Honest Voting

Okay, this is old news in a sense, but still worth examining.

The Taiwanese decided not to go with electronic voting machines for their election back in April.

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.

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.

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.)

Now for some further examination of the Republican Party’s voter fraud page.

As mentioned before, as of June 19th the page lists a total of 112 entries, going back to 2006, over 50 states, counting duplicates and national stories.  These stories have a few unifying characteristics that I’ll get to in a minute.  First, a quick breakdown of the page.

Here are the states and territories for which they list no episodes of voter fraud within the last three years:

Alaska
American Samoa
Arizona
Arkansas
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Guam
Hawaii
Idaho
Iowa
Kansas
Maine
Maryland
Minnesota
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
North Carolina
North Dakota
Northern Mariana Islands
Oklahoma
Oregon
Puerto Rico
South Dakota
Utah
Vermont
Virgin Islands
Wyoming
States with voter fraud stories listed:

California - Four stories, eight entries
Colorado - One story
Florida - One story
Georgia - Two stories, two entries
Illinois - Three stories, five entries
Indiana - Eight stories, thirteen entries, including one entry about a Supreme Court decision and four entries about the overall work of a state voter fraud task force
Kentucky - Eight stories, ten entries
Louisiana - One story, two entries
Massachusetts - One story
Michigan - One story
Mississippi - Four stories, thirteen entries
Missouri - Six stories, eight entries
New Jersey - Two stories, two entries
New Mexico - Two stories, three entries
New York - One story
Ohio - One story
Pennsylvania - Two stories, two entries
Rhode Island - One story
South Carolina - Two stories, five entries
Tennessee - One story, two entries
Texas - Four stories, five entries
Virginia - One story
Washington - Three stories, nine entries.
West Virginia - One story
Wisconsin - Six stories, seven entries; also, one entry following up on issues from 2004.

So, 112 entries on the page, but only 67 actual stories. The page also links to three major stories from earlier years on a separate Flashback page.

Beyond the things you’d expect — if any Republicans are involved in these cases they’re not named by party, but hey, it’s the Republican Party site, whaddya think they’ll say; meanwhile, Democrats and unions are called out by name — I noticed one thing: the vast majority of these cases are really small-time.  A number of them have to do with absentee ballots, which can’t readily be fixed by voter ID rules at a polling place.

Is this really the backbone of the case for preventing voter fraud with voter ID laws?

From the Houston Chronicle, the Las Cruces Sun-News …and the Republican National Committee webpage:

A suspended Sunland Park municipal judge accused of voter fraud pleaded not guilty.

Horacio Favela, 48, was arraigned Monday on six charges including false voting, falsifying election documents and falsely swearing in a municipal election.

State District Judge Stephen Bridgforth allowed Favela to remain free on his own recognizance. New Mexico law prohibits convicted felons from holding elected office, but Favela hasn’t been convicted.

Favela is accused of voting twice by absentee ballot in the 2004 general election — once in Texas and once in New Mexico. He also is accused of living in El Paso, Texas, not Sunland Park, making him ineligible to run or hold the judgeship that he won in the March municipal election.

Favela was sworn in as a judge; however, the New Mexico Supreme Court suspended him without pay on March 27 pending the outcome of the case.

Google brought me to the GOP page on New Mexico voting fraud, which shows two stories about Favela as I write this, one dated 5/30/08, the other dated 2/29/o8. Going beyond New Mexico, I took a closer look at the GOP’s listing of voter fraud stories around the nation. This state-by-state roster, which goes back to 2006, offers each update on an ongoing story as a new listing, so each new development in a case ratchets up the total number of stories; it also includes stories about voter ID, e.g., the voter ID law in Indiana, not just as a national story but as a state story.

Totting it all up: That’s 112 entries total, going back to 2006, over 50 states, counting duplicates and national stories. More on this in the next post.

Over in the Democratic Party’s pages, they’re talking about a different set of voter frauds, especially the way Rush Limbaugh encouraged Republican voters in Texas and Ohio to cross party lines in the primaries and vote for Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, that appears to be a minor felony in Ohio; in Texas apparently some people forgot they could only vote once, which is also a criminal offense. And then they’re remembering the Rovian strategy of replacing non-compliant federal prosecutors in states where Republicans faced tight election contests.

Interesting to see how the approaches differ.

I don’t care if she’s already elected, I want to vote for Debra Bowen for California Secretary of State again.

Bowen has focused her legislative efforts on computer privacy, spam, and security for 15 years. In 1993, her first year in elected office, she successfully passed AB 1624, landmark legislation that put all of California’s bill information on the Internet. In the years since, she has worked to protect individuals’ online privacy, and to strengthen the auditing of electronic voting equipment to ensure accuracy in voting.

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to attend one of the panels on election and voting security that Bowen convened in Menlo Park. The stories I heard there are yet another reason this blog exists: scholars, computer scientists, and voting-rights activists pointed out over and over just how easy it was — still is, in many respects — to fix an election with current voting technology.

Within six months of Bowen’s election as Secretary of State in 2006, she’d insisted on a top to bottom review of California’s voting machines. She continues to hold voting machine vendors’ feet to the fire.

On January 16, 2008, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer aired a story on how California county election officials were responding to Bowen’s insistence on “either choose a secure voting machine or use paper ballots” — here’s the transcript of their story. Interesting that the story’s web subhead was “The State of California is racing to fix unexpected problems with its voting machines…” You know what? The problems weren’t unexpected, thanks to Bowen’s work with secure-voting experts. Too bad for the counties that didn’t want to protect the accuracy of their constituents’ votes.”

Wikipedia tells me that in March of this year she was given the Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. I’m just glad to know that she’s got our back.