Category: National

Fairfield Panel: Rosy Views and Thorny Issues

While I was on vacation, the Fairfield Citizen News had a report covering the panel in Fairfield last week, with added information, apparently obtained from our web site, and an interview with the Secretary of the State. Overall it is a good article fairly covering what was said on the panel. The two hours flew by. I would have loved to have had more time to respond to questions and statements by both the other panelists and the audience. The entire article is well worth reading. Below are some of the statements in the article and my comments: <my opening statement> <Fairfield Citizen News Article>

Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz is in favor of the system. She explained Wednesday, “I firmly believe in Connecticut we have one of the strongest voting security laws in the country the Audit Bill It’s the toughest audit law in the country. After every election we put every precinct on a card and into the bingo box where 10 percent are chosen for public hand count.” She explained that 10 percent equaled 77 precincts in the state. “That’s a lot of ballots,” she said. “We shouldn’t take the machine’s word for it.”

On the measure of 10% we have the toughest audit law, but on other measures such as reliability, follow-up, transparency, and independence we have a law that is insufficient, unreliable and ineffective. See the 10 Myths.

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NY Times: “Check The Vote”

Once again the New York Times gets it right on electronic voting coming out in favor of post-election audits and reading their local Brennan Center reports for accurate information. <read>

Computer scientists have shown that it is easy to tamper with electronic voting machines in ways that are all but impossible to detect. The machines also make mistakes on their own. Just this month, the elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, Fla., apologized after machines there failed to count 14 percent of the votes cast in a city commission election.

The answer is voter-verifiable paper trails: paper records of each vote cast that voters can check to ensure that their preferences were accurately recorded. When these paper records are created, malfunctioning or dishonest machines can then be detected by a careful audit that compares the electronic vote totals with the votes recorded on paper.

Unfortunately, states don’t require such scrupulous audits. A 2007 study co-authored by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that most of the 38 states with voter-verifiable paper trails did not even require audits after every election. The states that do have audits do them inadequately.

An earlier accurate Times editorial was Broken Polls. Contrast this to the mythical world of the Hartford Courant which ignores all negative evidence including our own UConn Research.

Testing/Inspecting For Democracy Is Too Much Work

Why bother inspecting restaurants, bridges, trucks, and voting machines? It is just too difficult and costly.

While Connecticut is way behind in inspecting restaurants as we have been with bridges and trucks, we fit right into the trend evidenced by two national stories – the Election Assistance Commission finds its just too hard on vendors to insist that voting machines actually be certified – and in New York we find that half of the voting machines delivered by Sequoia do not work.

As summarized by John Gideon <read>

The Board of Advisors is advising [PDF, pg 7] the EAC, via resolution, that they need to speed-up the certification process for voting systems. They want the system to be what it was under the old, rubber-stamp system headed by the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED). They want the same system of testing and certification that has resulted in our voting systems failing in many elections and not even being compliant with federal standards.

Incredibly, the Board’s recommendation to the EAC goes so far as to admit that a failed “common practice” of the past should, apparently, be re-instituted under the newer certification system. “The common practice since the introduction of electronic voting systems,” they wrote, “has been to make hardware and software upgrades based on issues found in the most recent election in sufficient time to improve the voting systems for the next general election.”

Douglas Kellner as quoted by Kim Zetter of Wired on Sequoia in NY <read>

Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, expressed frustration with the vendor, saying it appeared that Sequoia was using the state’s acceptance testing process to find problems with its machines in lieu of a sound quality-control process.

“There’s no way the vendor could be adequately reviewing the machines and having so many problems,” he told Threat Level. “What it tells us is that the vendor just throws this stuff over the transom and does not do any alpha- or beta-testing of their own before they apply for certification testing. Then they expect that we’ll identify technical glitches and then they’ll correct those glitches. But correction of those glitches is an extraordinarily time-consuming process. And its very disappointing that this equipment is not ready for prime time.”

But New York has nothing on the Nutmeg State where UConn tests reveal that less than half of our election officials faithfully follow pre-election testing procedures. As for the restaurants it seems Connecticut occasionally still inspects them, but nowhere near as often as required by our own laws.

