From the Dispatch

Major Victory for Transparency in Elections

Christian Smith-Socaris — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:08:06 +0000

The District of Columbia has obtained an agreement from Sequoia Voting Systems to review a vast amount of information about one of their voting machines, which somehow recorded thousands of extra ballots during the September primaries. Investigators assembled by the council will have access to the source code and documents related to its creation, as well as blueprints for the machine hardware. The company had initially balked at releasing any information, refusing to comply with a council subpoena last fall. The company then tried to demand a $20 million bond insuring the secrecy of the information. They relented just prior to being sued by the council. "It is certainly going to serve as a precedent not just for further investigations in the District of Columbia, but around the country," said John Bonifaz, legal director for Voter Action.

This investigation follows California's recent investigation into irregularities in Sequoia voting machines, which revealed that the machines actually had a delete button, with no safety features, to erase the supposedly unalterable vote tally. This shocking feature is on voting machines in over a dozen states. Now with the phantom DC votes we are getting another look inside a machine, and given the track record of electronic voting machines, no one is expecting it to be a model of security and reliability. What happened in DC just reinforces the fact that paper ballot elections are the only reliable and secure alternative for our elections. And the fact that private companies have repeatedly thwarted attempts to investigate irregularities in the votes tallied on their machines makes clear that privatized elections are a direct threat to our democracy.

Resources:
Progressive States Network - Preventing Election Privatization
Progressive States Network - Paper Ballots
Washington Post - Firm to Give DC Information About its Voting Machines
Voters Unite - Vendors are Undermining the Structure of US Elections
Voter Action

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New Revelations Provide More Evidence Paperless Voting Not Safe

Christian Smith-Socaris — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:45:20 +0000

Three recent revelations about electronic voting machines highlight the maddening lack of security in paperless elections, and emphasize why paper ballot voting with robust post-election audits are a basic requirement for secure elections.

The Premier "Delete" Button, Discarding Votes Made Easy: The California Secretary of State's Office recently completed their investigation on the cause of almost 200 lost votes in the 2008 general election in Humboldt County. Faulty software from Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) was to blame, as it was in Ohio. Both California and Ohio are suing Premier over the botched product. Premier originally denied there were any flaws in its software, alternately blaming the issue on user error and anti-virus software, but has now acknowledged they are at fault.

The investigation, however, uncovered an even more troubling problem - the machines used in Humboldt County and elsewhere had an erase button that allowed the machine's audit logs to be "zeroed out" with the touch of a button. Not only does such a capability fatally undermine the security of these machines, they were built in such a way that votes could be deleted without election workers noticing they had done so. Premier was even made aware of the insanity of including such a function in their machines. An e-mail from one of the system's developers stated that "adding a Clear button is easy, but there are too many reasons why doing that is a bad idea."

The report on this fiasco by the Sec. of State sums up the scope and depth of the problem this way: "The Clear buttons ... allow inadvertent or malicious destruction of critical audit trail records in all Gems version 1.18.19 jurisdictions, risking the accuracy and integrity of elections conducted using this voting system. Five years after the company recognized the need to remove the Clear buttons from the GEMS audit log screens, not only Humboldt, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties in California but jurisdictions in other parts of the country, including several counties in Texas and Florida, continue to use Gems version 1.18.19...."

CIA Cybersecurity Expert Warns Electronic Voting Inherently Insecure: A CIA cybersecurity expert who specializes in assessing foreign threats to US election systems has warned the federal Election Assistance Commission that electronic voting is inherently insecure. Steve Stigall was testifying on the likely rigging of electronic machines that has occurred in Venezuela, Macedonia, and Ukraine when he attacked the security of electronic voting in general. According to a transcript of the hearing obtained by McClatchy Newspapers Stigall said, "[y]ou heard the old adage 'follow the money'? I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that's an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen."

