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Evidence-Based Elections

We favor “Evidence Based Elections”. We recently reread this 2012 paper by Phil Stark and David Wagner, Evidence-Based Elections

It covers at a high level the requirements to provide the public and losing candidates the evidence necessary to convince that its very likely the candidate favored by the voters actually was declared the winner of an election (or determining, if possible, the winner).

Compared to all the states in the Union, Connecticut would rank slightly above average, yet far from approaching credible evidence-based elections. We have paper ballots, inadequate post-election audits, close-vote recanvasses, no compliance audits, and atrociously weak ballot security. This is a case where a rating/ranking should be the result of multiplying the factors, rather than adding them:

Paper Ballots(1.0) x Post-Election Audits(0.3) x Self-Correcting(0.4) x Compliance(0) = 0

We favor “Evidence Based Elections”. We recently reread this 2012 paper by Phil Stark and David Wagner, Evidence-Based Elections <read>

Paper ballots (To date there is no other viable voter-verified record).
Software Independent Voting Systems – the whole system, computer, human etc. can produce an accurate result (independently) even if the computer and software systems are in error.
Compliance Audits – that the election was conducted as intended. e.g. we can trust the paper ballots and the check-in records.
Risk-Limiting Audits – that demonstrate that there is a certain chance that if a contest was wrongly decided, the audit would have detected that. e.g. 90% or 95%.
(A 95% detection risk does not mean that there is a 5% chance that the election was wrongly decided. Only that if there was error or fraud 19 times out of 20 if would be detected e.g. if there was a 95% chance a person would be caught each time they used a cell phone while driving, few would risk it.)
The overall election and canvass process should correct its own errors.

Finally, the authors point to the limitations of certification and testing of election equipment and the advantages of easing the constraints of setting unrealistic expectations for certification requirements.

Sadly, no state has full risk-limiting audits. Only about half have audits at all. Few have compliance audits. About half have close-vote recounts, which provide self-correction when the initially reported results are close.

Compared to all the states in the Union, Connecticut would rank slightly above average, yet far from approaching credible evidence-based elections. We have paper ballots, inadequate post-election audits, close-vote recanvasses, no compliance audits, and atrociously weak ballot security. This is a case where rating/ranking should be the result of multiplying the factors, rather than adding them:

Paper Ballots(1) x Post-Election Audits(0.3) x Self-Correcting(0.4) x Compliance(0) = 0

Secretary of the State Ignores Post-Election Audits as Key in Elections

What can we learn from the press release and calendar?

Elections Officials and the Secretary of the State’s Office work all year. In many towns the jobs are low pay and part time, yet the schedule is year-round and relentless. There are only a few periods when officials can take turns taking vacations attending to personal matters, like medical procedures. Occasionally the job is viewed as cushy, partisan, and thankless.
The Secretary of the State apparently considers post-election audits as not important enough to be included in the schedule.

The Secretary of the State, Denise Merrill, has released the Election Calendar for the 2017 Municipal Elections in this press release <read> and calendar <read>

Secretary of the State Denise Merrill announced key dates for 2017 elections. The schedule comprises dates for placement of candidates on the ballot, filing deadlines, availability of absentee ballots as well as timetables for primaries and the general election, among others.
Secretary Merrill, Connecticut’s chief elections official, said, “Local races can be among the most important in terms of direct impact on voters’ lives. Major decisions are made by mayors, town councils and other local legislative bodies…”

What can we learn from the press release and calendar?

Elections Officials and the Secretary of the State’s Office work all year. In many towns the jobs are low pay and part time, yet the schedule is year-round and relentless. There are only a few periods when officials can take turns taking vacations attending to personal matters, like medical procedures. Occasionally the job is viewed as cushy, partisan, and thankless.
The Secretary of the State apparently considers post-election audits as not important enough to be included in the schedule.

In our view, the schedule should include a date for the post-election audit random drawing and dates for the beginning and the end of the post-election audit. Then, officials across the State can plan ahead. Knowing the date for the random drawing, they could know with certainty if they have been selected for the audit or not; knowing the beginning and end of they audit, they can plan a date for a potential audit long in advance, leaving them free to schedule vacations or personal matters for other days.

