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Brennan Center: Election Integrity: A Pro-Voter Agenda

Whenever we open a report with multiple recommendations we start from a skeptical point of view. We expect to agree with some proposals and disagree with others. A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice is the exception. We agree with every recommendation:
Election Integrity: A Pro-Voter Agenda

It starts with the right criteria, it has a great agenda, strong supporting arguments, and ends with an appropriate call to action

It starts with the right criteria it has a great agenda, strong supporting arguments, and ends with an appropriate call to action:

This history strongly suggests two overarching principles that should guide any further efforts to secure election integrity. Such efforts should have two key elements:

First, they should target abuses that actually threaten election security.

Second, they should curb fraud or impropriety without unduly discouraging or disenfranchising eligible voters.

Efforts that do not include these elements will just result in burdens to voters and little payoff.

One: Modernize Voter Registration to Improve Voter Rolls

Two: Ensure Security and Reliability of Our Voting Machines

Three: Do Not Implement Internet Voting Systems Until Security is Proven

Four: Adopt Only Common-Sense Voter Identification Proposals

Five: Increase Security of Mail-In Ballots

Six: Protect Against Insider Wrongdoing

We do not have to choose between election integrity and election access. Indeed, free and fair access is necessary for an election to have integrity. This report examined genuine risks to the security of elections, highlighting current vulnerabilities as well as those that will be faced in the future. Recommendations have been made about how to reduce each risk. We invite and urge policymakers to tackle these problems.

As examples, we particularly support its call for sufficient post-election audits and attention to detecting, preventing, and punishing insider fraud:

Require Post-Election Audits. Many machines now issue a paper record of a voter’s selection. But these records are of little security value without audits to ensure that vote tallies recorded by a particular machine match any paper records. Despite near universal expert agreement on the need for audits, some vendors have vigorously opposed these paper trails, contending that they increase costs and slow the voting process. Security experts also recommend that states pass laws for effective “risk-limiting audits.” These require examination of a large enough sample of ballots to provide statistically “strong evidence that the reported election outcome was correct — if it was.” Also, the audit process should not rely on any one individual who might be in a position to manipulate either the voting machine or the recount device. According to experts, these insider attacks are the most difficult to stop. Voting technology experts also say machines must be “software independent,” which is technically defined as when “an (undetected) change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome,” but practically speaking means that the election results can be captured independently of the machine’s own software. Auditors should be assigned randomly to further ensure the process is not being gamed. Finally, audits should be as transparent as possible. This not only is essential to garnering public confidence, but can show a defeated candidate that she lost the election in a contest that was free and fair…

It is not surprising that many instances of election fraud, both historically and in the present day, involve the actions of insiders. Recent abuses by insiders have included lawmakers lying about where they live, magistrate judges willfully registering ineligible persons, and legislators running fraudulent absentee ballot schemes. A pollworker in Ohio was famously found guilty of using her authority and training to conduct voter fraud and take certain steps to evade detection. Culprits have even included the chief election officer of Indiana. This is why election officials and workers should receive special attention because their insider status increases their opportunity to both abuse the system and avoid detection. Moreover, when organizational leaders are involved in wrongdoing, it can create a culture for fraud, encouraging others to commit misconduct.

Twice again, Internet/online/email voting not a good idea

“You can’t control the security of the platform,”…The app you’re using, the operating system on your phone, the servers your data will cross en route to their destination—there are just too many openings for hacker interference. “But wait,” you’re entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?”…

“As soon as large numbers of people are allowed to vote online, all of the sudden the attack surface is much greater,”…

Handing over election technology to tech companies surrenders the voting process to private, corporate control. The companies will demand trust without letting the public vet the technology, peek into the source code or see behind the curtain into the inner workings of the programs that count the ballots

We have and others said it many times and many ways. Internet/online/voting is not safe for voting and maintaining democracy. Here are just two more articles to explain it again, a variety ways.

Scientific American: When Will We Be Able To Vote Online? <read>

Sooner or later everything seems to go online. Newspapers. TV. Radio. Shopping. Banking. Dating. But it’s much harder to drag voting out of the paper era. In the 2012 presidential election, more than half of Americans who voted cast paper ballots—0 percent voted with their smartphones. Why isn’t Internet voting here yet? Imagine the advantages! … It’s all about security, of course. Currently Internet voting is “a nonstarter,” according to Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute and author of the 2006 book Brave New Ballot. “You can’t control the security of the platform,” he told me. The app you’re using, the operating system on your phone, the servers your data will cross en route to their destination—there are just too many openings for hacker interference. “But wait,” you’re entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?” Voting is much trickier for a couple of reasons…

So how does Estonia do it? It’s a clever system. You can vote online using a government ID card with a chip and associated PIN code—and a card reader for your PC. You can confirm the correct logging of your vote with an app. Parts of the software are available for public inspection. You can change your vote as many times as you like online—you can even vote again in person—but only the last vote counts, diminishing the possibility that somebody forced your selection.

