Category: Skulduggery and Errors

CT: Unfortunately, we were correct.

Last week, we said “There are likely many other differences that have not been discovered.”

Last week, we said: “There are likely many other differences that have not been discovered.”

Unfortunately, we were correct.  We checked our own town of Glastonbury web’s reported results against the Secretary of the State’s results:

Totals for ROV in Glastonbury, on Glastonbury site:  9,018   8,501 <read>
Totals for ROV in Glastonbury, on SOTS site:           9,001   8,491 <read>

Checking with Zelda Lessne, Registrar of Voters-D, this is the difference between the originally reported results and those one the web listed as amended on November 17th.

Once again, this may not matter in the result in this eleciton, but it seems there are many errors out there that could change future results.  Its good that towns recheck their work after a good night’s sleep, but those results also should be reflected in the State’s posted results.

CT: More Errors In Reported Results?

We have covered reports of differences between the results posted on the Secretary of the State’s web site and actual election results in Shelton and Stamford. We have learned of a third problem in the results posted for the Congressional race in Avon, with the possibility of similar problems in several other towns. David Bedell … Continue reading “CT: More Errors In Reported Results?”

We have covered reports of differences between the results posted on the Secretary of the State’s web site and actual election results in Shelton and Stamford. We have learned of a third problem in the results posted for the Congressional race in Avon, with the possibility of similar problems in several other towns.

David Bedell (Green Party candidate for Registrar, Stamford) was researching the effect the Working Families Party may have had in the recent election. He noticed several anomalies: 9 towns with instances of zero counts for WFP and one with duplicate results for the Democratic and WFP for a candidate.

He checked with the Avon Registrar and she reported U.S. Representative Chris Murphy’s results were Democratic-5111 and WFP-269, making a total of 5380.

Checking this morning at the Secretary of the State’s web site we see totals of Democratic-5577 and WKF of 0, an extra 197 votes. By our calculations that amounts to about 1.9% of the initially reported results for the race in Avon.

As we have pointed out before, the manual calculation of votes, usually with three transcriptions and several additions along the way is an error prone process. It can be a daunting task for voters, candidates, and parties to check results independently, since the State publishes summary results which must be verified against multiple hand written reports and machine tapes held in each town hall. There are likely many other differences that have not been discovered.

Perhaps no errors, discovered or not, in the November election would change the winner in any contest, however, it could matter in future, closer elections and it does matter in the next election how votes are allocated to parties in this election.

Another Audit – Another Diebold Error

Ohio is conducting its first post-election audits. Like the recent audits in Humboldt, CA, and CT, the Ohio audit has uncovered discrepancies in the machine and manual counts. Here is one of the stories, by Kim Zetter at Wired <read> Montgomery County officials discovered that although the five votes were recorded to a memory card … Continue reading “Another Audit – Another Diebold Error”

Ohio is conducting its first post-election audits. Like the recent audits in Humboldt, CA, and CT, the Ohio audit has uncovered discrepancies in the machine and manual counts. Here is one of the stories, by Kim Zetter at Wired <read>

Montgomery County officials discovered that although the five votes were recorded to a memory card inside the voting machine, the votes weren’t counted by the tabulation software when the memory card was uploaded to the tabulation server. Premier’s Global Election Management System (or GEMS) is the tabulation software that counts votes from memory cards.

We also note the excellent comments of John Gideon of VotersUnite <read>

What does Diebold/Premier have to say? “We have not seen this particular condition anywhere else in Ohio or anywhere else in the country,” according to spokesman Chris Riggall. Clearly Riggall is joking. Of course they haven’t seen this condition in Ohio because Ohio has not done these audits in the past and the lack of audits across most of the rest of the country would ensure that no problems would have been found in the past. Where there are audits that may have found this condition, the condition is ignored or just shrugged-off. What they ignore is that there is federal law that dictates accuracy of voting systems and even the loss of these 5 ballots in a county that saw over 280,000 ballots cast is a violation of that law


What does this Diebold error mean for Connecticut?
Continue reading “Another Audit – Another Diebold Error”

CT: How Many Errors Can You Find In This Story?

Update: Cross posted at MyLeftNutmeg. See some of the comments there, especially Tessa’s describing obtaining election results on election night in Milford. <read> ConnPost has an article on errors in Shelton on election night. But we find other possible inaccuracies in the story as reported: State: Shelton vote snafu ‘human error”, <read> Shelton’s arithmetically challenged … Continue reading “CT: How Many Errors Can You Find In This Story?”