Will good help be available from Homeland Security, and will Connecticut ask for it?

The Department of Homeland Security has designated Election Infrastructure as Critical Infrastructure. We ask three questions. We would like to see evaluations in Connecticut.

We emphasize the ‘see’ as secret evaluations would do little to provide the public assurance, and likely as not, would be available one way or another to those bent on using them to exploit weaknesses in the system.

The Department of Homeland Security has designated Election Infrastructure as Critical Infrastructure: <read>

By “election infrastructure,” we mean storage facilities, polling places, and centralized vote tabulations locations used to support the election process, and information and communications technology to include voter registration databases, voting machines, and other systems to manage the election process and report and display results on behalf of state and local governments…

Prior to reaching this determination, my staff and I consulted many state and local election officials; I am aware that many of them are opposed to this designation. It is important to stress what this designation does and does not mean. This designation does not mean a federal takeover, regulation, oversight or intrusion concerning elections in this country. This designation does nothing to change the role state and local governments have in administering and running elections.

The designation of election infrastructure as critical infrastructure subsector does mean that election infrastructure becomes a priority within the National Infrastructure Protection Plan. It also enables this Department to prioritize our cybersecurity assistance to state and local election officials, but only for those who request it. Further, the designation makes clear both domestically and internationally that election infrastructure enjoys all the benefits and protections of critical infrastructure that the U.S. government has to offer. Finally, a designation makes it easier for the federal government to have full and frank discussions with key stakeholders regarding sensitive vulnerability information.

We ask four questions:

Will the program continue in the Trump Administration? Many Republicans are skeptical of any Federal program and currently doubting foreign interference in our elections,
Will the program actually be meaningful? It could fail by being a whitewash or by being to critical.
Will Connecticut Municipalities and the Secretary of the State ask for reviews?
Will we ever know? Its results might be withheld from the public for reasons of security?

We would like to see such evaluation(s), statewide and locally:

An evaluation statewide of our election programming, memory card protocols, tabulator protocols, voter registration database, vote totalling, post-election audits, and recanvass procedures – not just the laws and procedures, but also their actual implementation.
An evaluation municipality by municipality of ballot and tabulator security.

Connecticut pre-election voting machine testing now less reliable

Over the the last few weeks, we have learned that in the November Election, registrars have substituted a less effective form of pre-election testing that is less likely to catch errors in ballots or election equipment. There are at least two problems

Pre-election testing in Connecticut used to involve feeding about twenty-five hand-voted test ballots of every type to be used by a scanner and checking the results. In general, pre-election testing is not a panacea – it cannot test every case, cannot detect every possible error, and cannot prevent clever hacks for recognizing the difference between a test and a real election. Yet, pre-election testing can detect many errors in ballot printing, memory card programming, or hardware problems.

For the November 2017 election, a new voting machine for those with disabilities was introduced statewide. One of its features is printing a vote on a standard ballot that can be scanned along with other ballots. It would have been advisable to have several test ballots of every type voted using the two voting methods designed for those with disabilities, a touch screen and an interface for sight impaired. That would be quite an undertaking.

Instead of a test of the user interface, officials used a special IVS test function which directly printed out test-ballots, bypassing the user interface. Then they used those test ballots to test their acceptance and results on the AccuVote-OS scanners. Sounds useful and helpful. It is. Yet, apparently, from our discussions that was the extent of testing or the majority of testing of the IVS and the AccuVote-OS in many towns. There are at least two problems:

First, such a test does not completely test the IVS. It certainly tests that the IVS understands the ballots, yet there is no guarantee that either of the interfaces would correctly display and record the votes for each candidate and contest on the ballot. Perhaps, for instance it displays or says the wrong names for State or local offices, such as State Representative, Registrar, or Probate Judge. It would still record the vote in a correct position on the ballot.

