Category: CT

Bysiewicz To Consider Elimination Of Manual Recounts

Last year the Legislature passed PA 07-194 mandating audits of the optical scan machines. Last year, Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz promised advocates that regulations would mandate that recounts be manual counts and did not need to be included in the law. Now with less than half the mandated audits complete, according to the New London Day she is reconsidering that promise. Just one example of why it is not safe to rely on regulations and procedures to accomplish what should be in the law: <read>

Bysiewicz said if those results continue, she would recommend that future recounts be done by feeding the ballots into a different optical scanner from the one used during the election. Election workers would have to count only ballots that could not be read by the machines.

It seems she may not recommend that change for audits, just for recounts. But don’t voters have even more interest in seeing that their votes were counted as intended in a recanvass?

The audits were specifically designed and specifically mandated to answer the question, how does the voter know the machine counted their vote the way they intended,” Bysiewicz said. “The only way to do that is to hand-count them.

Recall that races involved in recounts are currently exempted from audit. So, without action by the legislature, the most important races to verify would by law be exempted from a hand verification.

Also the current state law does not give audit observers the right to visibly see the ballots such that they can visibly verify that the marks on the ballot are counted correctly. Indeed, how is a voter to know. Maybe by ‘faith’ when the ballots are ‘independently’ counted by the local election staff conducting the election?

“It is important voters have faith that their vote will be recorded accurately,” Mrs. Bysiewicz said, “and that’s why the independent audits are so vital.” <source>

Remember the election might be overturned in a recount and the reason might be because the people failed to accurately program and test the optical scanner: <recently in Riverside>

Blank Memory Cards and No Problems In Recounts?

Update: The Secretary of the State’s Office was offered four hours to comment on this entry before publication, but said they needed more time to gather information. We will post their response promptly.

New York Times: Voting Machines Are Put To The Test – reviews the optical scan performance in the municipal elections, with information from Secretary Byseiwicz <read>

I found a couple of items quite interesting. The following is not a direct quote from Secretary Bysiewicz but from the context seems to be information she discussed with Times. There is no indication of any other source associated with the information:

In a report after that audit, UConn researchers found, after a hand count, that in at least one race, the machine at a polling place in East Hartford counted six more votes for one candidate than the person had actually received. The discrepancy did not change the outcome, but they warned that it could in the future.

No such problems have turned up in 39 recounts of the Nov. 6 election,

This seems contradictory to the recent news describing recounts that resulted in a change in 17 votes in New Caanan and another error in Riverside that overturned the results. I suppose it depends on what is meant by “No such problems”, these may be different in some ways from those in East Hartford.

Also for the first time we learn that UConn has discovered some issues with the cards tested in the pre-election test. It seems that in some cases either a set of blank cards were sent to registrars or sets inconsistent cards, some blank, were sent to registrars.

Mrs. Bysiewicz said that in addition to reviewing the audit results of this past election, the University of Connecticut audited more than 300 memory cards prior to the election and will audit another batch now that the election is completed. The memory card, which she described as the “brains” of the new machines, posed the biggest security concern for UConn researchers, who warned in October 2006 that if someone gained access to the card, the results of an election could be altered.

Mrs. Bysiewicz said the pre-election audit of the cards found that none of the cards had been tampered with, but that a handful were blank, meaning that they had not been programmed with the proper ballot information.

No report yet on how many blank memory cards were discovered in pre-election testing by the registrars. If the same percentage of 6 out of 300 holds, then if each registrar in 695 towns tested at least two cards then about we could expect that about 28 would have been discovered.

Recount Reaffirm’s Wisdom of Recounts in Close Races

That’s not the tittle of article, nor what it says. It says:

with 14 towns holding recounts. New Canaan is included in that and held a recount on Tuesday to reaffirm the 25-vote difference between Town Council candidates Beth Jones and John Emert. That recount showed Jones edging Emert by seven votes.

No. It reaffirmed the winner, not the difference. If Jones had won by 17 votes, perhaps the article would not be so rosy. Then we might have Emert winning by 1 vote. What has been reaffirmed is the wisdom of recounting close races!!!

Read the entire article which includes some thought provoking quotes by voter Jody Eisemann, Secretary of the State Bysiewicz, and George Cody, President of the Registrars Of Voters Association Connecticut. <read>

Courant Fresh Talk: Voting: Too Far From Online

Fresh Talk editorial by Courant intern asks question and answers well: <read>

Why is it when more and more Americans spend more and more of their time at a computer, we still having a voting system that doesn’t incorporate online capabilities?

…Several computer scientists took part in 2004 in federally funded program called the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, and concluded that a online voting system would create insurmountable security risks.

The study concluded that unless there is some unforeseen or radical change in modern PCs and the Internet, it would be impossible to guarantee a safe and secure system for large-scale online voting.

There is a lot the regular Courant Editors can learn from following the example of their intern, Will Violet, who wrote this editorial. Research and facts trump wishes and myths every time.

Why Bother Recounting and Auditing Manually?

For those who question the value of manual counting in audits and recounts, here is an example from Greenwich, where despite pre-election testing an error apparently slipped through.