Update: Cross posted at MyLeftNutmeg. See some of the comments there, especially Tessa’s describing obtaining election results on election night in Milford. <read>

ConnPost has an article on errors in Shelton on election night. But we find other possible inaccuracies in the story as reported: State: Shelton vote snafu ‘human error”, <read>

Shelton’s arithmetically challenged voting officials snatched away a local victory from Democratic congressional challenger Jim Himes a week after initial results indicated that he won the city, state officials have determined…

It didn’t get straightened out until Nov. 13, nine days after veteran U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays conceded that Himes had won the Fourth Congressional District race representing 19 southwestern Connecticut communities.

Bysiewicz said there was no political malice involved, a fact that the feuding local voter registrars — Democrat John “Jack” Finn and Republican Peter R. Pavone — agree upon. With a lingering controversy over an incorrect result on a local ballot question sharply dividing the two registrars, both Finn and Pavone say it was strictly erroneous tabulation that initially had Himes winning in the part of the city that’s in the Fourth District.

While the initial results had Shays with 7,114 votes and Himes with 7,632, after Pavone and Finn performed the recount, Shays had 7,668 and Himes had 6,744…

Finn said, “A mistake could have come from a person reading the number to the person on the computer. It had to be an error putting numbers into the computer.” He noted that Shays’ absentee ballots were also initially omitted.

We are pleased that the error has been corrected and that it did not change the results of the race. It would be even better if the registrars could manage to get along.

This was not the only error found in reporting results in Shelton:

“The discrepancies seem to be in the congressional races where there were cross endorsements,” Bysiewicz said. “Shelton’s one of those weird, split towns where there are two districts.”

“I definitely think it was human error, a transcription problem,” recalled state Sen. Dan Debicella, R-Shelton, who won re-election that night, but whose numbers also changed over the week and a half it took to agree on a final total…

There were also transcription errors when election officials dictated results that were typed incorrectly onto city spread sheets.

Bysiewicz believes that initial miscounts on absentee ballots was another problem…

“Arithmetic mistakes are not unusual,” Bysiewicz said, noting that her staff even found a mistake in the turnout percentage of the finalists for her “Democracy Cup” award that goes to the towns and cities with the highest Election Day turnout.

“Avon said they had 96 percent, but when we when crunched the numbers ourselves they were wrong and New Hartford ended up being the winner,” she said.

There is also plenty of confusion about the dual endorsements:

Part of the problems, Bysiewicz said last week, was that Himes was cross endorsed by the Working Families Party, so he appeared on the ballot in two places.

Some voters filled in their ballots in both spots and in those cases, if the tabulation machines did not reject the ballots, the votes were given to Himes on the Working Families ballot line.

“It’s not in [state] law, but it’s our advice to count double votes for Working Families, or whatever the cross endorsement is, because it’s up to us to help the minor parties,” Bysiewicz said.

We question the statement that “the tabulation machines did not reject the ballots, the votes were given to Himes on the Working Families ballot line”. Our understanding is that when a voter voted for the same candidate, they were counted once but then listed as UNK (unknown party) on the tabulator tape. The hand counted ballots should also have been counted that same way as UNK. We presume the Post misunderstood the Secretary.

It is also our understanding that the Secretary of the State did make a decision to not only count the UNK votes for the Working Families Party, but also to total them in the same bucket when reporting results on her website.

We are not sure if the following statement is correct:

Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz said a review last week of the city’s mistakes found that Shelton had the biggest Election Day tabulation breakdown among the state’s 169 towns and cities.

Our understanding is that there are still unresolved errors in Stamford, from a comment on a post on MyLeftNutmeg on the Shelton story <ref>:

Weird numbers in Stamford too… on the Constitutional Convention. The original number they sent to the SOTS office was 41,775 “no” votes. That was amended to something like 23,000 “no” votes due to an “Excel error,” I’m told. That’s a pretty big error. The original number is still posted on the SOTS web site.

If true, then perhaps it was not a “tabulation breakdown among the state’s 169 towns and cities” but made elsewhere. Looking at the Stamford numbers at the Secretary of the State’s web this morning, we see:

President Total Votes 49543 McCain 17510 Obama 31733 Nadar 289 Others 11

Congress Total Votes 47327 Shays 19735 Himes-D 26039 Duffee 213 Himes-WF 1035 Carrano 305

Question 1 Total Votes 58024 Yes 16249 No 41775

Question 2 Total Votes 49087 Yes 25679 No 23408

Looks like there is, at minimum, an anamoly of about 9,000 votes.