Second, such a test does not completely test the AccuVote-OS. The problem is that the IVS does not fill in the bubbles on the ballot in the way a voter is supposed to fill them in. For each vote, the IVS makes a black square about twice as wide as the wide dimension of the oval. Those votes should certainly be counted by the AccuVote-OS. However, their being counted is no guarantee that a voters proper vote would be counted. What if the location of the bubble was incorrectly programmed? A transposition, an incorrect number etc. could cause some bubbles, especially partially filled in bubbles to not be counted by the AccuVote-OS, while all the IVS voted “bubbles” would be counted.

We did not do a formal survey. We talked to several registrars and it seems they did little, if any, testing beyond the canned IVS test.

Amid national election concerns, Connecticut goes the wrong way

CT Mirror Viewpoints

Last week, without public notice, seven Connecticut municipalities conducted electronic “audits” under the guidance of the UConn Center for Voting Technology and the Secretary of the State’s Office, using the Audit Station developed by the Voter Center.
There is a science of election audits. Machine-assisted audits can offer efficiency and ease of use, but any audit process needs to be transparent and provide for independent public verification of the results.

CT Mirror Viewpoints <read>

About half the states, including Connecticut, have both paper ballots and post-election audits. Because our audits were transparent and publicly verifiable, Connecticut Citizen Election Audit observers have been able to reveal multiple flaws in the process and in the official reporting of audit results. Earlier this year, however, the General Assembly unanimously cut Connecticut’s the audits from 10 percent of districts to 5 percent.

Now there is more bad news: our already inadequate audits have been partially replaced by electronic “audits” which are not transparent and not publicly verifiable. Instead, we now have “black box voting” augmented by “black box auditing.” This should satisfy only those with blind trust in computers and blind trust in insiders with access to the “audit” computers.

Last week, without public notice, seven Connecticut municipalities conducted electronic “audits” under the guidance of the UConn Center for Voting Technology and the Secretary of the State’s Office, using the Audit Station developed by the Voter Center.

There is a science of election audits. Machine-assisted audits can offer efficiency and ease of use, but any audit process needs to be transparent and provide for independent public verification of the results. Machine-assisted manual audits in California and Colorado demonstrate how this can be achieved. Public verification begins with publicly rescanning the ballots and providing the public with a computer readable list of how each ballot was counted. Then selecting a small random sample of the ballots and comparing the actual voter verified ballots to the record of how the machine counted them.

It is puzzling that the UConn Voter Center, the General Assembly, and the Secretary of the State have consistently chosen to ignore the peer-reviewed science which would provide an actual audit, appropriately trusted, even faster, and even less work for local officials.

Compare existing election audits to professional audits. Professional audits include examining a sample of original documents such as receipts from vendors or signed checks. Such audits are performed by individuals independent of those accountable for doing the original job. Public verifiability is critical to post-election audits, because they are performed by those responsible for conducting the election itself, protecting the original ballots, evaluating and recommending the election equipment.

The new Connecticut system ? including equipment and procedures ? involves rescanning, with officials reviewing scanned images of every ballot and how it was interpreted by the system. But, scanned images are not photographs: they are as vulnerable as other computer data, subject to machine errors, tampering, and human error. Connecticut’s electronic “audits” do not verify that the ballot images correspond to the ballots. Ballots are the only evidence verified by voters.

Last week local officials reviewed each of the images for approximately one to three seconds. At that speed, it was difficult to verify that even one race of five displayed was accurately interpreted by the system. It would be more efficient, accurate, and trustworthy, to sample the paper ballots as in Colorado and California and compare them to the system interpretations.

The new system is being presented as much more economical for municipalities with less work and stress for local officials. When and if it is working properly, without errors and unhacked, it could be much more accurate than the disorganized, inconsistent hand counting that is frequently performed in Connecticut.

A solution is at hand. The UConn Audit Station is capable of providing the kind of machine-assisted manual audits that would meet the requirements of sound science for election audits. It could provide transparent, publicly verifiable audits that are independent of the software, hardware, and the officials who are responsible for the audit and the election.