Unfortunately, three factors weaken this system’s importance as a model for the U.S. First, Estonia is a country of about one million eligible voters—not around 220 million. Second, we don’t have a national ID card. Third, security experts insist that just because hackers haven’t interfered with Estonia’s voting doesn’t mean they can’t. In 2014 a team led by University of Michigan researchers found at least two points where hackers could easily change votes: by installing a virus on individual PCs or by modifying the vote-collecting servers. (The Estonian government disagrees with the findings.)

Meanwhile other countries’ online-voting efforts haven’t been as successful.

We do disagree with one point: “security experts insist that just because hackers haven’t interfered with Estonia’s voting doesn’t mean they can’t.”. We ask “How do they know? One of the huge problems is that the system could have been compromised undetected by those “virus on individual PCs or by modifying the vote-collecting servers”. This is covered in the second article:

Tech.MIC: Online Voting Is the Future — And It Could Lead to Absolute Disaster <read>

More experts and more reasons its dangerous to democracy:

It’s 2016. Why don’t we have an app on our smartphones that allows us to vote remotely and instantly?…

Why has it taken so long for online voting to enter the election? It’s not government laziness. It’s not that nobody’s trying to realize the promise of online voting. It’s that there’s a concerted effort to make sure online voting never happens…

What’s holding back online voting? In short, security risks. If we’ve learned anything from the past few years of cybersecurity scandals — like the Office of Personnel Management hack, the Sony Pictures Entertainment fiasco or the Ashley Madison breach — it’s that no digital system can be proven to be totally safe.

There’s a common refrain that digital voting experts are tired of hearing: “If I can bank online, why can’t I vote online?” If the internet is safe enough to store our money, shop, file our taxes and perform other sensitive tasks, why can’t it be used to vote?

The truth is, we don’t bank or shop safely online. Major retailers and banking systems deal with hacking, fraudulent charges and identity theft every day. Companies like Amazon are used to a small percentage of transactions being fraudulent. And when fraud occurs in a financial transaction, those problems can be fixed after the fact…

This is the problem voting has that banking and retail do not: the “audit trail.” If something goes wrong with a purchase, you can retrace that purchase between the bank, vendor and customer to see where something went wrong. But voting has to be anonymous: Once a ballot is cast, it can’t be tracked back to the original voter without violating the sanctity of voter anonymity.

“Voting is a situation with two hands,” Ed Gerck, a computer scientist who has been trying to solve the online voting problem from a logistical perspective since the ’90s, told Mic. “In one hand, you know who the voter is; they’re qualified, and they’re allowed to vote. In the other, you have the ballot, which must be correct. But you cannot link the ballot to the voter.”

The hand-off, where a person submits his or her ballot using a phone or a computer and sends it to a digital ballot box, is where mischief can occur, because hackers could theoretically manipulate votes without ever alerting election officials that the system has been compromised…

one reason these systems haven’t yet shown signs of being hacked is because no one cares enough to try. Federal elections don’t rely on them.

“As soon as large numbers of people are allowed to vote online, all of the sudden the attack surface is much greater,” David Jefferson, a computer scientist and digital voting researcher, told Mic. “If I thought we could allow it for a very small number of people who really needed it, I could live with that, but that’s not what people are advocating.”…

Handing over election technology to tech companies surrenders the voting process to private, corporate control. The companies will demand trust without letting the public vet the technology, peek into the source code or see behind the curtain into the inner workings of the programs that count the ballots…

Alabama’s system, Everyone Counts, has been put through rigorous testing from mammoth security companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers. Everyone Counts lets the districts that use it vet the technology themselves or hire an outside contractor to test the security of the system. Alabama’s system, as far as Alabama can discern, has been rock-solid for years. Everyone Counts has never put the system up for a public, free-for-all penetration test, but Merrill says he isn’t worried about a security breach.

