By Luther Weeks on December 27, 2015
Last Saturday, some may have been channel surfing and mistakenly thought they were watching Saturday Night Live. As one the 2% of voters spending last Saturday night intentionally watching the debate between the Democratic candidates and two ABC hosts, I was not the only one that noticed the flaws in one candidate’s claims for encryption that went unchallenged.
Fortunately, Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept articulates the issues and the faulty assumptions of candidates and pundits: Democratic Debate Spawns Fantasy Talk on Encryption <read>
During Saturday’s debate, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton said the U.S. should commission a “Manhattan-like project,” a reference to the secret World War II-era atomic bomb endeavor, to address the alleged threat encryption poses to law enforcement. She also admitted she doesn’t actually understand the technology.
Posted in Electronic Vulnerability, Internet Security Issues, National
By Luther Weeks on December 22, 2015
In the long run, apparently Not or Not Much.
Article from the Washington Post, from researcher Elizabeth Bergman: Voting only by mail can decrease turnout. Or increase it. Wait, what?
My research found that when you can only vote by mail, voter turnout actually drops by about 13 percent. I examined what happens to turnout if voting by mail is compulsory. I studied more than 90,000 voters who could vote only by mail across four elections from 2006 through 2008 in five of the most populous urban counties in California. (In that state, if a precinct has fewer than 250 voters, elections officials are allowed to forego a polling place and accept ballots only by mail.)
That decline may seem counterintuitive. Presumably voting by mail is easier and more convenient than going to the polls. So why doesn’t turnout go up?
Posted in Mail/Absentee Voting, National
By Luther Weeks on December 17, 2015
From OpEd News, Interview with Barbara Simons: What the Heck Does the Recent Volkswagen Scandal Have to Do with Our Elections? <read full interview>
Since the Volkswagen hacking was disclosed we have been using that to highlight the potential of rigged elections as we have for earlier, more dramatic, vehicle hacking demonstrations.
Any large software program contains undetected bugs. That’s why software vendors such as Microsoft and Apple send out frequent software updates, many of them to fix security holes. Likewise, it also can be very difficult to detect cleverly hidden malware.Computers can greatly facilitate both car performance and ballot tabulation. But just as laboratory tests are not adequate for testing pollution controls in the presence of malware, so too we cannot depend solely on voting system “certification” to verify that our voting systems are accurate and secure
Posted in Electronic Vulnerability, National
By Luther Weeks on December 11, 2015
Des Moines Register: Democrats abroad can phone-in caucus votes <read>
No matter how much we warn about Internet voting, it seems nobody learns. In this case it is telephone voting, just as insecure. These days the phone goes over the same paths as the Internet:
Posted in Internet Voting, National
By Luther Weeks on December 5, 2015
Many believe that stronger Voter Id would prevent voter fraud. Actually who would risk going to the polls with the risk of strong penalties if they are caught when there is an easier alternative, absentee voting? This case from Wisconsin shows how easy can be, yet also that sometimes you can get caught. In this case only because there were two votes from one person.
A Shorewood man has been charged with more than a dozen counts of illegal voting, accused of casting multiple ballots in four elections in 2011 and 2012, including five in the 2012 gubernatorial recall.
Posted in Mail/Absentee Voting, National
By Luther Weeks on November 27, 2015
San Francisco provides another reason for Connecticut to wait before considering new voting machines: San Francisco Examiner: San Francisco sets sights on open source voting by November 2019 <read>
“San Francisco could help write some U.S. democracy history with its leadership role,” said a Nov. 18 letter to the Elections Commission from Gregory Miller, co-founder of the Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Foundation, a collection of executives from top technology companies like Apple and Facebook. “And the total estimated cost to do so [$8 million] is a fraction of status-quo alternatives.”
Posted in Costs, CT, National
By Luther Weeks on November 20, 2015
Yesterday we observed the random drawing of 68 districts and alternate districts for the post-election audit. Just as last time, it was an effective and educational event for all those present and participating. After each district was drawn they were marked on an map of the State. See the <press release> for more details and a list of the districts chosen.
Posted in CT, Post-Election Audits
By Luther Weeks on November 16, 2015
Once again, we wonder which is safer Gambling or Voting?
Courant story: Suspended Lottery Game Had Too Many Winners <read>
Just how some lottery agents were able to manipulate their machines is not clear, but
investigators believe there was a vulnerability between the time a ticket was ordered at a terminal when it was printed…
[Consumer Protection Commissioner Jonathan] Harris said he does not think those who manipulated the system were sophisticated hackers, but rather people who were able to figure out how the lottery terminals work.
We are not reassured.
Posted in CT, Electronic Vulnerability
By Luther Weeks on November 12, 2015
Nor more comfort that the ‘C’ ranks us 3rd in the ‘Class’ of states.
New report from the Center for Public Integrity: How does your state rank for integrity? <read>
With the Connecticut details: Connecticut gets C- grade in 2015 State Integrity Investigation <read>
Let me start by applauding the Center for the report and Connecticut reporter Jennifer Frank for her contributions to the report. I will have some suggestions and criticisms of the report, yet having created a report on 169 Connecticut elections websites I know how challenging it is to set the criteria and perform uniform objective evaluations across several entities with multiple elevators.
Posted in CT, CT Law, National
By Luther Weeks on November 7, 2015
Sadly, Dorothy We are still in Kansas Kentucky. Many are concerned with the accuracy and result of the election for Governor of Kentucky, many are not.
once again — on Election Day yesterday. We see, again, the nightmare scenario I’ve warned about for so many years: a U.S. election where all of the pre-election polls suggest Candidate X is set to win, but Candidate Y ends up winning by a huge margin instead and nobody even bothers to verify that the computer tabulated results accurately reflect the intent of the voters.
That’s exactly what happened in Kentucky on Tuesday, where Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway was leading by a fair margin (about 3 to 5 points) in almost every pre-election poll in his race for Governor, but then ended up being announced as the loser to ‘Tea Party’ Republican candidate Matt Bevin by a landslide (almost 9 points) — according to the state’s 100% unverified computer tabulation systems…
What would be good for Kansas and Kentucky would be good for Connecticut. As just one example, recall the 2010 Citizen Audit of ballots in Bridgeport.
Because the City of Bridgeport gave the CT Post access to the ballots, we were able to recount them all and assure the state that the declared Governor was actually the choice of the voters. If Bridgeport had not agreed, we would still be wondering and questioning the legitimacy of Governor Malloy.
Unfortunately, the official Connecticut system was not able to recount those votes, and has never recognized or counted the votes of some 1,500 citizens of Bridgeport.
Posted in CT, National, Skulduggery and Errors