Public Officials in Kentucky Indicted for Stealing Electronic Elections: Political corruption and vote buying have been alleged in Clay County Kentucky for decades. In an effort to counteract that tradition, the Department of Justice has indicted several public officials - including a judge, the county clerk, the school superintendent and members of the elections board — on vote buying and election fraud. According to the indictment, the defendants not only conspired to steal elections the old fashioned way, but also exploited a vulnerability in their new ES&S iVotronic paperless voting machines. The defendants are alleged to have duped voters into leaving the voting booth after they had pressed the "vote" button, which doesn't actually cast the vote, but brings up a review screen where a voter confirms their selections. Once the voter had left the booth, corrupt election workers went in and changed their votes.

This case is significant for a couple reasons. The first is that the major defense used by voting machine vendors regarding the flaws in their products has been that none of the problems have ever resulted in a stolen election. If the DOJ is correct, several elections were stolen in Kentucky on electronic machines. Second, the fact that using electronic voting machines is confusing enough that many voters can be tricked into leaving the booth before they have actually cast their ballot is a critical vulnerability in these systems that has not previously been appreciated.

Revelations like those outlined above just add to the overwhelming evidence that elections without paper records cannot be secure. And while a majority of voters in the US now cast their ballots on paper, there are still a large number of voting jurisdictions that plug their ears to the growing drum beat of warnings and defend these indefensible voting systems. Progressive leaders in these states must stand up for the rights of their constituents to free and fair elections by demanding paper ballot elections that create a permanent record of the votes, as well as strong post-election audits to detect any errors or fraud.

Resources
Progressive States Network - Paper Ballots
Progressive States Network - Post-election Audits
Wired - Report: Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs
California Secretary of State - Report Concerning Errors and Deficiencies in Diebold/Premier GEMS Version 1.18.19
McClatchy Newspapers - Most Electronic Voting Isn't Secure, CIA Expert Says
Brad Blog - KY Election Officials Arrested, Charged with "Changing Votes at E-Voting Machines"

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How our Election Systems Held up Under a High Turnout Election

Christian Smith-Socaris — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:00:45 +0000

This year election administrators, many of whom were fielding new voting equipment for the first time, faced record turnout. After the pervasive problems with the previous two presidential elections and the fears of more election problems, both real and imagined, voters across the political spectrum faced the election with deep skepticism about its fairness and integrity. Today we give a brief overview of whether the expectations for the election were born out, and what election day tells us about where to focus reforms.

How Big was the Wave? The biggest question that most people have is how high was actual voter turnout this election. There is some serious inconsistency in the numbers that are being reported, but from American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, the preliminary number is 62% of eligible voters which is five points below 1960. That was clearly below the most ambitious expectations. But beyond turnout percentages, every four years there are more total voters than the last because of population growth. So even without a record turnout, the actual number of voters was about 6.5 million more than 2004. It is also clear that turnout wasn't consistent across the country, with some states experiencing turnout well above the average. And, of course, battleground and election day registration states led the pack.

So what we saw was not a best case scenario in terms of participation. This moderately high turnout election, however, managed to seriously tax the system and disenfranchised an unknown number of voters on election day. The result was long lines throughout the country and hours-long waits to vote. The system was definitely over capacity: an election with over 65 to 70 percent turnout likely would have been a complete disaster with huge numbers of precincts totally overwhelmed. But even some states and counties with very high turnout managed to avoid major strains on their polling places.

Early and Mail-in Voting Save the Day in Many States: For several states that have seen problems at the polls in recent elections, early voting - either in person or through the mail - appears to have made a significant difference in how smoothly things went on election day. Colorado stands out for having faced serious problems in previous elections, responding with a strong commitment to using mail-in voting to ease the pressure off the polls, and successfully implementing that strategy which resulted in a successful election. In the end, a majority of votes in the state were cast early, as was the case in Texas where two-thirds of votes were cast before election day. The tremendous success of early voting, even for in-person early voting where there were sometimes long lines, has already prompted several states to examine adding or extending early voting, including key swing states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Obama Campaign Makes Early Voting a Key Component of GOTV: Early voting efforts gained a lot of momentum due to a strong push by the Obama campaign to emphasize the importance of getting as many people to vote before election day as possible. In past elections, early voting was often more popular among conservatives and reflected a pool of voters older and more white than the average pool of voters. However, early voting was an essential element in Obama's get out the vote efforts and worked in concert with his efforts and independent progressive efforts to register new voters. In the end, the campaign's work paid serious dividends. Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by significant margins in several key battlegrounds. In North Carolina, a traditionally red state, early and newly registered voters accounted for a Democratic victory.

