Honest Voting

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.

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.

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!

As I got my gear together for the July 4th weekend my mind wandered to the idea of Election Day as a national holiday. That’s how a fair number of other countries handle it. The idea has been bruited about for years in the US. In fact, that’s how some US states handle it. Why not take the idea all the way. The day itself has already been nationally mandated.

I’m not sure that I’m as happy with another solution some areas choose, the possibility of early voting.

More in a moment.

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.

The Internet is a very big place, as a friend reminds me every so often. Do we need to rely solely on dusty facts and outrage to force ourselves into the poll booth? We do not. Besides, frankly, I can use a laugh/smile/ironic raised eyebrow right about now, can’t you?

In the “I can’t believe I had to remind myself of this one” category, back in May 2007 the lingerie company Triumph International Japan announced a new concept bra called the “Voter Turnout Lift-UP! Bra.” The brassiere is made of silver vinyl, with the Japanese characters for “ballot box” written on the front.

In England, by contrast, it’s men’s underwear that seems to affect voting patterns, according to an article in the Daily Mail, “Boxers or briefs: Why a man’s underpants are the bloodstream of our country.” Let’s not look too closely at the headline — it conjures up far too many uncomfortable images. But the article’s author, Quentin Letts, says that the United Kingdom is “surely the only country in the world where the result of not one but two general elections may have been influenced by party leaders’ choice of drawers.”

The United States, on the third hand, assumes a candidate will wear underwear, enjoys speculating on the contents of a candidate’s underwear, but so far has not let an election hinge on anyone’s choice of undergarments. …Well, okay, bloggers and comedians often riffed on Romney’s religious garb, but it was his speeches and public appearances that did him in.

In Russia, far from undoing a politician’s career, underwear has been enlisted in the aid of the government. (”In Russia, underwear tries to convert *you*!”) Witness this pro-Putin underwear offered by a young Russian designer.

That’s all I can wrap my head around right now.  It’s only a few years until someone offers underpants with embedded electroluminescent wire that spells out a candidate’s name.  If the light’s too bright election officials might have to ban EL underwear from polling places on the grounds it would constitute electionneering.

It’s nice to have something to look forward to.

It’s going to be difficult not to just run to Bruce Schneier’s site whenever I’m casting about for a topic. He’s been thinking about election integrity for a long time.

Here’s something you might not have seen in Wired, though. In the July 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM, Paul Kocher and Bruce Schneier wrote a short op-ed essay called “Insider Risks in Elections.” Kocher and Schneier wondered just how many votes a purported election fraudster would have to switch while doing the most good for Political Party X. The answer is, not very damn many.

“In order to gain a clear majority of the House in 2002, Democrats would have needed to win 13 seats that went to Republicans. According to Associated Press voting data, Democrats could have added 13 seats by swinging 49,469 votes. This corresponds to changing just over 1% of the 4,310,198 votes in these races and under 1/1000 of the 70 million votes cast in contested House races. The Senate was even closer: switching 20,703 votes in Missouri and New Hampshire would have provided Democrats with the necessary two seats.

Of course, it isn’t possible to anticipate exactly how much fraud or undetected error would alter the winner of each race. It would also be suspicious if Democrats won 13 districts by exactly one vote. As a result, modestly more votes would need to be changed. In 2002, fraud that changed 2% of the votes in a few contested races (or 1/250 of the total votes) would have completely changed the balance of power in Congress.”

The authors postulate that, in the 2002 US elections, every percent of the vote added to a candidate’s victory was worth $60,000 — after examining the question more closely, they eventually concluded that swinging only ten percent of the opposition’s votes on a 250-vote machine would be worth $5,000 in a close race. In other words, vote-tampering gets you a lot of bang for your buck.

“The evidence clearly shows voting systems must be designed to counter very well-funded and sophisticated opponents,” they remind us. It’s kind of a shame that most of our electronic voting systems still lie open to anyone above the level of script kiddie.