It is time for improving the process, surfacing problems, and strengthening the audits. It is not the time to call for weakening the audits and replacing manual counting with machine recounts that can only confirm erroneous results and provide false confidence.


For those who question the value of manual counting in audits and recounts, here is an example from Greenwich, where despite pre-election testing an error apparently slipped through. <read>

While the new optical scan voting machines won raves from poll station managers on Election Day, a machine error nearly cost a newly elected Representative Town Meeting (RTM) member his seat.
When results became official in the RTM races on Nov. 6, it initially appeared that Randall Smith from District 5 in Riverside had not been elected. With a vote total of 424, he was one of three candidates from the district not to be elected to the 19 seats District 5 has on RTM. However, a recount in the district found that votes that had been cast for him had mistakenly been given to write-in candidates by the machines.
By the time the hand recount was done, Mr. Smith had enough votes to make it and will begin his first term next month. This was the first year the optical scan machines were used in Connecticut and now Mr. Smith’s hoping for the state to make improvements to keep the problem from repeating.

 

Lets hope that it will not take errors discovered in their own elections to have State Senators, Representatives, and other politicians see the need to strengthen the election system and strengthen the audits. Rather than calls to weaken them <read> <read>

There is more good news and not so good news. Continue reading “Why Bother Recounting and Auditing Manually?”

The Middlefield Recount Experience

Different officials gave differing opinions on what was permissible and what was not, but none were willing to make a decision and say with authority what process should be followed…

A story worth reading: <read>

We were chagrined to learn of the proposed ‘second recanvass’ as there was no basis in law for the recanvass, just the Democrat desire to have another one.
This issue of check off list numbers not matching up with ballots is nothing new in any town, as there are a variety of factors at play…
The Secretary of the State’s office is a busy one, no doubt, but their actions in this case left many exasperated. Different officials gave differing opinions on what was permissible and what was not, but none were willing to make a decision and say with authority what process should be followed…
The next day, the Secretary of the State’s office expressed appreciation to the Middlefield Republican officials for not participating in the ‘recanvass’ and told them that it would have been a bad idea.

Dori Smith Reports At Brad Blog

Dori Smith of TalkNationRadio.org provides a report on Connecticut issues at Brad Blog.  A summary of her excellent broadcasts this fall, along with the issues raised  for Connecticut by memory card problems with the Diebold Premier AccuVote-OS optical scanners in Florida.

Diebold Optical-Scan Failures Reported in Florida May be Affecting Connecticut As Well  <read>

Meriden Record-Journal: Recounts raise questions about voting machines

Excellent article.  A significant issue is raised.   We will need to carefully review the results of the post-election audits and the recounts.  If the machines regularly fail to accurately count votes with an accuracy well within the mandatory recount level of 0.5% then we will need to set the recount trigger at a significantly higher level.

Despite the rollout of high-tech voting machines in all towns and precincts, errors still turned up during recounts in Wallingford, Southington and elsewhere. In both of those towns, all of the Town Council candidates saw their totals change once the paper ballots had been examined by humans and not just by the optical scanning machines.
Some candidates lost more than one-half of one percent of the total votes cast, which is the threshold for a mandated recount in a close race.
The election results didn’t change, but the system was shown to have flaws.

Also read comments by Rep Lawlor, Andy Sauer of Common Cause, and yours truly:

but at least one voter advocate would like to see that increased. “The chance of an error or fraudulent behavior even being detected is two to four percent in a local race,” said Luther Weeks, executive director of CTVotersCount.org, based on his analysis. “I personally am not satisfied with (that).
“Weeks said he doesn’t expect fraud to happen, but that the standard should be raised in such a way that the state has a one-third chance of catching it if it does. Audits cost pennies per vote, he said.

Read the entire article <read>

Harftord Courant: Vote Recounts Prove Tedious, Time-Consuming

We are likely to see more articles like the one in the Courant today: Vote Recounts Prove Tedious, Time-Consuming, <read>.

General comments on the article:

We arrived at this point by knee-jerk reactions in Washington, resulting in the Help America Vote Act and little heed to advocates in Hartford when the audit law was written this year. We do not need to determine the future of a critical piece of democracy by further off-the-cuff assessments followed by further knee-jerk reactions.

We need a rational process to determine the most accurate and efficient process to actually perform the recounts and audits. Several states in New England have such experience. PEW is funding research on best practices for manually counting ballots. Just like highway inspections, building inspectons, bridge inspections, and functioning parole boards, we need to pay a small price for insuring integrity of our elections.

In Connecticut we have seen a flurry of reactions to electronic voting, along with reactons to the costs and work of recounts and audits – let us hope that the result will not be a knee-jerk reaction by the legislature resulting in weakened audits at a time when we need stronger audits. The costs of recounting and auditing are much lower than one would gather from the flurry, the value of preserving our votes and insuring democracy, priceless.

My further comments on some of the statements in the article below. Continue reading “Harftord Courant: Vote Recounts Prove Tedious, Time-Consuming”

TalkNationRadio: Interview with Deputy Secretary of State Lesley Mara on Voting Machine Glitches: Breaking News re LHS Violations and State Elections

Another very informative show <read/listen>