Chronic Election Problems Persist: Beyond preparing for very high turnout, which didn't happen adequately in areas across the country, there were several areas where election experts and observers were expecting trouble - registration errors, voting machines malfunctions, and voter suppression. Before election day and during the early voting period in many states, significant problems did crop up. In some instances that allowed election officials to deal with problems before election day, or in the case of voter deception, inform voters of the threat. In others, like purging of voters from the rolls, problems in the run-up to the election could not be rectified after the fact. While there were no crises in this election, it is also clear that voting problems are not behind us and significant reform is still needed to ensure that we have a free and fair election system.

Voter Registration Problems: Election post-mordems virtually all identify voter registration problems as endemic this year. In many states voters were removed from the polls within 90 days of the election, in direct violation of federal law. In other states election officials used overly restrictive rules such as demanding exact matches between voter registration info and government databases to keep people off the rolls. On election day there were many reports of people who had registered showing up at the polls only to find their names missing from the poll books, leading to a substantial number of provisional ballots being cast.

Problems with purges and restrictive registration rules were the most significant voter registration problems this year. Yet, accusations that ACORN was engaged in voter registration fraud, though not supported by facts, drowned out much of the discussion of real problems. Ironically these real problems include the arrest of a prominent rightwing signature gatherer for voter registration fraud. However, the uproar over ACORN may have a silver lining in convincing conservatives of something that progressives have known for decades - the voter registration process is in need of serious reform.

The problems, both real and imagined, are leading to a consensus that either states on their own or the federal government must implement universal voter registration. Many of the controversies and failures surrounding the current systems would disappear if the government took responsibility for registering as many eligible citizens as possible. Many nations reach over 90% registration (some even have turnout that high as well), and as the world's leading democracy, we should endeavor to reach similar levels.

Electronic Voting Machines Continue to be Unreliable: While critics and proponents of electronic voting agree that there were no major meltdowns of voting systems during the election, as there have been in the past, machines once again proved themselves to be unreliable throughout the country (update here). Perhaps the most troubling problems occurred during the early voting period where machines flipped votes from one candidate to another in at least four states. Election integrity experts continue to call for the use of paper ballots and the implementation of robust hand count audits of election results in every state.

Voter Suppression Remains Popular and Unpunished: Voting rights advocates have become accustomed to the host of voter suppression efforts that occur with every election, many of which we've highlighted in Dispatches leading up to Nov. 4th (here, here and here). This year was no different, and with conservatives on the ropes in many states, may have become more widespread. States across the country saw deceptive and intimidating flyers and phone calls circulated to minority voters and students in the days before the election. Caging and voter challenge campaigns were also widespread. (For those interested in the specifics, the good folks at the Voter Suppression Wiki have a rundown of suppression problems reported before and on election day. Video the Vote has also released a compilation of voting problems experienced on election day).

What is beyond clear is that voter suppression will not go away on its own. The Department of Justice has been asleep at the wheel for the last eight years and has shirked its responsibility to pursue vote suppressors with criminal prosecutions. It is also clear that many states have a long way to go to improve and expand their voter protection laws. Additionally, state need to take efforts to track down perpetrators.

Conclusion: This election was the culmination of a dramatic shift in the political landscape of this nation that began in 2006. Voters are recoiling from the conservative excesses and failures of the last decades and are embracing a new progressive agenda to strengthen families and the nation as a whole. However, if we are to build a true progressive majority, much work remains in modernizing our election practices for the 21st Century. Without significant gains in securing the franchise, the tremendous gains progressives have recently had at the ballot box might slip away as quickly as they came. All progressives should guard against complacency born of these triumphs and use their new prominence to put election reform at the center of the broader progressive agenda.