The looming hypotheticals and doomsday scenarios are unprecedented in the United States. If there were a breach, it could come from someone outside of of U.S. jurisdiction, even a state-level foreign aggressor. That’s if we could verify it at all. Hackers are tough to track — we’re still left wondering who’s responsible for the 2014 Sony hacking fiasco. And unlike a bank transaction that can be corrected by instant accounting, imagine this same system applying to the presidential election. If Hillary Clinton wins in 2016 and, months later, the discovery of a breach reverses the results, what would happen? It would be a legal nightmare without precedent…

Still interested in risking your vote and your democracy via the Internet? Please read both articles in their entirety.

Safe as an ostrich, from cyber attack.

Imagine no Internet for a few weeks. Imagine if that is because there is no power grid. CNN.Money: Cyber-Safe: How Corporate America keeps huge hacks secret

The backbone of America — banks, oil and gas suppliers, the energy grid — is under constant attack by hackers.

But the biggest cyberattacks, the ones that can blow up chemical tanks and burst dams, are kept secret by a law that shields U.S. corporations. They’re kept in the dark forever.

Imagine no Internet for a few weeks. Imagine if that is because there is no power grid. CNN.Money: Cyber-Safe: How Corporate America keeps huge hacks secret
<read>

The backbone of America — banks, oil and gas suppliers, the energy grid — is under constant attack by hackers.

But the biggest cyberattacks, the ones that can blow up chemical tanks and burst dams, are kept secret by a law that shields U.S. corporations. They’re kept in the dark forever.

You could live near — or work at — a major facility that has been hacked repeatedly and investigated by the federal government. But you’d never know.

What’s more, that secrecy could hurt efforts to defend against future attacks.

The murky information that is publicly available confirms that there is plenty to worry about.

Unnamed energy utilities and suppliers often make simple mistakes — easily exposing the power grid to terrorist hackers and foreign spies. A CNNMoney investigation has reviewed public documents issued by regulators that reveal widespread flaws.

Reminds us of the “little” error by a DNC vendor a few weeks ago. Except that a successful attack on the power grid vulnerability could be much more devastating.

Robert M. Lee spent time in the U.S. Air Force, where he identified critical infrastructure attacks as a “cyber warfare officer.” Now he travels the world for the SANS Institute, teaching the actual government investigators and power plant computer teams who face these types of dangerous attacks.

Except he doesn’t have any class material. He can’t find it. It’s all secret.

“My class is the only hands-on training for industrial control systems, but my students’ number one complaint is that there aren’t case studies or enough data out there about the real threat we’re facing,” he said. “There’s no lessons learned. It is extremely destructive to the overall national security status of critical infrastructure.”

Book Review: Ballot Battles by Edward B. Foley

I have long been a fan of the papers and other writings of Edward B. Foley of the Moritz College of Law. He writes extensively on the issues associated with close elections, how they have been decided since the founding of the United States, and how the process might be improved. Last month his book on the subject, Ballot Battles:The History of Disputed Elections in the United States was released.

To me, it was a highly fascinating read that kept my interest through every page. It should be required reading for anyone interested in Election Integrity

As I would define it, Ballot Battles is focused on one component of election integrity, i.e. How close elections have been decided in the U.S., rather than if the vote counting itself was accurate. Foley’s work is an important component of election integrity. Further along that vein we could say that Fair Elections go beyond Election Integrity to include fair voter eligibility, access to the polls, candidate access to the ballot, access to the press, and campaign financing etc.

Ballot Battles follows close elections and the process for deciding the declared winner from 1781 through 2008. While Presidential races from 1800, 1876, and 2000 are important, many other races for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Governors are just as important to history and the challenges remaining today. Reforms have been attempted after major controversies, yet as Foley shows they have been insufficient, including those after 2000. We remain vulnerable. As summarized at one point in Ballot Battles:

“the 1960 presidential election must be viewed as a failure of American government to operate as a well-functioning democracy. That failure puts 1960 along-side 1876 — and, as we shall later consider, 2000 — in a disturbing series of instances in which the nation has lacked the institutional capacity to identify accurately the winner of the presidency.”

There is no easy solution. It would likely require a Constitutional Amendment. Ultimately, as Foley recommends, following successful models of instances of bodies of equal numbers of partisans, with a single respected non-partisan member. That is unlikely to always work, yet that has worked better than the system we are left with for adjudicating close Federal Elections.

Ballot Battles thoroughly covers the adjudication process and the risks to which we are exposed. Those seeking information on fraud and error in elections will not find the details here. Likewise, those seeking agreement that the Supreme Court erred or acted responsibly in 2000 will find little agreement here, yet much to ponder, much to learn about the law, and the precedents applied to resolve election challenges.

