Honest Voting

Dorothy Fadiman’s new documentary, Stealing America: Vote By Vote, is another in a line of documentaries about the problems with America’s election process. Fadiman, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, decided to make the movie after she worked as a volunteer at the polls in 2004, when she heard repeated complaints from voters that their votes for Kerry were switched to votes for Bush.

Michael Ordoña, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, asked a couple of electronic voting machine manufacturers what they thought about the issues raised by this and similar movies.

Chris Riggall, a spokesperson for Premier Election Solutions (the rebranded Diebold) said this: “Sometimes the criticisms [of machines’ security vulnerabilities] are not factual because they are based on incorrect assumptions (such as networking or the presence of wireless ports on machines). On other occasions, the studies have recommended valuable improvements. … There’s no question that the emphasis on system security by voters, election officials and the industry is much greater now than it was, say, five years ago.”

Peter Lichtenheld of Hart InterCivic said, “I think the key issue right now is voter confidence.” Lichtenheld blamed controversial elections in 2000 and 2004 and the perceived misconduct of certain officials such as Katherine Harris in Florida, not faulty electronic voting systems, for generating distrust. (I have to admire Lichtenheld’s ability to glide over the role that electronic voting systems played in those controversial elections.) Lichtenheld reportedly pointed out that his company’s systems were the only ones for which California Secretary of State Debra Bowen did not require changes for use in 2007.

Oh, other people will fill that gap, Mr. Lichtenheld.

Here’s an interesting series of articles from the online version of Stars and Stripes, a daily newspaper published for the U.S. military, DoD civilians, contractors, and their families.

More on this in a moment.

I was curious about the future of Diebold’s election machine division — yes, they make machines other than electronic voting machines, particularly ATMs (and doesn’t a moment of thought about that make you feel more comfortable about who has access to your money). So I started looking around. Here’s what Marketwatch said a couple of weeks ago:

The performance and near-term market expectations for the Premier Election Solutions subsidiary remain unchanged from the company’s April 30, 2008 release. While Diebold fully supports its elections subsidiary, the company also continues to pursue strategic alternatives to ownership of this company.

“Strategic alternatives to ownership” is one of the best euphemisms I have ever heard.

Okay, at this point the story’s been around — as it should be, because for heaven’s sake! — but I didn’t want you to think I’d missed it.

Diebold Election Solutions, which recently rebranded itself as Premier, has admitted that their software dropped “hundreds” of votes in Ohio’s March 2008 primary elections, and not because of any conflicts with antivirus software, either.

As previously mentioned here, Diebold/Premier originally blamed conflicts caused by antivirus software from McAfee Inc., but as Grant Gross writes for Computerworld, this week the company blames a logic error in the machines’ GEMS source code for the problem.

“We now have reason to believe that the logic error in the GEMS code can cause this event when no such antivirus program is installed on the server,” Premier President Dave Byrd wrote in a Tuesday letter to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. “We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error.”

Wow, Brunner must have caught them seriously red-handed somehow.

“Numerous tests by voting authorities had failed to identify the logic error before Ohio discovered the dropped votes, Byrd wrote.” Uh-huh. What a surprising result — we all know how rigorous that testing has been.

Brunner thanked the board officials at the Butler County Board of Elections for going “above and beyond the call of duty” in tracking down the problems with the Diebold machines.

It’s not only voting activists who’ve noticed the potential bottleneck at the polls this year.  The New York Times‘ editorial board writer Adam Cohen wrote today that in Ohio “tens of thousands of votes were suppressed by something so mundane that no one thought to focus on it: long lines.”

Cohen points out that most of the decisions about polling stations and voting equipment are made by local officials, not state or national leaders. The result is that efforts to coordinate numbers of machines and ballots may sometimes be hamstrung by disjointed planning or even various kinds of bias.  (College towns may do their best to minimize votes from the college population, for example.)

