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.

I don’t normally review groups based on what I think of their web page, but nevertheless I want to tip my hat to SAVE Our Votes in Maryland for offering an information-filled and clean-looking website. Also for their spot-on acronym — “S A V E” stands for “Secure, Accessible, Verifiable Elections.” More concretely, the site also offers a good collection of links on “how to get involved and stay in touch with your representatives.”

SAVE Our Votes is referenced in a later post on this blog.

The group might want to update its otherwise useful Excel spreadsheet of the Number of Registered Voters in Each MD Precinct by Party Affiliation, since that list was only good through July 2007. Useful in many respects, to be sure, but is that really the latest information?

SAVE Our Votes is associated with the International Humanities Center, for what that’s worth. The biographies of some of the Center’s board members raise my eyebrows a little bit — connections with the rightwingish Renaissance Foundation, for example — but perhaps that level of diversity is just a reminder that secure elections concern everyone of every political stripe.

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.”)

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.

This group, more than several of the other groups mentioned here so far, focuses on what individuals can do to improve the voting process. I’ve been writing a lot about national groups and international issues. In the United States that’s more likely to keep concerned individuals at a distance, wringing their hands and wondering what they can do.

Here’s what you can do:

A core concept we have at EDA is that all elections are local. There is no substitute for taking action in the precincts and counties where you live and vote.

Our goal at EDA is to build local-to-national collaboration among regional election integrity groups acting locally but also with collective strategy for effecting national outcome. This collaboration we speak of is not one-way and top-down, but two-way and interactive. Local groups have invaluable direct experience that can be synthesized and applied at a national level. A national group can develop research, legal, media, and fundraising capacities that are beyond the scope of smaller local groups.

We encourage you to go get active with a local or regional election integrity group where you live — and then put that experience to work at a national level as well, by becoming an active member of an EDA Working Group. Everything that you learn and do on the local level can be leveraged for double-duty, working with EDA to build a collaborative national effort.

To find a state or regional election integrity group near you, see this directory:

http://electiondefensealliance.org/regional_election_integrity_organizations

Reading that perks me up a bit as I stare at the end of the July 4th weekend.

The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology received a federal mandate to develop a national program for accrediting voting system testing laboratories.

This sounds wonderful, of course, except that the standards are a) minimal and b) voluntary. The committee’s latest set of standards appeared last August, around the time of the committee’s last plenary meeting.

One could wish that the representatives for the group’s Standards Board didn’t include John A. Gale, Nebraska secretary of state, the state that brought us Chuck Hagel to the US Senate. Hagel ran for office shortly after he resigned as CEO and director of the company now called Election Systems & Software.; his company made the vote-counting machines used during the 1996 Nebraska election that brought him to office. I mention this because it’d be nice if Secretary Gale had ever looked into vote tallies that continue to bring Hagel victories even in communities that historically never voted Republican. ES&S machines continue to be the standard in Nebraska elections.

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.

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.

The Election Assistance Commission faces nearly impossible odds. Established in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act, this independent, bipartisan commission (two Republicans, two Democrats) was given the job of creating and improving election standards for all 50 states. But Congress forgot to give it any funding. At first the four commissioners had to meet in a Starbucks.

Since then Congress has ponied up some operating cash, at first $700,000, now $16.5 million. (In a June 15 story by Deborah Hastings of the Associated Press about the EAC, the agency’s current operating budget was erroneously reported at $115 million. The larger figure actually represents money appropriated by Congress for election reform projects in the states.)

The commission isn’t entirely toothless. In January 2007 the commission banned Ciber, Inc. from testing voting machines until it got its quality assurance procedures up to snuff. (Also, Ciber contributes to election campaigns, mostly to Republicans. Nope, no conflict of interest there!) The commission dinged but did not decertify SysTest Labs, another machine certification company, pointing out that it just made electronic voting look bad if a voting machine certifier accepted work from a winning political candidate whose election had been challenged because of possible voting machine irregularities.

But the EAC is, at best, forced to do too much with too little.  At worst there’s the possibility that the commission was designed to be brought out at parties and congressional inquiries so that the administration could say, “But we’re working on the problem, honest!” Either way the result has been weak standards, poorly enforced.

Writing in a hurry today; this post is mostly a reminder to myself to explore the Brennan Center’s site thoroughly, because there are so many meaty issues the center is involved with. But feel free to explore the links on your own.

Here’s how The Brennan Center for Justice describes itself:

“The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a non-partisan public policy and law institute that focuses on fundamental issues of democracy and justice. Our work ranges from voting rights to redistricting reform, from access to the courts to presidential power in the fight against terrorism. A singular institution—part think tank, part public interest law firm, part advocacy group—the Brennan Center combines scholarship, legislative and legal advocacy, and communications to win meaningful, measurable change in the public sector.”

For the purposes of this blog the most important mission of the Brennan Center is its focus on voting rights and elections.   Categories within this group include Election Day Issues, EAC Oversight, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Voter ID, Voter Lists and Databases, Voter Purges and Challenges, Voter Registration, Voting After Criminal Conviction*, and Voting Technology.

Within the Voting Technology category you can find a link to the center’s publication Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections, co-written with members of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California Berkeley), based on a blue-ribbon panel of statisticians, voting experts, computer scientists and leading election officials.  (You can find the executive summary of the paper here .)

Lots of food for thought here.  What I’m wondering as I type this, since this definitely appears to be a liberal-oriented organization, is what the conservative counterpart to the Brennan Center would be.

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*Speaking of voting after criminal conviction, don’t forget to look at the Rhode Island Right to Vote page.