Honest Voting

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.

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.

The voting-technology lobbying group VerifiedVoting.org has voiced strong opposition to voting technology legislation, the bill S.3212 by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT). “The show-stoppers in this bill unfortunately overshadow its positive provisions,” says Verified Voting president Pamela Smith.

Verified Voting says S.3212 fails to require a physical, voter-verifiable record of votes cast — instead it calls for an “independent record” of votes that could be electronic, paper, audio, video, pictorial, or “other,” and exempts some systems altogether. The bill would not require states to use these independent records in a recount or a post-election audit of vote tallies.

To be meaningful for audits or recounts, a verification record must be presented to the voter for verification before the ballot is cast, and not be alterable by a failure or manipulation of computer software. A voter-verified paper ballot is the only system that today effectively serves that purpose.

Smith says the bill is likely to increase the cost of elections without solving the problem of voter confidence. Additionally, Smith said, it will allow unverifiable electronic voting systems to remain in use. Verified Voting says that the bill could remove the voter’s ability to verify a vote before it’s cast. Even more troubling is the bill’s provision for “independent” electronic records, which the group says “invites the development of paperless electronic voting systems, when there are no government certification processes to protect the voters from insecure voting systems.”