Amid national concerns for election integrity and calls for stronger audits nationwide, Connecticut is positioned to be a leader in election auditing. Our manual audits were a good start, with some flaws.

The Secretary of the State and the UConn Voter Center should work with national experts to develop procedures that take full advantage of the Audit Station, to deliver efficient and trustworthy election audits. Until then our manual audits should continue. Voters and the General Assembly should insist upon transparent and publicly verifiable elections.

Luther Weeks is Executive Director of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit.

What Do YOU [still] Want? Eight+ Years and Not Counting.

In the summer of 2008 I was on a panel in Fairfield, CT. I opened with remarks on “What Do You Want”. I said voters want five things and what Connecticut could do about them in the short run (three steps over two years). The two years passed and little changed, so in 2010 I repeated the post as What Do YOU [still] Want? Here we are in late 2016 and little has changed for the better:

In the summer of 2008 I was on a panel in Fairfield, CT. I opened with remarks on “What Do You Want”. I said voters want five things and what Connecticut could do about them in the short run (three steps over two years). The two years passed and little changed, so in 2010 I repeated the post as What Do YOU [still] Want? Here we are in late 2016 and little has changed for the better:

We have a different Secretary of the State, Denise Merrill.
In the last eight years, the science of auditing has progressed such that we could have much better audits at lower cost.
Only about half the states have post-election audits of any type. Experts debate if even one or two have effective, sufficient audits.
Connecticut’s post-election audits remain insufficient, unreliable and ineffective.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly has cut those insufficient audits in half. The only state we know that has actually cut back on post-election audits.

What I said in 2008 remains true today

My topic for the next few minutes is simple. It is: “What Do You Want”.

Let us begin with a quote from Colorado’s Secretary of State, Mike Coffman whose words inspired this talk and a quote from our own Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz.

Secretary Bysiewicz sent a letter in March to voters like you, who signed our petition last year. She said, in part: “We still have a lot of work to do and we need concerned citizens like you to stay involved…I share your belief that we should make our audit law the strongest in the nation and that its size and scope is adequate to achieve its goals…”

In June, Colorado’s Mike Coffman gave his view, of activists like CTVotersCount, “I think they have a fundamental belief that anything electronic, as it relates to voting, is evil and undermines our political system,”…”They believe in a world of conspiracy theories and are highly motivated. No matter what I do, so long as it leaves some form of electronic voting intact, it will be wrong by their standards.”

I agree with both of them. With Secretary Bysiewicz that we still “have a lot of work to do”; With Secretary Coffman, that voting advocates are “highly motivated”.

However, I do not believe that “anything electronic” is “evil” nor do I have a goal of eliminating “anything electronic” from voting.

So, What Should You Want?

Most fundamentally, five things:

That the ballot is secret, votes cannot be bought, coerced, added, lost, or modified

That your vote is counted, counted accurately, and counted exactly once

That everyone’s vote is counted accurately and reflected in the election results

That everyone has confidence that everyone’s vote is counted accurately

That, failing any of the above, appropriate corrective action will be taken

You deserve no more and no less. Democracy requires no less. Do you want anything less? Do you believe democracy can exist and flourish with less?

I’m open to any solution that will ensure Democracy. Whatever we can implement that ensures Democracy and is most efficient for officials and most convenient for the voters, I will support it.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

We do not have a blank slate. We have just spent millions of dollars on purchasing the most cost effective, most voter verifiable, and auditable type of electronic voting system available, that meet Federally mandated requirements.

I could talk of the long term, realistically six to ten years off. But Democracy cannot wait. There are real risks now. There are actions we can take over the next two years to ensure Democracy in Connecticut – to lead the way for the Nation. Yes, I said two years, if we start now, taking decisive action, with the equipment we have.

The Short List

Let me finish with the short list of what we need to do now, over the next two years. The three items I think of when Secretary Bysiewicz says “We still have a lot of work to do”:

First, an element of prevention. Each of our elections is programmed in Massachusetts by contractors; Contractors over which we have little, if any, oversight. UConn has developed an outstanding program to independently test the memory cards to detect many potential errors or fraud. 100% of our memory cards need to be tested independently in Connecticut with that program; before the cards are shipped to election officials; before the cards are used in any election.

