Here we go again

Some of the names we’ve seen involved in problems with electronic voting machines are showing up again as problems arise with electronic records of registered voters. This article from Wired explains how thousands of Americans who are legally able to vote may not get to, or may not have their votes counted, because of errors (not “glitches”) in the systems that contain names of registered voters and are supposed to match them against drivers-license or Social Security records.

Folks, we have all the technology we need to run accurate elections with robust auditing measures to ensure that accuracy. What we lack is the will.

(h/t: Phred)

Voting machines tampered with in Ohio?

Could be:

At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.

The investigation was launched after Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s Secretary of State and chief election official, found that a candidate’s name was marked as withdrawn on the electronic voting machine that she used during the recent primaries, an irregularity that was also reported by voters in other precincts. The state attorney general is now working with a team of computer forensic consultants to determine if there was any tampering.

Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates that the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines had been manually disabled by county election board programmers last year, making it almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been made to the systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had failed to adhere to routine machine testing standards and had tested only one machine in each precinct rather than all of the machines.

Ohio has seen one electronic voting disaster after another ever since counties in the state began adopting the technology. Two Cuyahoga election officials were convicted of rigging a recount in May 2004 because they literally admitted to doing precounts and displayed the evidence while being recorded on videotape. A different Cuyahoga county recount, for a November 2007 local election, was equally marred when Brunner turned the state’s voter-verifiable paper audit trail law into a mockery by conducting the recount with paper ballots reprinted after the election from voting machine memory cards.

After all of these incidents, Brunner launched a $1.9 million security review which determined that the voting machines used in the state are all egregiously insecure and susceptible to manipulation and outright fraud in numerous ways. The review produced over 1,000 pages of documentation describing the profound flaws that impact the systems.

Voter-verified paper ballots are the way to go. And if counting paper ballots takes a little while longer, so be it. We have way too many problems with voting in a country of our size and level of technological development, and this may be one case in which technology isn’t going to be helpful in ensuring that everyone’s vote is counted and counted correctly.

(h/t: Ed)

Ohio, Colorado: You can keep your machines. We don’t want them.

The voting-machine industry’s long and mostly unsuccessful effort to prove its products aren’t utterly worthless if not corrupt has come a cropper this week as officials in both Ohio and Colorado are basically throwing them out. (h/t to Fred for the links)

As my friend David Allen has said (and likely would be saying now if his site weren’t down at the moment), how often do we have to be right before the politicians will listen? Touch-screen voting machines are unreliable (if not corrupt), the process that certifies them is riddled with flaws, and there are simpler and more accurate approaches readily available  that will, along with robust auditing and recount policies, ensure the highest probability of an accurate vote count.

Was the 2006 election hacked?

Yes, but not enough to affect the outcome, says Rob Kall, relying on research by the Election Defense Alliance. I think the evidence is circumstantial but not, contra Kall, directly probative. Put another way, I am, as I always have been, agnostic on the question.

What’s for sure is that some sort of electronic-voting-machine screwup has landed the 13th Congressional District race in Florida in court.

Bring it on

Oh, this is cute: Diebold, maker of, to be polite, flawed touch-screen voting machines, is threatening to sue HBO if it airs a documentary about the company.

As if.

Literally the last thing Diebold wants is lots and lots of subpoenas of all kinds of Diebold computer records and hardware, so that we can see what we can restore from “erased” hard drives, and lots and lots of questions having to be answered under oath by Diebold executives.

All of which would come to pass if Diebold sued HBO.

Which is why they won’t.

Well, that and the fact that they’d lose on the merits in summary judgment. There’s way too much evidence already in the public domain to believe a damn thing Diebold says about the reliability and security of its equipment.

The only mystery is why banks continue to buy Diebold equipment (ATMs and such). If they can’t even make reliable voting machines, why on earth would you trust them with other people’s money?

(UPDATE: Added link.)

How to steal an election

Like plans for the atom bomb, instructions for stealing an election with paperless touch-screen electronic voting machines are now available on the Internet:

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company’s internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that’s only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn’t want to believe me, and I don’t blame you. …

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I’ve followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

Now can we please have voter-verified paper ballots and mandatory, robust auditing of all elections nationwide?

Voting machines: Same old same-old

Once again, Diebold screws up. Once again, Diebold lies about its screwup. And once again, David catches them at it.

You know what? Screw it. Just forget trying to make secure electronic voting machines. Just go back to paper ballots, counted at each precinct and again downtown, out in the open where anyone who cares can watch.

I know it's heresy for a journalist to say this, but frankly, if paper ballots would give us a more secure, transparent, auditable voting system than what we have now with DREs — and they would — I'm willing to wait a few more hours, or even a day or two, for accurate vote counts. As public policy goes, giving the voting-machine companies chance after chance after chance to get it right, only to be disappointed every single time, just strikes me as idiocy, if not insanity, at this point.

Behind enemy company lines

Regular readers know of my longstanding interest in fair, accurate, transparent voting. My friend David Allen has an even longer standing interest and a much lengthier history of involvement in the issue, including service on a special legislative committee that looked into the issue of touch-screen voting machines.

David recently took his involvement one step further by volunteering to be a field troubleshooter for one voting-machine company during North Carolina’s recent primary election. (Well, the company was paying him and he was going to turn the money over to charity, but now he’s just refusing it outright.) He has a report up on his voting site, BlackBoxVoting.com, on his recent experience, what it says about North Carolina’s recent, positive changes in the law regarding voting machines, and where the potential problems remain. It’s surprisingly upbeat — astonishingly so if you actually know David, who’s the only friend I have who consistently rivals me in terms of darkness of outlook. :-) It’s also interesting and informative. Check it out.