A big part of a solution would be for all polling place moderators to be required to fax their moderators’ returns, checklist reports, and tabulator tapes to the Secretary of the State’s Office on election night. The Secretary’s Office post the faxed images on the web, along with much more detailed keyed in results, in downloadable format. Then interested parties would be able to check the data. Of course, the remaining potential transcription error gap is hand counted ballots and hand transcribed numbers to the moderators’ reports not on the tabulator tapes.

Election “Audit” Discovers Diebold-Known Error

Eureka CA, Diebold error resulted in 179 uncounted ballots. The Times-Standard reports the story of the “Humboldt Election Transparency Project”, similar to a post-election audit <read>

Premier Elections Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems, Inc.), seems to have known about the glitch at least since 2004.

The Transparency Project is not an ordinary audit, it is partially accomplished by the public:
Continue reading “Election “Audit” Discovers Diebold-Known Error”

CT: Errors found in town’s first vote audit

Like several towns in the most recent Post-Election Audit, Hamden found unexplained discrepancies in the post election audit. Unlike most towns, the media in Hamden takes note. The Hamden Chronicle has the story <read> Not by a large number, though Esposito considered any deviation to be problematic. They estimated no more than 3 percent as … Continue reading “CT: Errors found in town’s first vote audit”

Like several towns in the most recent Post-Election Audit, Hamden found unexplained discrepancies in the post election audit. Unlike most towns, the media in Hamden takes note. The Hamden Chronicle has the story <read>

Not by a large number, though Esposito considered any deviation to be problematic. They estimated no more than 3 percent as of Thursday, Nov. 20. That was within the range of standard human error according to Esposito.
“We’re looking at three to four votes out of 2,000 so far,” said Esposito.

We wonder where the 3% figure for standard human error comes from? We also note that four votes out of 2000 would represent .2% of the votes and perhaps a .4% margin difference in a 2000 vote race.

Our belief is that people can easily make errors, however, with reasonable procedures and supervision teams of people can count accurately. Machines can count accurately or inaccurately, but they ultimately cannot judge voters’ intent.


The Cross-Endorsed Counting Challenge:

Continue reading “CT: Errors found in town’s first vote audit”

Nationwide: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

We won’t go into all the details here, but in case you have not been keeping up, there have been many small and large problems occuring across the country lately.  It started with recent elections in Washington D.C., Palm Beach, and Rhode Island highlighted at CTVotersCount.org <read> <read> Now with early voting and problems with absentee voting we have several stories each day of election problems from around the country.  The best place to keep up is Daily Voting News – too many stories in one day to read them all <latest> Along with some good summary articles on some of the problems at BradBlog.

Commentary:

  • The Ugly: These incidents point out the ugly facts that every voter’s opportunity to vote is not effectively guaranteed, and that counting every vote, and counting every vote accurately is a myth. We must improve the system such that we can trust the final outcome of elections, even if counting every last vote is a ideal that may never be quite realized. We should have a fully protected right to vote.
  • The Bad: We may elect the wrong candidates or decide questions incorrectly through fraud, error, incompetence, and lack of vigilance. Many of these problems may be small and ultimately irrelevant to the result – many may be significant.
  • The Good: At least we are surfacing and highlighting these problems. Apparently many similar problems have been going on for years – but were either covered up, brushed aside, or just did not get the national attention deserved. More and more the public is becoming aware of the problems which is the first step toward solutions.

Times Editorial: Critics Should Not Be Dismissed.

The New York Times in an editorial, That’s a Pretty Big Glitch, nails the issue again <read>

In the early days of electronic voting, critics who warned that it was unreliable were dismissed as alarmist. Now it seems that hardly an election goes by without reports of serious vulnerabilities or malfunctions.

Unfortunately, for the most part, we are still being dismissed by many.

Computer scientists have shown that electronic voting machines are easy to hack. And voters report errors like vote flipping, in which the vote they cast for one candidate is recorded for another. Ohio’s secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, is suing Diebold over the vote-dropping and noted that its machines crashed repeatedly during last year’s voting in Cuyahoga County.

There is no time left between now and Election Day for states and localities to upgrade their machines or even to fix the vote-dropping software. All they can do is double-check their vote totals, audit their paper trails and be on the lookout for the next, as-yet-undiscovered computer glitch. After that, Congress must require that all states adopt voting systems that include voter-verifiable paper records for every electronic vote cast.

