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.

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.

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.

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.

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*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”.

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.”

California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen gave the keynote address at the Usenix security conference last week, cementing her reputation as the secretary of state who best gets IT.

In her speech, titled “Dr. Strangevote, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paper Ballot,” Bowen said optical scanning was a “pretty good, although not perfect alternative” to direct-recording electronic voting.

Elinor Mills writes for CNet:

A paper ballot is a permanent record that is easy to audit, whereas electronic vote records and audit logs can be altered, she said. And many e-voting systems use Microsoft Access for tallying votes, which opens the system up to fraud, she added. “Votes can readily be moved from one column to another …. without being detectable.”

California and West Virginia are the only two states that have a statutory requirement for random manual vote tallies, according to Bowen.

“I added requirements for additional manual tallies of 10 percent of precincts in any contest where the margin of victory is less than one half of one percent,” Bowen said. If there is a problem with the scanning software for any reason additional audits can be done, she added.

It’s nice to live in a state where I feel as though the Secretary of State has our back.

I have to admit I didn’t understand how compulsory voting worked in countries like Australia and elsewhere. In the back of my mind I must have imagined people clocking in like characters in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Compulsory voting has strengths and weaknesses. The primary goal is to maintain access to voting for groups that might otherwise find themselves disenfranchised — a laudable idea that doesn’t sound too bad at the moment here in the United States, where voters lose their right to vote for reasons fair and foul. The downside for people who don’t want to vote is that they may have sanctions levied against them, anything from difficulty finding child care to being unable to withdraw your salary from the bank.

The “compulsory” aspect can mean either that you have to register (or are automatically registered), or that you also have to show up at the polling place and cast your ballot in some manner.

It’s the “in some manner” that can get interesting. Until today I hadn’t thought about how people in a compulsory-voting nation would protest if they didn’t like the parties or candidates available.

In Australia the tendency is to scrawl illegibly across one’s ballot or to leave it blank (it’s a secret ballot, after all). In Canada, though, some citizens have decided the answer is to eat your ballot.

In Canada a determined voting protester with a taste for fine dining and psephophagy* should contact the Edible Ballot Society, where you can meet other connoisseurs of disgruntlement, or even pick up ballot recipes like “Rachel’s Ballot Smoothie.”

Unfortunately, psephophagy may be illegal in Canada, so unless you’re ready for the consequences of your protest, don’t bring your wok to the polls. But if that form of dissent is to your taste, then bon appetit.

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*I made this word up myself, from the Greek for “pebble,” as used in the word “psephology,” the study of election results.

The Open VotingConsortium (OVC) has been working with scientists and engineers around the world since 2001 to produce what its members consider a trustworthy open-source voting machine — on Tuesday, August 5th it will put its machine to the test with a mock election at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

Deborah Gage writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that the new machine costs about $400, one tenth of the cost of proprietary voting machines, even less if made in quantity. OVC co-founder Alan Dechert says this is possible because the machine is simply designed and based on free, open-source software. The code that runs the voting machine is based on the work of a former UC Berkeley student, Ka-Ping Yee. A slightly more in-depth precis of the system can be found here.

People who attend the conference will vote by scanning a bar code on their badges, then selecting a candidate from a computer screen. When they’re done, they will print their ballots, which will include their bar codes. A separate machine can scan the bar codes and read their votes back to them if they choose.

This still leaves some questions of security, anonymity, and vulnerability to be answered, of course.

The good news about Florida counties switching to optical scanners was that they no longer used touch-screen systems. The bad news, however, is that current Florida law only permits hand recounts in a small percentage of cases. Jim Stratton writes for the Orlando Sentinel:

When legislators passed the new law, they made no provision for a full hand recount, rendering the paper trail of optical-scan systems virtually useless. The law requires that only ballots with too many or too few marks — so-called overvotes and undervotes — be reviewed by hand. The rest won’t be checked.

“By law, humans can’t look at that paper record,” said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. “The system is sort of bass-ackwards.”

State law mandates *machine* recounts for any race decided by less than half a percentage point. So the votes are run back through scanners again. If after that process the margin drops to one-quarter of a percent, a hand recount is ordered — but only for ballots showing undervotes or overvotes. The rest of the ballots can’t be reviewed unless a candidate sues.

Florida’s secretary of state, Kurt Browning, had wanted a provision for a full hand recount, but relented when county officials demurred. Florida has one of the shortest voting certification periods in the nation, 12 days, and many felt that wasn’t enough time to provide a complete recount. Voting activists hope this will be changed, along with what they call insufficient auditing procedures.

PS to any readers from Florida: Today was the deadline for registering to vote in the Aug. 26 primary election.