Second, an element of detection and confidence: We need strong post-election audits to detect errors and fraud. Our current audits are insufficient, unreliable and ineffective. Our audits should be based on the current science of election auditing and recognized post-election audit principles.

Third, a solid chain-of-custody to make credible elections and audits possible. We need to protect and account for ballots before, during, and after the election. Ballots, memory cards, and optical scanners must be protected from illegal modification or covert access whenever they could be compromised.

Would you trust chain-of-custody standards less than those we require for evidence in criminal cases?

In Summary

You are committed to the proposition that Democracy survive and flourish. We have serious work to do. It can happen in Connecticut. Voting Integrity, like the Constitution, can start here in the Constitution State and spread to the Nation.

CTVotersCount is dedicated to pursuing “What You Want”. As a great teacher said “Anything worth doing is worth failing at, and failing at, and failing at…until you succeed”

Better Access To Voting Within Reach In CT (Annotated)

Courant Editorial, Sunday November 20th: Better Access To Voting Within Reach In CT

We have long had concerns with extending mail-in voting, aka no excuse absentee voting. We also support in-person early voting, if we are willing to pay for it. We have a new Courant Editorial joining Denise Merrill in a renewed push for early voting, defeated two years ago by the voters of Connecticut, consistent with our warnings but not our prediction.

Connecticut is one of only a handful of states that does not allow in-person voting before Election Day and requires those casting absentee ballots to provide an excuse — two unnecessary and antiquated barriers to participation in the political process. [Unnecessary only for those who lack concern for election integrity, turnout, and costs]

Courant Editorial, Sunday November 20th: Better Access To Voting Within Reach In CT <read>

Connecticut is one of only a handful of states that does not allow in-person voting before Election Day and requires those casting absentee ballots to provide an excuse — two unnecessary and antiquated barriers to participation in the political process. [Unnecessary only for those who lack concern for election integrity, turnout, and costs]

But Secretary of the State Denise Merrill has a smart, two-pronged plan that would make it easier to cast a ballot and give more people access to the workings of democracy.

A record number of Connecticut residents were registered to vote in this year’s presidential election, but only about three-quarters of them actually cast a ballot. Procrastination, apathy and disgust certainly kept many people at home. For others, though, there can be no doubt that the inconvenience of voting was the primary factor. [Note that we also enhanced our motor-voter system and thus registered many with no intention to vote, so that could also account for some of the difference, as we predicted.]

Consider a person who commutes to work in New York City every day. She had to get on the train in West Haven at 6:47 a.m. and wouldn’t get back until after 8 p.m. Perhaps she tried to vote at 6 a.m. when the polls opened, but the line was long, and she had a train to catch. So she didn’t vote. [Checking the Metro-North schedule, she is actually eligible to vote absentee if she left town on the 5:51am or could arrive at her polling place to vote at 6:00am, then she would likely still make the 6:47am or catch the next trains at 6:53am or 7:13am, actually the 6:53am would get her in to Grand Central 10 minutes earlier than the 6:47am! In any case, she could vote with just a little effort.]

If Connecticut allowed early voting, she would have had more days to vote and lines would have been shorter [Not necessarily, since early voting might itself have very long lines, or to pay for early voting towns could scrimp on both staffing election day and early voting. Some states with early voting have long lines.], or she could have rearranged her schedule [Yes, she could rearrange her schedule with no change in CT law]. Or she could have cast an absentee ballot, if Connecticut didn’t have such strict laws regarding who can take advantage of that simple solution. [Or as we said left on an earlier or later train.]

Ms. Merrill’s plan addresses both situations by recommending a simple change to the absentee ballot law and a constitutional amendment to allow early voting. [Depending on if the “simple” change allows regional voting. See the Courant’s version of early voting below.]

The legislature should make both of those options happen in the coming session. [Which they cannot because the voters must approve Constitutional Amendments.]