Lessons From RI/DC – Hand Recounts & Voter Fraud

The Providence Journal has the story of a very close primary in our neighboring state. There are some interesting lessons here. <read>

First there is a reason CTVotersCount wants manual hand-to-eye counts in close races, rather than reading the votes through a machine. Primarily (no pun intended) any machine errors will likely just be repeated. Also, CT like RI is a voters intent state – we count votes as the voter intended, not as the machine requires – so counting by hand in close races is the only way to really determine voters intent in races where the margin is very small. Lets not be like RI and depend on courts and candidates to do the right thing:

The amended court order mirrors one issued Wednesday in the case of a candidate for state Senate in Warwick, David Bennett, who lost his bid for a place on the November ballot to Erin Lynch in the Sept. 9 primary.

Both orders require the recounting of all provisional, mail and regular ballots cast. In addition, the court ordered the state Board of Elections to examine any ballots rejected by the optical scanning machines to determine which candidate, if any, the voters intended to choose but failed to mark the ballot correctly.

Actually the RI court should have gone further and ordered a full hand count — just because the machines read the ballots, it does not mean they read the voters intent accurately. Having observed 16 post-election audits in Connecticut, from first hand observation, I can attest that sometimes an optical scan ballot is such that the circle that is filled in is crossed out, but the machine cannot determine that. There is also the unlikely possibility that an optical scanner might just not work well. OK so its not so unlikely anymore, given recent tests in a real election in Washington, D. C.

Back to RI, it seems there was also a bit of voter fraud, with a good evidence trail. The only question remaining is, will it be prosecuted? Remember the Attorney General scandal? It was all about prosecuting non-existent voter fraud.

During a hearing involving the Alves protest, West Warwick’s deputy town clerk reported to the state Board of Elections that 13 Republicans had voted in the Democratic primary. Taveras reviewed each of the nearly 2,000 ballot applications, finding the signatures of two more Republicans who apparently voted. Taveras also told the board that there were three more Democratic ballots cast without corresponding ballot applications, creating a total of 18 questionable ballots.

In the Bennett hearing, Taveras said that his comparison of numbers from the Board of Elections and from the Warwick Board of Canvassers showed that 31 ballots were cast without signed application forms. He said that as many as 19 Republicans voted in that Democratic primary.

“This isn’t an isolated mistake,” Lynch, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, said. “There are [many] separate instances where Republicans signed for Democratic blue ballots and voted in the Democratic primary. That’s no mistake.”…

However, Lynch said the law isn’t as lenient. Rhode Island law considers it a felony to vote in any election that an individual “knows or should know” that he or she is not eligible to vote.

“I think if you’re a registered Republican, you know enough not to vote in the Democratic primary,” he said. “I know enough not to vote in the Republican primary.”

******
Update 06/06/2009 Washington Post: Firm to Give D.C. Information About Its Voting Devices <read>

Sequoia agrees to hand over source code and documentation under rasonable terms.  This should be the normal response to every voting discrepancy traced to a voting machine.  It should not require going to court.

Sequoia Voting Systems agreed yesterday to turn over sensitive information to the D.C. Council about how the District’s voting machines work and tabulate results, setting the stage for one of the most comprehensive probes on the reliability of electronic voting equipment.

The agreement is a response to the election night chaos in the September primaries, when Sequoia machines tabulated more ballots than there were voters, resulting in thousands of phantom votes.

Electoral change advocates said the agreement, finalized yesterday in D.C. Superior Court after the city threatened a lawsuit, is one of the first times a manufacturer of electronic voting machines has been forced to endure a public vetting of how its equipment tabulates returns.

“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, a national voting rights organization.

Connecticut Accused Of Purging Voters In Violation Of Federal Law

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group has released a report that is getting national attention, Vanishing Voters: Why Registered Voters Fall Off the Rolls. The report accuses 19 states of improperly purging voters from the rolls, in violation of federal law. <read>

Fifteen years after enactment of the NVRA, however, many states continue to appear unaware of the federal rules regarding voter roll purges. A survey of state laws and election officials shows that, on the eve of the 2008 general election, many voters across the country do not appear to enjoy the important voter protection provisions afforded by the NVRA.


Connecticut is among the 19 states accused of violating federal law, to the detriment of democracy.

Citations in the report where Connecticut is listed: Continue reading “Connecticut Accused Of Purging Voters In Violation Of Federal Law”