

Premier says its system didn’t cause votes to be lost and blames the county elections board and poll workers for problems.

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Meanwhile, in a story in The Progress, the Clearfield County, Pennsylvania newspaper, Jeff Corcino’s writeup of the county commissioners’ meeting on Tuesday reminded me why touch-screen voting machines continue to be used despite their flaws: touch-screen voting isn’t as messy and lets people go home early. I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve heard anyone refer to optical scanners as “time-consuming” — it’s also the first time I’ve heard anyone complain that optical scanning machines would regularly jam and “eat” ballots. Corcino quotes the county solicitor, Kim Kesner, as saying optical scanning equipment sometimes gives different results for the same ballots each time they are put through the machine. Perhaps the most telling issue was money, since the county purchased its ES&S touch-screen machines with grant money provided through the Help America Vote Act; Kesner says that new machines would have to be purchased with the county’s own money. They’re comfortable with the current level of accuracy of the ES&S machines.

Corvino paraphrases Kesner: “Not everybody is going to like or want the same car, and just because someone chose to purchase a different system than Clearfield County, everybody has different preferences and it doesn’t mean it was a bad or wrong decision.”

I admire, though I don’t entirely respect, Kesner’s serene confidence.

Technical problems with electronic voting machines may be skewing voting totals in France, according to a study conducted by the French voting-transparency group Ethical Citizen . The problems don’t appear to be anything specific to France, but are the same problems noted with electronic voting machines in other countries.

Ars Technica reports:

The study was conducted at over 21,000 polling stations by comparing electoral registers, which voters sign after voting, with the total vote counts from machines and paper ballots in several elections. Discrepancies were found at almost 30 percent of polling stations that use electronic machines and only at about 5 percent of those using paper ballots. Based on the results, the researcher believes that broader studies are needed to determine the scope of the pattern and the reasons for the discrepancies. The root cause is thought to be technical rather than a result of widespread operator error because the margin of discrepancies increased in later elections when voters were already familiar with the systems.

You can read Ethical Citizen’s report (in French) here.