Will encryption save us? No, “It’s Saturday Night!”

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.

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.

Clinton was largely parroting a popular FBI talking point that’s been highly publicized following the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino — that encryption is law enforcement’s Achilles heel in preventing crime — though there’s no evidence encryption enabled the plots to go undetected…

..law enforcement argues, the government needs some sort of a way in — a “backdoor,” “front door,” or “golden key” — to stop the bad guys in their tracks. For months, FBI Director James Comey has been proclaiming his wish for some sort of magical solution to allow law enforcement access to encrypted communications. Comey has repeatedly insisted that smart people working on technology simply need to try harder, or be incentivized properly.

But technologists and cryptographers have been saying for years that it’s impossible — without severely handicapping the protection encryption affords its users…

Yet the government has never presented a clear case where encryption has crippled a critical terrorism investigation, and law enforcement has other investigative tools in its arsenal — like traditional informants and tips, for example. Even when encryption is present, there is evidence that the FBI and other government agencies can hack into suspects’ computers and phones — bypassing encryption entirely.

And as Ed Snowden reminds us, be careful in setting precedents:

No matter how good the reason, if the U.S. sets the precedent that Apple has to compromise the security of a customer in response to a piece of government paper, what can they do when the government is China and the customer is the Dalai Lama?” he wrote to The Intercept in July.

Perhaps it is too much to ask in the limitations of the debate format, no candidate challenged these remarks and assumptions. Yet it is not just candidates and government officials that need to be fact checked. Increasingly it is correspondents and debate moderators:

Raddatz, ABC News’ chief global affairs correspondent, framed her questions in the debate as being about encryption as a “new terrorist tool used in Paris.” But criminals and terrorists have been using encryption for years, and encryption is also used legitimately by people around the world to protect sensitive information.

Read the full article for more of the arguments against and references to other pertinent articles.

* You might rate us “Mostly True” here as we rely on media reports that just under 8 million tuned in to the debates, assuming they reflected the U.S. population and most were eligible to vote, although considerably fewer do so.

Does All Mail Voting Increase Turnout?

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?

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? <read>

Note that we here are talking about all mail elections, not no-excuse absentee voting, which tends also to decrease turnout.

Supporters hope that voting by mail means more citizens will vote. Is it so?

Generally, the answer is both “no” and “yes,” but with important qualifications…

Some early research in Oregon claimed that voting by mail increased turnout by 10 percentage points. However, since then, scholars have been unable to reproduce those results. Apparently that boost to Oregon’s turnout grew from a “novelty effect” and recurred only in special elections.

In Washington, researchers found that switching to all-mail elections increased overall participation by about three percentage points in presidential and midterm elections. In the California pilot, after the Nov. 3 elections, the San Mateo County elections office received 105,325 ballots out of the approximately 353,000 that were mailed. That’s 29.5 percent voter turnout, or 4.1 percent more than a similar off-year polling place election in 2013, when 25.4 percent of registered voters cast their ballots…

The media was quick to attribute the “eye-popping” increase in voter turnout to simply switching to vote-by-mail. But it’s not that simple.

Mail-only balloting actually decreases voting

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?

According to a 50-state study that examined elections over a 30-year period, voter turnout is less about convenience than academics once thought. Most voting reforms, like all-mail balloting, do not attract new voters.

What’s more, alternative voting methods are most likely to be launched in states that already have high voter turnout.

Why does voting by mail decrease turnout? Because mail voters have a longer voting “window,” they receive less stimulus to vote. Scholars have found that reductions in stimulation to vote are greater than the modest positive benefits of additional convenience from mail voting…

But reminders make a difference

Reminders are critical. My research found that when the elections office communicates more often with voters, more of them vote. In particular, four official communications can wipe out the 13 percent decrease in turnout that I found. ‘‘Official communications’’ include such documents as a Sample Ballot, a Voter Guide, letters on county letterhead and postcards from the Registrar of Voters. Each additional communication improved the odds of voting by 4 percent. And a voter who received five communications was 4 percent more likely to vote than a voter who received no mailings.

That leaves us with another question. What effect would those same reminders have on election day voting? Could we wipe out the 13% deficit by avoiding all mail voting, and add those same five reminders to increase turnout altogether, say by 10% or so?

What if we used computers for voting, not just driving?

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

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.

Both modern cars and voting systems are significantly computerized. VW was playing a very high stakes financial game that led someone to installed cheating software (malware).