Update: Bysiewicz, Blumenthal Violate Federal Ban

Update: July 12, 2008 Other States Join Connecticut <read>

Bysiewicz and Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican, have launched a national effort to overturn the directive. They’ve been joined by secretaries of state from Ohio, Montana, Vermont, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Kansas, New Hampshire and Maine.

Original Story and Update July 1, 2008

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French Study: More Errors With Electronic Voting

ComputerWorld article on French study <read>

There were discrepancies between the number of signatures and the number of votes at around 29.8% of polling stations studied using electronic voting machines, compared with just 5.3% of those using paper ballots, and those discrepancies were larger in the stations using voting machines, Enguehard found. It’s unlikely that voters’ unfamiliarity with the machines is to blame, for two reasons, said Enguehard. The ratio of discrepancies between electronic and traditional stations got worse, rather than better, with time, and there was no correlation between the bureaus with discrepancies and the bureaus that received the most complaints about difficulties with the voting machines.

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Panel In Fairfield – What Do You Want?

Last night I was on a panel in Fairfield with Deputy Secretary of the State Lesley Mara, Dr. Alex Shvartsman from the UConn VoTeR Center, and Michael Kozik of the Secretary of the State’s Office. The event was video taped by the sponsors. If possible I will make the video availabe here. For now, here are my opening remarks, my topic was “What Do You Want”:

Fairfield Panel

Introduction

Thanks to Jody Eiseman for creating this event and to the Fairfield Democratic Town Committee for hosting it. Thanks to everyone of you in the audience for coming tonight.

I want to thank Dr. Shvartsman, Mike Kozik, and Deputy Mara for being here tonight. A bit over three years ago I was on a panel with the previous Deputy Secretary of the State. That panel directly precipitated actions that were instrumental in the passage of the paper ballot bill in 2005 and the eventual rejection of Touch Screen (DRE) voting equipment in early 2007.

CTVotersCount is committed to voting integrity and that our democracy flourishes.

Lest we forget, democracy is dependent on the voting integrity of every district in your town; dependent on the voting integrity of every district in the state; and indeed every district in the nation.

My Topic Tonight
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Truth Under Assault In Texas Hearing

Since its release last August we have covered the California Top-To-Bottom Review and its implications for Connecticut <here> <here> <here> it is an outstanding collection of reports based on research and evidence. It helped earn a deserved “Profile In Courage” award to its sponsor, Debra Bowen, Secretary of State of California.

How far will those patriotic voting machine vendors go to stretch the truth? How far to discredit a report demonstrating massive flaws in their voting systems? We have the answer. It seems that they stretch it beyond the breaking point. Dan Wallach was testifying last week about the California Top-To-Bottom Review to the Texas Legislature. <read his report>

Wow, was I disappointed. Here’s a quote from Peter Lichtenheld, speaking on behalf of Hart InterCivic:

Security reviews of the Hart system as tested in California, Colorado, and Ohio were conducted by people who were given unfettered access to code, equipment, tools and time and they had no threat model. While this may provide some information about system architecture in a way that casts light on questions of security, it should not be mistaken for a realistic approximation of what happens in an election environment. In a realistic election environment, the technology is enhanced by elections professionals and procedures, and those professionals safeguard equipment and passwords, and physical barriers are there to inhibit tampering. Additionally, jurisdiction ballot count, audit, and reconciliation processes safeguard against voter fraud.

..Did our work cast light on questions of security? Our work found a wide variety of flaws, most notably the possibility of  “viral” attacks, where a single corrupted voting machine could spread that corruption, as part of regular processes and procedures, to every other voting system. In effect, one attacker, corrupting one machine, could arrange for every voting system in the county to be corrupt in the subsequent election…

Were we given unfettered access? The big difference between what we had and what an attacker might have is that we had some (but not nearly all) source code to the system. An attacker who arranged for some equipment to “fall off the back of a truck” would be able to extract all of the software, in binary form, and then would need to go through a tedious process of reverse engineering before reaching parity with the access we had. The lack of source code has demonstrably failed to do much to slow down attackers who find holes in other commercial software products. Debugging and decompilation tools are really quite sophisticated these days. All this means is that an attacker would need additional time to do the same work that we did.