Resources

Alternet, Tova Wang - Despite Clear Presidential Victor, No Shortage of Problems in 2008 Election
AmLaw Daily, Daphne Eviatar - Election 2008: The Voting Problems Aren't Over
Wired.com, Kim Zetter - Election Problems Around the Country
Voter Suppression Wiki - Voter Suppression in the 2008 Election
TheNation.com, J. Barkin and C. Smith-Socaris - End the 'Voter Fraud' Debate

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Election Integrity: How We Lost It and How States are Getting It Back

Christian Smith-Socaris — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:30:00 +0000

The 2000 presidential election propelled America's problems with our elections into the national spotlight in an unprecedented way. Americans, night after night, watched news stories exposing the many problems that are routine in elections but that receive little attention: confusing ballots that lead people to mark their vote for the wrong candidate, voter suppression aimed at minorities through voter registration purges, and weary election officials trying to discern voters’ intent on ambiguously marked punch card ballots.

In response the federal government passed the Help America Vote Act which funded wholesale changes in how Americans cast their ballots, most visibly by increasing the use of electronic voting machines. Reacting to the problems caused by electronic or so-called “black box”? voting, a grassroots movement of citizens and legislative leaders across the country have been steadfast in their pursuit of secure and transparent voting systems. In cooperation with election reform organizations and prominent computer scientists, they have mounted a series of local and national campaigns that are steadily changing the debate on election integrity and changing the way people vote. This Stateside Dispatch will highlight how state leaders have sought to protect ballot integrity, create post-election audits that work to protect voters rights, and have fought the privatization of elections into the hands of potentially partisan and often incompetent corporations.

Protecting Ballot Integrity

The Move Toward Electronic Voting: Watching the difficulties Florida election workers encountered when attempting to tally ballots by hand after the 2000 election, many came to the conclusion that electronic voting machines would establish unambiguous voting records, preventing such problems in the future. The federal government provided billions of dollars to make the switch resulting in a large scale shift in the voting systems that states use.

In 2000, only 13% of voters were in precincts that used electronic voting machines. By 2006 that number had risen to 44%. However, even before the first machines were bought, advocates for election integrity and computer scientists were ringing the alarm that these machines were unreliable and unverifiable. Adopting such machines would open up our elections to possible manipulation. At the time their warnings were widely dismissed by election officials and were violently attacked by voting machine vendors who were in a mad scramble to sell as many machines as possible before federal money dried up.

States such as Florida moved quickly to replace their voting systems with electronic machines. Yet advocates and experts were undeterred and began a long and ongoing campaign to track the problems that the machines have presented, from lost and switched votes, to outright breakdowns. They also began to do their own technical assessments of machines and their software that uncovered critical flaws in the security of many electronic voting systems. Additionally, these advocates and experts continued to press their case with legislators, demanding that these problems be addressed.

Critics Proven Right as Voting Problems Accumulate: The problems encountered and uncovered regarding electronic voting are legion, the following are just a few recent examples:

In Arkansas during an election this spring 45 votes cast in one race were added to the totals of an entirely different race that wasn't even on the same ballot.
Last year, Volusia County Florida was forced to replace over 300 memory cards on their voting machines due to manufacturing defects.
Last year, Lawrence County Ohio had one race where the voting machines flipped the results between two candidates due to a programming error.

However, once again it was Florida that in 2006 experienced a complete crisis during a hotly contested election when 18,000 votes went missing in a congressional race that ended up being decided by less than 400 votes. Such a huge loss of votes in a close race for a congressional seat was a wake-up call to those who had been denying that electronic voting posed any significant risks. The incident was also a turning point in the election integrity debate and forced Florida to abandon its newly purchased voting system.

The Pendulum Begins to Swing the Other Way as Voters Demand Paper Trail: Due to the many documented problems with electronic voting machines and the organizing work of local advocates, many states began to reconsider the headlong rush to electronic voting. The first step came with the introduction of "voter verified paper audit trails" (VVPATs). VVPATs use a printer attached to an electronic machine to print a physical record of the voter's ballot and allows the voter to accept or reject this record. These paper audit trails would then be the official record of the vote should any disputes arise.