The stakes are also very high in modern elections. I continue to be amazed that some losing candidates either are pressured not to rock the boat – sometimes by their own party (I know of candidates to whom this was done) – or actually accept negative results without questioning the computerized voting machines that “declare” those results.

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

Read the full interview <read>

Iowa Caucus: Democrats to vote by “Magic Pony” Express

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:

The Iowa Democratic Party on Tuesday announced the first ever Tele-Caucus initiative. It will allow deployed service members and other Iowans living abroad to participate in the first-in-the-nation event.

The effort piggybacks on a satellite caucus initiative the party announced this fall. Both programs aim to expand participation in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus to those who are normally unable to attend.

“This is to try and be more inclusive as a party,” Iowa Democratic Party Chair Andy McGuire said. “We want as many people as possible to participate in this caucus.”

We would add, perhaps there will be people participating they would rather not have, such as hackers.

The Tele-Caucus will be facilitated through a telephone consulting firm, Stones’ Phones.

?Founder of the company, Marty Stone, said participants will essentially phone-in their caucus vote by selecting a candidate with the push of a number on the dial pad. It’s compatible with any landline, cellphone, Skype or other program used for calling abroad.

Anyone planning to participate in the inaugural Tele-Caucus must register online, at iowademocrats.org/telecaucus, by Jan. 6. Those eligible should be registered to vote as a Democrat in Iowa and qualify for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

As with other such schemes, saying it is secure is not the same as it being secure. No word of actual testing and certification by third parties.

Just this week, we learned a new technical term, Magic Pony, in this article from the Intercept: Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider “Their Business Model” <read>

It is an educational read about the fallacies of the “Security” of placing back doors “only for the government” into encryption software. One of those things likely only to be used by the public. Anyone aiming at skulduggery would use encryption without backdoors, or avoid the Internet altogether.

Comey had previously argued that tech companies could somehow come up with a “solution” that allowed for government access but didn’t weaken security. Tech experts called this a “magic pony” and mocked him for his naivete.

Now, Comey said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, extensive conversations with tech companies have persuaded him that “it’s not a technical issue.”

“It is a business model question,” he said. “The question we have to ask is: Should they change their business model?”

Voter or Voting Fraud? via AB, immune to Voter Id

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.

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.

Robert D. Monroe, 50, used addresses in Shorewood, Milwaukee and Indiana, according to the complaint, and cast some votes in the names of his son and his girlfriend’s son.

According to the complaint:

Monroe cast two ballots in the April 2011 Supreme Court election, two in the August 2011 Alberta Darling recall election, five in the Scott Walker-Tom Barrett recall, one illegal ballot in an August 2012 primary, and two ballots in the November 2012 presidential election.

In the presidential election, Monroe cast an in-person absentee ballot in Shorewood on Nov. 1 and drove a rental car to Lebanon, Ind., where he showed his Indiana driver’s license to vote in person on election day, Nov. 6, the complaint charges. Monroe owns a house there, according to the complaint…

The complaint indicates the investigation started in Waukesha County as an inquiry into possible double voting by Monroe’s son, who lives in Waukesha. But the son denied any knowledge of requesting an absentee ballot from his father’s Shorewood address, and the investigation shifted back to Milwaukee County…

The complaint refers to Monroe as an executive within the health care industry who earned a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2013.

“He has expressed an interest in attending law school,” the complaint reads.

Monroe faces various counts of election fraud, including registering in more than one place, providing false information to an election official, voting more than once and voting as a disqualified person, for a total 13 felony charges. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of up to 18 months in prison, two years of extended supervision and a $10,000 fine.

Time to Hold ’em – Connecticut’s voting machines

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.”

San Francisco could have an open-source voting system in place by the November 2019 election, under a plan approved earlier this month by the Elections Commission.

The timeline could result in the emergence of San Francisco as the leader of the open-source voting movement in the United States.

For supporters of open-source voting, the importance of that point can’t be underscored enough.

“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.”

Open-source voting systems bring a greater level of transparency and accountability by allowing the public to have access to the source codes of the system, which is used to tabulate the votes. A system owned by The City could also save taxpayers money…

We have said it before, No Crisis in CT unless we make one, there are few voting system options available today, expensive and, at best, incrementally better than the AccuVoteOS scanners we use in Connecticut. It is time to wait and see the results of efforts underway in Los Angeles County, CA, Travis County, TX, and now San Francisco. There will be dramatically better and more economical systems available in the next five to ten years for Connecticut to benefit from these pioneering efforts.