Cohen, who was in Ohio for the 2004 election, says he watched tens of thousands of people give up on voting when faced with hours-long lines to reach the voting booth.  Therefore he’s cheered to learn that Ohio’s secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner (mentioned previously on this blog) — is “hyperfocused on long lines” for the coming election.  He reports that she has been pushing reluctant local election officials to have at least one voting machine for every 175 voters, and she is also directing counties that use electronic voting machines to have backup paper ballots on hand equal to 25 percent of the 2004 turnout — ballots that can also be used if lines get out of control.  Missouri’s secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, has been doing much the same; in addition she is providing funds for the hiring and training of poll workers, which will be needed in November in record numbers.

But most other states aren’t considering these issues. Let me second Cohen here: “An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world’s leading democracy.”

In Arizona, back in December 2007, Pima County Superior Judge Michael Miller ruled in favor of the Pima County Democratic Party, the party’s attorney Bill Risner, and AuditAZ, an election integrity group, in their suit to review the county’s electronic voting records for the 2006 primary and general elections.  This included copies of the Diebold GEMS databases.  (Reportedly this was the first ruling in the country to indicate that such data was a public record.)  The issue that originally concerned the activists was a 2006 regional transit bond vote that was behind in pre-election polls but won on election day.

In July 2008, Risner and the other activists reported that they’d received a written confession from a whistleblower who claimed that the chief computer programmer and operator for the Pima County Elections Division, Bryan Crane, confided to him in a bar conversation that he “fixed” the elections on orders from “his bosses” in the county.

Bill Risner wrote an article for Alternet a couple of weeks later that gives more details. Risner’s article includes not only a copy of a letter he wrote to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, in which Risner asks the state to reopen its own investigation and recount the 2006 ballots, but a link to the whistleblower’s affidavit. I highly recommend reading this article, which appears to give copious details on how a state should not conduct an investigation into voting fraud. Risner points out that the investigation could easily have been skewed because county officials were involved in determining the scope and parameters of the study. It’s hard for me not to concur. If the records under review are sent to the chief election official being investigated, you’re doing it wrong. If the records subsequently disappear, that counts as a massive Fail.

Following up on yesterday’s post on avoiding debacles at your local polling place this November — it’s not just a wise move to have extra paper ballots on hand, it’s recommended by Science.  Dr. William Edelstein, who’s associated with the Maryland group Save Our Votes, reached this conclusion via mathematics and queuing theory (the study of what happens when you stand in line).

You can probably excuse the heightened tone of this page; it reads as a bit crackpotty but the basic idea is probably accurate: even with the best planning, the best will in the world, sheer numbers can overwhelm a polling station. Even what would seem like short voting times — 5 minutes, 6 minutes — can result in huge backups.

Setting up extra stations for people to vote with paper ballots could siphon off some of the extra traffic, says Edelstein, and the time to plan for that and print the paper ballots is now. …Actually, the time to plan for that was months back, considering the cost of a print run. One of the reasons voting officials favor electronic voting is the method’s lower short-term cost. Nobody’s going to like a last-minute trip to the government printing office. But paper ballots cost far less than electronic voting machines that you have to send to the scrap heap.

Here’s something unusual for this blog: specific suggestions for maximizing the possibility that all the votes in your precinct will be counted. Problems at your polling place might arise because of administrative or technical reasons rather than partisanship.

Steven Rosenfeld writes for AlterNet that you as an individual can take action in several areas:

• Foil voting roll purges. Check with your local election office to confirm you’re registered at your current address, especially if you haven’t voted in several years. Update your registration if necessary. Make sure you do this before your state’s registration deadline (in 27 states that’s sometime in the first week in October, but your state may differ.
• Update your registration early, or register early if you’re not currently registered. Examine your registration form carefully before you turn it in. The Democratic Party will be conducting a major voter registration drive after its national convention. Local election officials have complained all year that they’ve been overloaded with last-minute registrations; some officials will take a more hard-ass view than others. Make sure there’s time to correct any errors. Call your election office to be sure your form has been processed.
• Be prepared for partisan voter challenges. If you registered after Aug. 1 and if you get a postcard from a political party not of their choosing, you could be on a “caging” or voter challenge list. This is especially true for college students, minority voters, and even people who live on a military base. If you’re in a known battleground state, check with the political campaign you support to find out whether voter caging is likely in your area. Bring additional ID to the polls with you. This tactic is designed to cause voting delays, so be prepared for that.
• If you’re a student new to voting, find out what the local rules are for student voting. Post office boxes won’t suffice for a voting address in many instances. State residency and identification requirements often prove to be stumbling blocks. Find out how you need to vote, and consider getting an absentee ballot.
• Make sure your precincts have enough election machines and paper ballots.
  

  Local election integrity groups or election activists should ask election officials how they are deploying the machines and ask officials what the basis is for that decision. Election officials tend to use historic turnout patterns over several voting cycles, which, as was the case this spring, underestimated the number of primary and caucus voters. Local officials should be encouraged to use the voter turnout numbers from 2008’s primaries and caucuses and updated voter registration statistics, rather than voter turnout figures from 2004.

• Prevent shortages of poll workers. Because voter turnout is expected to be high, the need for poll workers has increased too. Local election integrity activists or local media should ask election officials where there are likely to be shortages of poll workers, and help recruit key staffers there. Don’t forget high-school and college students, who may be able to get school credit for their service. I worked in my state’s primary this year, and one of the best workers in my precinct was the calm, collected high-school student.
• Report problems with early voting to voter registration organizations. Early voting and absentee voting are popular enough now that they’re also early indications of voting problems. If absentee ballots aren’t sent out in time, people overseas or in the military may not get their ballot in time for it to be counted.

The state of Hawaii will change its ballots this year so that when voters make their choice during the September 20th primary election, they will have to choose a political party. In previous years, voters were handed ballots color-coded by party; this year, everyone fills out the same white ballot.

Mark Niesse writes for the Associated Press (in an article in the Washington Post) that both Democrats and Republicans worry that they’ll lose the voters who don’t realize they have to choose a party before voting. Votes without a political party marked won’t be counted.

“What we’re concerned about is the chance that someone might half-consciously check the Independent box and then vote the straight Democratic Party ballot and then have their votes voided,” said Bart Dame, a Democratic Party elections observer who has seen the ballot.

The Elections Office acknowledges that voters could make that mistake, but they believe the instructions on the ballot will guide voters through the process. In addition, voting machines will return ballots with overvotes, and voters will be allowed to redo their selections before they leave the polling place.

Under this system the greatest problem could be with absentee ballots, which cannot be corrected once mailed in. One third of Hawaii’s voters voted by absentee ballot in 2006.

A side note: Election machine manufacturers are battling over Hawaii’s custom. Hawaii is using paper scan and electronic voting machines made by Hart InterCivic this year under a $43 million contract intended to run through 2016. A state administrative hearings officer has ruled that the contract be rebid, finding that the cost was “clearly unreasonable” compared to an $18 million bid from rival company Election Systems & Software. Hart filed an appeal in circuit court on August 18th.

Deborah Hastings, in an article for the Associated Press, says that “the demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses.” What a fine pulp mystery cover that visual would make!

One manufacturer has reportedly offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines, writes Hastings. (I’m guessing that would be Premier, the rebranded Diebold, since they’re already making ATMs.) Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries or salvage them for scrap. (Whoops, I guess we know what that makes you, Finland.)

A few more [counties] are holding out hope that the machines, some of which were purchased for as much as $5,000, could one day be resurrected.

“We store them very, very carefully in the hopes that someone, someday may decide that we can use them again,” said San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, whose jurisdiction spent $25 million on the devices.

It’s worth mentioning that Seiler used to work for Premier, the rebranded Diebold, and she’s perfectly happy with the machines’ reliability. So that’s okay then!