Ms. Merrill proposes amending the state constitution to explicitly allow in-person early voting for two to five days within two weeks before the election and to allow anyone to vote absentee without having to meet specific conditions. [That might pass. Last time, the Constitutional Amendment gave the General Assembly a blank check to do anything with early voting.] To get on the ballot, it would have to be approved by 75 percent of the legislature during the coming session. Those simple changes would clear away the most onerous legal barriers. [75% would be an almost impossible hurdle. The previous amendment took the path of a majority of two General Assembly’s to pass. So, by our understanding the next time such an amendment could be on the ballot is 2020.]

The second prong is to simply amend the law that describes who is eligible to vote absentee. Under current law, one of the acceptable “excuses” for voting absentee is that the voter is out of town all day. Ms. Merrill’s proposal would remove seven words — “during all of the hours of voting” — from the law, thereby making the hypothetical commuter eligible to vote absentee. Another smart, and simple, change. [Hard to justify given the debate on the previous amendment that a Constitutional change was necessary for unlimited absentee voting.]

The drawbacks are few. There could be increased costs to towns to keep polls open and staffed for those extra days, but ensuring everyone can exercise their most fundamental American right must be the top priority, if not the basic responsibility, of every municipality. The few dollars it might cost are not worth quibbling over. [Maybe not, yet there are not that many polling places with long lines in Connecticut. That problem can be solved with one or two additional individuals manning check-in lines at polling places that had lines this year. Adding the equivalent one-half person for each polling place would cost about $80,000. Staffing a polling place with only one line in 169 municipalities for one day would cost about $270,000, just for the polling place staff. Lines and the requirement for more checkers would occur once every four years, while early voting would presumably be required for every election, primary, and referendum.]

Ms. Merrill’s proposed constitutional amendment also would allow early voting to be done regionally — for example, the city of Hartford could allow early voting only at city hall instead of staffing all of the individual polling places across the city for five days. It might be more difficult for someone in the city to make it to city hall than to their own polling location, but given enough time to vote, along with easy no-excuse absentee voting, residents will have more opportunity to cast a ballot. [The Constitutional Amendment gets longer here, and voting in a region, not just one city gets complex, unless the entire election function is regionalized (which we do support).]

Some politicians might be inclined to consider whether early voting would benefit one party over the other by expanding access to specific demographic groups, such as commuters or urban residents. But there isn’t strong evidence that early voting has any such effect, and in any event, it’s far better for politicians to try to convince voters that their platform is the right one than to try to win an election by excluding, or including, certain demographic groups. [And turnout could be increased by better and more candidates. We could enhance turnout and interest by leveling the playing field for third-party and petitioning candidates – a move unlikely to please either major party.]

There is one, and only one, good reason to allow people to vote before Elenntion Day: because it allows, and encourages, more people to vote. [Actually it does not. Studies have shown that Early Voting actually decreases turnout.]

Reminder: We would support in-person Early Voting, if we are willing to pay for it. i.e. provide for a complete voting experience along with integrity of the process, especially providing effective protection from ballot skullduggery.

**********Update:
An example of the problem of long lines. It will not be fixed by early voting. It will be fixed by competence: New Haven Independent: Probe Sought of [New Haven] Election Mess <read>

New Haven Set To Repeat 2014 Disaster

! W A R N I N G !

Do not wait till the last minute. Do not wait to the last hour. Get there early if you want to use Election Day Registration!

NOTE: This is also a tale of how elections work in a state with a Secretary of the State with limited powers over underpaid, and occasionally resistant/obstinate local registrars. (The same registrars who are often cited by state officials as the reason we will have no problems in our elections this year. Read here how they handle their joint responsibility.)

! W A R N I N G !

Do not wait till the last minute. Do not wait to the last hour. Get there early if you want to use Election Day Registration!

We have been saying this for years. Election Day Registration is heading for a Civil Rights Violation. The reason is the Secretary of the State’s procedures which say officials must have your registration complete by 8:00pm or you will be turned away.

