Honest Voting

A razor-thin margin in Palm Beach County’s August 26th election has forced a county-wide search for 2,500 ballots believed to have gone missing.

Mary Pat Flaherty writes for the Washington Post that after a recount last weekend, only 99,045 ballots were logged, though 102,523 ballots had been recorded by machine scanners on election night. (The Washington Post article, updated this evening, would seem to indicate that around 1,200 votes have been retrieved, since an earlier article in Computerworld magazine pegs the number of missing ballots higher, at 98,775 in and 3,748 not accounted for.) Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning brought legal and technical teams to West Palm Beach last Wednesday to suss out what might have gone wrong.

Today the county ran all the available ballots through high speed scanners to crosscheck results of its hand counts. County workers were sent to comb through polling places to see if packets of ballots had been left behind, and election workers counted the voter signatures from logs.

Palm Beach County has become a bellwether for the nation’s election-integrity problems. In 2000, Palm Beach County became notorious for its ”butterfly ballot.” When the county moved to touchscreen machines for the 2004 elections, other problems arose.  This year Palm Beach County chose optical scanners to maintain a paper trail for its ballots.  It’ll be interesting to see whether the rest of the nation gets to learn again from the Florida county’s problems.

Princeton professor Andrew W. Appel says that the state’s electronic voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems continue to be vulnerable to simple lockpicking, not just electronic interference, writes John Froonjian, political editor for The Press of Atlantic City.   Appel is serving as an expert witness in a lawsuit aimed at banning the use of 10,000 electronic voting machines in the state.  In addition to being vulnerable to physical and electronic break-ins, say activists, the machines don’t produce a paper backup.

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.

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.

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!

Note to Ohio:

Dear Ohio,

If the condition of electronic voting machines in your state continues to be so parlous that your state is written up in Scientific American as a bad example, wouldn’t you think it behooves you to get more of a move on? (Political play on words not really intended; it’s just a bonus.) I mean, Scientific American, folks. That’s like having your sweet old scientist grandmother pick you up at school after you were sent to the principal’s office.

I don’t really mean to lecture Ohio’s secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, who isn’t dawdling. Along with the spot attack of suing Premier (the rebranded Diebold)*, Brunner last year commissioned Project EVEREST, a comprehensive security review of the electronic voting technology used throughout Ohio, to identify any problems that might make elections vulnerable to tampering.

Larry Greenemeier writes for Scientific American that during the 10-week project, teams of academic researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania and WebWise Security (a security firm formed in 2005 by faculty and students from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s security research group) examined DRE touch-screen and optical-scan voting systems from Premier (the rebranded Diebold)*, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) in Omaha, Neb., and Austin, Tex.–based Hart InterCivic as well as the software that manages these systems.

Patrick McDaniel, a Penn State professor of information security, led the EVEREST testing.

A lot of the attacks that McDaniel and his team tested could be carried out at a polling place or county elections office in a matter of seconds. An example: when researchers placed a piece of white tape over part of an e-voting system’s scanner, they were able to effectively block it from reading the entire ballot. In other words, a person could put the tape in a place that kept the system from counting votes for a particular candidate. The team also found that the keys to unlock Hart’s ballot box could also be used to open the ballot boxes on the Premier systems.In a more serious attack, McDaniel found that his researchers could replace the memory card in some of the e-voting systems. “Any software you put on your card would [be] uploaded into the system’s computer,” he says.

Later, at the apocalyptically named Last HOPE conference:

University of Pennsylvania researchers who led EVEREST’s analysis of ES&S e-voting technology described exploitable security vulnerabilities in almost every hardware and software component of ES&S’s touch-screen and optical-scan systems. Some of these flaws, [EVEREST researcher Sandy] Clark said, could allow a single voter or poll worker with bad intentions to alter countywide election results, possibly without election officials ever knowing that the results had been tampered with. “There wasn’t an attack that we tried that we weren’t able to carry out,” she added. “We learned that every current e-voting system has serious exploitable vulnerabilities.”

It might not be too late to convert to paper ballots, Secretary Brunner.

_____
*I’m considering making this the standard form for referring to the beleaguered and doubtless felonious voting machine manufacturer, just as the much missed SPY magazine of the 1980s used to always refer to Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” and Lynne Cheney as a “bosomy dirty-book writer”.

A Supreme Court ruling on whistleblower lawsuits has prompted Illinois attorneys to withdraw a case against the maker of eSlate voting machines, the system used in Kane County, Illinois.

The Supreme Court ruling requires whistleblowers to provide more specific proof of how wrongdoing occurred and the harm it caused, or be prevented from recovering financial damages, said attorney Matt Schultz, who represented whistleblower William Singer in his case against Hart Intercivic.

“In other words, a whistleblower may correctly identify fraud, but if he does not perfectly predict the ultimate way in which the fraud causes harm, then he may be precluded from recovering under the law,” Schultz said in an e-mail interview with Dan Campana, who writes for the Courier News. “This could be particularly problematic in cases, like Singer, involving an ‘evolving’ product like voting machines, in which successive, distinct iterations are used over time.”

Singer opted to withdraw the lawsuit in June, although Schultz said some voting rights advocates are looking into ways to keep the case alive.

Computer scientist and founder of the Association for Computing Machinery’s U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) Barbara Simons has been appointed to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Board of Advisors, which oversees voting and technology standards. (The press release says, “She will hold a seat that is allocated for science and technology professionals.” I assume this is the empty seat on the EAC Technical Guidelines and Development Committee; neither the EAC or the USACM websites are more specific.)  The Election Assistance Commission is pitifully underfunded and understaffed considering how much it’s responsible for, but having Simons there has to be good.

Dr. Simons is an encryption and privacy expert who previously served as president of ACM. Simons was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting, convened at the request of President Clinton, and participated on the Security Peer Review report that resulted in the cancellation of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Internet voting project because of security concerns. Simons also co-chaired the ACM study of statewide registered voter databases, and served on a subcommittee of the President’s Export Council for Encryption. Notably, she and fellow USACM member Ed Felten testified before Congress in September 2006 about the necessity for voter-verified paper trails in the election process.

Simons was one of three computer scientists behind the “Diebold Bombshell” announcement, a denunciation of the technical flaws inherent in voting machines from Diebold (recently rebranded as Premier). She is currently co-authoring a book on voting machines with University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas W. Jones.