Did we have a threat model? Absolutely! See chapter three of our report, conveniently titled “Threat Model.”  The different teams working on the top to bottom report collaborated together to draft this chapter. It talks about attackers’ goals, levels of access, and different variations on how sophisticated an attacker might be. It is hard to accept that the vendors can get away with claiming that the reports did not have a threat model, when a simple check of the table of contents of the reports disproves their claim.

Meanwhile In The Real “Wild” West

Update, Another Problem, this time in FL: In the “Wild” South an Audit catches uncounted votes, almost 20% of the total <read>.

When it comes to elections, what happens in any precinct in New Mexico can determine who sits in the Oval Office and the balance in our U.S. Senate and House. What happens in any election district in Connecticut can do the same for National offices and in addition determine our Governor and the balance in the Connecticut House and Senate.

Earlier this year in the Danbury Connecticut public hearing, one member of the Government Elections and Administration Committee compared our election system to the “Wild West”. This was based on the failures to follow procedures along with the lack of consistency in the process from one Connecticut town to the next. Many of these issues were evident in the coalition observation reports and in the recent investigative report showing more ballots cast that voters checked-off in Bridgeport.

It seems that the real west, is still pretty wild with this Sun News story from New Mexico: NM revises recount procedure in close races <read>

Like Connecticut, New Mexico law does not require hand recounts. While Connecticut has recently revised procedures to eliminate hand recounts, New Mexico, faced with a close election and a concerned candidate they are rethinking their procedure:

The secretary of state’s office has revised procedures for recounts in close primary election contests, including a state Senate race in which some ballots are missing in one county.

The change came as one of the candidates in the Senate race voiced objections to the recount plan.

Secretary of State Mary Herrera said earlier this week that the recount would be conducted by having counties recheck the results of voting machines—inserting memory cards into tabulators and printing out the results. A change was announced Thursday.

Now, paper ballots will be fed into the tabulators again for the recount except in two Cibola County precincts where ballots are missing. When necessary, ballots will be counted by hand. Provisional ballots, for example, are handed tallied.

Unfortunately, that is not possible:

[Clemente Sanchez, a Grants Democrat who finished second in the Senate contest] said he remained troubled by the missing ballots in two precincts in Grants. About 180 votes were cast with the missing ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“To this day nobody knows what happened to them. It amazes me,” said Sanchez.

New Mexico implemented its paper ballot voting system in 2006 to try to make voting more secure and restore the public’s confidence in elections.

Ballots are supposed to be removed from a storage bin underneath a tabulator and placed in a separate ballot box, which is to be locked and transferred to the county clerk’s office.

Apparently, the ballots in the two precincts were not locked away in ballot boxes after polls closed. Ballots are supposed to be removed from a storage bin underneath a tabulator and placed in a separate ballot box, which is to be locked and transferred to the county clerk’s office.

As in our situation in Bridgeport, election officials did not find/report the problem.

However, Sanchez said he was unhappy that candidates were not told about the missing ballots by county elections officials and that the issue was not disclosed publicly when the county canvassed its election results. Sanchez learned of the missing ballots from news reports. The missing ballots were first disclosed in a story last week by The Associated Press.

Better late than never, however, the time to revise procedures is before an election. Otherwise there could be ethical questions of bias based on the politics of the Secretary of the State and that of the loser in the initial count.

John Gideon Leaves It To Us

We get a healthy dose of news from John Gideon at VotersUnite.org and his Daily Voting News. Today he highlights the difference between a legislator and the Secretary of State in Colorado: <read>

The state Senate Majority Leader is quoted as saying this about the election integrity community, “I believe the group has gotten larger. It’s become more mainstream and people are paying more attention to them. They are an entity that’s at the table and has a voice that is listened to”. Meanwhile the Secretary of State told the newspaper, ““I think they have a fundamental belief that anything electronic, as it relates to voting, is evil and undermines our political system. They live 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’ll leave it to the reader to make up their mind who is correct….

Answer below.

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