Unfortunately, VVPATs fail on at least two levels. First and foremost, research indicates that in practice few people review the paper ballot, which is often small and hard to read. Unless people are actually verifying their votes, the audit trail serves no purpose. Additionally, any malicious attempt to alter the vote totals on a machine could be arranged to also print the votes the voter intended on the paper trail ballot.

It is also the case that without a procedure for auditing the results, there is no way to reconcile the vote total recorded by the machine with those reflected in the paper audit trail. Yet, most states with VVPATs do not have adequate audit procedures likely to detect manipulation.

States Move to Paper Ballots, the Only Truly Secure Option: The shortcomings of the VVPATs have left lawmakers and election officials with one secure option: paper ballots. There is no way to guarantee security and transparency when votes are stored electronically -- a physical record of each vote is required. Also, since that record must be the same one that the voter used to cast their ballot, audit trails are not an adequate substitute.

Fortunately the efforts of the election integrity movement are beginning to bear significant fruit, seen in one instance by the adoption of paper ballots by some states. States that took longer to replace their voting systems after 2000, such as New York, had the benefit of seeing the problems that electronic voting machines cause and switched directly to paper ballots. Several other states such as Florida, Iowa, and Tennessee have decided that their initial investments in electronic machines was a mistake and have switched to paper ballots. Such a move has recently been made easier as the federal government has cleared the way for states to apply unused Help America Vote Act funds to replace machines previously purchased with those funds.

This November, for the first time, a majority of voters in the country will cast a paper ballot on election day and just 36% will use electronic machines, marking movement in the direction of more secure paper-based elections. At least one state is also trying to recover funds spent on problem plagued machines, contending that machine companies have not fulfilled their contractual obligations to supply reliable voting equipment. Diebold, the most prominent manufacturer of voting systems has changed the name of its voting technology subsidiary so that voting machine problems don't effect the reputation of the entire company.

Clearly the move away from electronic voting machines is a tremendous victory for voters and a boon for fair elections. However, other clear threats to the integrity of our elections remain. The controversy over electronic voting machines motivated many to look more closely at the safeguards that protect our election systems from fraud and manipulation, and what has been found is troubling. Paper ballots are clearly not enough to make our elections secure; we also need a reliable way to verify election results. Recognition of this fact has moved the election integrity debate forward into two additional areas: post-election audits and publicly controlled elections.

More Resources

Post-Election Audits that Work

Even when using paper, in order to have timely reporting of election results, ballots are counted by optical scanning machines that read each ballot and tabulate results. Whenever you use a system other than publicly observed hand counting of ballots there will be errors in tabulating and reporting the results, due either to a compromised machine or to simple transcription errors when recording the final tallies. The benefit of paper ballots is that there is a physical record that we can go back to that will allow us to verify results. But even if paper-ballot results are never verified, we still have an insecure system.

In order to protect against error or the manipulation of the election results, post-election audits must be done to verify to some degree of certainty that the reported results are accurate. Barring a public hand count, without such an audit process, the accuracy of election results are unknown. 20 states have now implemented a post-election audit procedure with New Jersey's being the most advanced. However, many of these procedures fall far short of best practices.

It is important that all audits and recounts follow these principles:

Transparency
Independent oversight
Flexible sample size based upon the margin of victory
Recounts expanded to more precincts when discrepancies are found

New Jersey enacted the first law (AB 2730 of 2007) in the country that adapts recount procedures in relation to the outcome of the election - in closer races, where a smaller discrepancy could change the outcome, the recount will be broader. The scope of the audit is also expanded when discrepancies are found. Additionally, the law sets up an independent commission to design and oversee the audits. The commission includes statisticians and has strong transparency guidelines.

Minnesota recently passed an innovative amendment (Chapter Law 336 of 2008) to its audit procedures that allows a candidate to obtain a discretionary recount of up to three precincts at their expense. This is an economical and convenient way to boost the integrity of elections by allowing those most likely to detect questionable vote totals the ability to direct limited recounts.