It happened in 2014 in New Haven, 100 were turned away. But nobody sued. It looks like it is going to happen again, unless somebody takes bold action. Even then it can happen. If they are moderately busy and a bunch of people arrive close to 8:00pm, some will be turned away.

Here is the story from the New Haven Register Election Fiasco Repeat Looms <read>

The Secretary of the State’s office rushed down to New Haven to try to prevent a repeat Election Day disaster involving last-minute registration.

An election staffer from the office huddled with the city’s Democratic and Republican registrars Thursday to try to bring them up to speed on how to conduct Election Day Registration (EDR).

The secretary of the state’s office is concerned for three reasons, according to spokesman Patrick Gallahue:

• New Haven’s registrars, unlike the majority of other registrars in the state, failed to participate in three EDR training sessions.

• The office appeared not to have enough ballots in place and staffers ready to handle the expected crush of people seeking to vote.

• This is the first presidential election in which Connecticut will have EDR, and big crowds of last-mintue voters are anticipated in college communities.
Compounding fears is the fact that New Haven failed in handling EDR in 2014, the year it took effect in Connecticut.

We testified this year to the General Elections and Administrations Committee. They seemed to understand what we were saying, yet did nothing (at least they did not go along with the Registrars request and cut-off EDR at 7:00pm) <testimony>

Here is the first time, we predicted this, long before the debacle in New Haven, back in May 2012 <read> and two months earlier in testimony <read>

I recommend against this proposal for Election Day Registration. It lacks sufficient detail to protect the rights of EDR voters, the rights of all voters, and the integrity of elections. The structure that is proposed, by its nature portends chaos in future critical and high interest elections…

Secret Ballot and Constitution under assault in Connecticut by AP and Secretary of the State’s Office

One AP story, two different versions in the Connecticut Post and the Hartford Courant.

As we said in our comment on the Connecticut Post article:

Connecticut has this other thing called the Constitution. It is even available at the Secretary’s website. It says: “The right of secret voting shall be preserved.”, which would likely be interpreted as not taking a picture of your ballot such that you could prove how it was voted. Otherwise votes could easily be bought, sold or intimidated. http://www.ct.gov/sots/cwp/view.asp?q=392288

One AP story, two different versions in the Connecticut Post and the Hartford Courant:

CTPost: Ballot selfies: A look at where they are allowed or not <read>

CONNECTICUT: No law bans ballot selfies, according to Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for Secretary of State Denise Merrill. But election moderators have discretion to prohibit activity “that threatens the orderly process of voting or the privacy of another voter’s ballot.”

Courant: If you elect to take ‘ballot selfie,’ check state law first <read>

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring issued a formal opinion last month that nothing in Virginia law prohibits voters from taking pictures of themselves, fellow voters or their ballot within the polling place.
Ballot selfies are also legal in Connecticut.

As we said in our comment on the Connecticut Post article:

Connecticut has this other thing called the Constitution. It is even available at the Secretary’s website. It says: “The right of secret voting shall be preserved.”, which would likely be interpreted as not taking a picture of your ballot such that you could prove how it was voted. Otherwise votes could easily be bought, sold or intimidated. http://www.ct.gov/sots/cwp/view.asp?q=392288

Ballots Still Broken: Doug Jones on Today’s Voting Machines

Broken Ballots co-author, Doug Jones interview on the vulnerabilities of today’s voting machines, the newer models available, risks of Election Management Systems, and Internet voting: Douglas Jones on Today’s Voting Machines <read>

Fortunately, Connecticut has avoided the problem of corruption of the EMS by using a separate system from programming elections and using a manual reporting system to accumulate the results at the end of the night. That does not mean our systems are safe from errors, hacking, and fraud. We need audits that subject every ballot to the potential for audit selection, along with audits of the entire system including the accuracy of the results reporting and totaling.

In my opinion, the benefits of the currently available systems are not enough to justify replacing our current optical scanners. In the next few years we will need to replace them. Odds are a that in five to ten years there will be much better systems available at much lower cost. Worth the wait.

We have also wisely avoided the risks of Internet voting.