Quote of the day

From commenter “clevershark” at Metafilter: “Yesterday we in Canada voted using the time-tested technologies of pencil and paper. Today we know who won the election. We know by how much. There is no dispute whatsoever. There may be a message in that.”

Ya think?

(To clarify: I don’t think all ballots should be pencil and paper. I do, however, believe touch-screen electronic machines are insecure and subject to unacceptable failure rates, and that if they are used they should generate a voter-verified paper ballot and that a robust auditing system be in place.)

What are they smoking in Ohio? And what are they hiding in New Mexico?

Problems far and wide related to paperless electronic voting machines. Again.

In Ohio, results on one referendum item come in within a percentage point of the Columbus Dispatch’s historically reliable pre-election polling … and results on four others come nowhere close … after the state adds 800,000 new touch-screen machines.

In New Mexico, elections officials are stonewalling discovery in a lawsuit pertaining to the vote totals in the 2004 presidential election. (If my math is right — always questionable — the outcome of the election would not be at stake either way. But from where I sit, that’s not the point and never has been.)

Folks, how much proof do you need that the world is round? And that paperless electronic voting machines are incredibly unreliable? And that for us to have confident in our voting system, that system must be completely transparent?

Good

From the NYT:

Voting-rights groups sued Florida election administrators on Wednesday to overturn a rule that prohibits manual recounting of ballots cast with touch-screen machines, a lawsuit with echoes of the state’s disputed 2000 presidential election voting.The lawsuit said the rule was “illogical” and rested on the questionable assumption that electronic voting machines perform flawlessly 100 percent of the time. It also said the rule violated a Florida law that expressly requires manual recounts of certain ballots if the margin in an election is less than 0.25 percent of the votes cast.

Court disputes over how to conduct manual recounts of punch card and absentee ballots delayed Florida’s results in the 2000 presidential election, which George W. Bush won after taking the state by 537 votes.

The lawsuit was filed against the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections and which issued the rule in April.

Plaintiffs included the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the nonpartisan political group Common Cause and other voter education and civil rights groups. The suit will be heard by the Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee, the state capital.

The plaintiffs said in their suit the electronic voting machines were “known to malfunction and to be subject to malicious tampering.”

I might’ve made it “vulnerable to malicious tampering” because I don’t think we can prove such machines ever have been tampered with. But otherwise, good for the plaintiffs.

Because God forbid we count votes accurately or anything.

Voting news

Locally, my friend David Allen, owner of Plan 9 Publishing in High Point, publisher and co-author of “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century” and editor of the ThoughtCrimes blog, has been named to a legislative study commission that will be looking at voting-machine problems in North Carolina. Before starting his publishing business, David did network security for banks for a lot of years. He’s sharp, he’s skeptical and, although quite a partisan liberal, he’s reality-based and sees this issue as utterly nonpartisan. The commission is lucky to have him.

Nationally, the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office), the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, said today it will be looking into voting irregularities in this year’s elections, including more than 57,000 complaints received by the House Judiciary Committee, according to this news release. GAO investigations are almost alone among government investigations for their high degrees of fairness and thoroughness. I don’t expect the findings of this investigation to change history — nor should you — but I hope and expect that it will shed detailed light on the (still far too many) problems remaining in our vote-counting systems.

“The paper trail worked flawlessly”

From Wired.com, a report on what happened when voting-machine maker Sequoia tested a new touch-screen machine with voter-verifiable paper ballot for California officials last week:

… the machine worked fine when the company tested votes using an English-language ballot. But when the testers switched to a Spanish-language ballot, the paper trail showed no votes cast for two propositions.”We did it again and the same thing happened,” said Darren Chesin, a consultant to the state Senate elections and reapportionment committee. “The problem was not with the paper trail. The paper trail worked flawlessly, but it caught a mistake in the programming of the touch-screen machine itself. For some reason it would not record or display the votes on the Spanish ballot for these two ballot measures. The only reason we even caught it was because we were looking at the paper trail to verify it.”

The article goes on to quote a company official as saying that ballot-design error, not programming error, was to blame, and that such an error “would never happen in an election environment because of all the proofing that election officials do.”

State Senate aides watching the demonstration and Chesin “could not confirm this, however, since the company did not show them evidence of the digital votes stored on the machine’s internal memory.”

No voting system is foolproof. There’s no way to be 100% sure of preventing malfunctions, bad programming or even fraud. All you can do is create an audit system that makes it close to 100% sure that any discrepancy will be noticed. That’s the voter-verified paper ballot, the so-called “paper trail,” in a nutshell.

“How They Could Steal the Election This Time”

The inflammatory headline above introduces what’s actually a long but nuanced article in The Nation about the perils of black-box voting. If you’re unfamiliar with the issue — and statistically speaking, there’s a decent chance you are — go check it out.

You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you, or, “Florida is heading toward being the next Florida”

A lot of very well-meaning people think we don’t need and/or can’t afford voter-verified paper ballots as part of electronic voting machines.

A lot of very well-meaning people are flat wrong:

MIAMI, July 27 - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times.

“This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida,” said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition.

Remember, the goal here is not necessarily to prevent fraud (although VVPBs will make it harder, for sure), but to create an auditing system so strong that any fraud inevitably will be discovered. Congress and your state legislature will have to act to make that happen. For more information, go here. To join in an online letter-generating campaign (which I don’t endorse; I think personal letters are more effective), go here.

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