More Resources

Stopping the Privatization of Elections

The public administration of elections is the fundamental basis for the freedom and fairness of our elections. Without government control of elections and public scrutiny of the process, establishing the legitimacy of election results is not possible. Publicly administered elections were until recently an unchallenged aspect of our democracy. However, the move to computer systems to administer elections and the swift, federally-funded adoption of these systems has led to a privatization of many election functions.

Electronic voting machines are the most visible aspect of our voting systems that has been privatized. Machine vendors insist on maintaining the privacy of both the hardware and software that they are selling or renting to states. This is extremely dangerous to the security of our elections. Without having access to the "guts" of the machines, there is no way to analyze machine errors or to determine how secure the machines are. These private voting systems have caused serious problems.

Florida's 18,000 Missing Votes: In the case we mentioned earlier from Sarasota, Florida, both the loser of the race and a group of voters brought separate lawsuits seeking access to the voting machines and the software responsible for the 18,000 lost votes. Both were denied access based on a claim by the Election Systems and Software Company that the machines and their software are trade secrets. The court upheld the privacy rights of the corporation over the right of the people to a fair election.

New Jersey Voters Battle Sequoia: During this year's presidential primary, machines in 37 New Jersey counties recorded vote totals that did not match with summary tapes of the votes cast. When county clerks tried to have a Princeton University computer scientist examine the machines, both the clerks and the professor were threatened with a lawsuit by the machine manufacturer. In the face of a lawsuit the clerks dropped their efforts to have the machines examined. A group of government reform advocates then filed a lawsuit to have the machines declared unreliable, and as a result of that lawsuit a judge has ordered that the machines be examined by independent computer professionals.

While the report based on that examination is forthcoming, another computer scientist purchased some of the machines through a government auction and has determined that they can easily be hacked.

Other parts of the election system have also been privatized in some states, including statewide voter registration databases and the poll books that contain the list of eligible voters. In two instances from this past presidential primary, Georgia had numerous reports by voters that electronic poll books, made by Premier Election Solutions, were crashing and inoperable, leading to long lines and citizens leaving polling sites without casting ballots; in the New Mexico Democratic presidential caucus, a flawed voter registration database prepared for the state by the Elections Systems & Software Company led to thousands of voters' names not appearing on the voting rolls.

Principles of Public Elections: Voter Action is the lead organization responding to the increasing privatization of our election systems. In addition to paper ballots and post-election audits, they have identified the following as essential aspects of keeping public control over elections:

Open-source voting systems. Even with voter-marked paper ballots, citizens must know that their right to vote overrides any alleged trade secret of a private corporation. When votes are counted in secret by private companies, the integrity of the process suffers. All voting systems in the United States should be required to adhere to open-source standards.
Public oversight. Public control of our elections is dependent upon an active, engaged citizenry monitoring the electoral process. Grassroots networks across the country have already helped to expose key voting-rights barriers that threaten the integrity of our elections. With even greater sunlight, we can help ensure that our elections are open, transparent, free, and fair.

Given the broader scandals in privatization of public services, it makes no sense to entrust our most fundamental right to vote to private companies that hide behind "trade secrets" and other corporate laws to escape accountability.

More Resources

Conclusion

A series of election "reforms" advanced after the fiasco of Florida's 2000 election have had the consequence of acutely undermining the integrity and security of our voting processes. Seeking usable voting systems, states embraced electronic voting machines while dismissing critics who questioned the wisdom of using computers for such a sensitive application. However, after a multitude of failures in practice and a series of negative assessments from computer scientists, many states are scrapping the electronic machines in favor of paper ballots.

Even as states belatedly embrace paper balloting, most still do not have the post-election audits necessary to ensure election results are accurate. In addition, the privatization of our voting systems continues and is the primary emerging threat to the freedom and fairness of our elections. Lawmakers and the public must demand that the public maintain control over the voting process, because without transparent elections, democracy is truly imperiled.

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