Category: Reports

Report: Is America Ready To Vote?

Verified Voting, Common Cause, and the Brennan Center for Justice released a major report today: <press release> <report>

Is America Ready to Vote? State Preparations for Voting Machine Problems in 2008

States Get Mixed Reviews on Readiness for Voting Machine Problems — Citing Improvements, Election Experts Call for Backup Measures to Secure the Vote on Nov 4th

From the Press Release:

With millions of Americans expected to confront an array of voting technologies on Nov. 4, today election administration experts from the Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause and Verified Voting issued a 50-state report card that grades each state on its preparedness

“There’s no question that in the last few years, election officials around the country have made dramatic improvements that will make it much less likely that voters are disenfranchised due to voting system failures,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the Voting Technology Project at the Brennan Center. “Unfortunately, there is still much work to be done to ensure that every voter will get to vote and every vote will be counted if something goes wrong with voting systems on Election Day,” he stated.

Is America Ready to Vote? evaluates each state by four criteria: procedures for issuing emergency paper ballots, reconciling ballot tallies, providing paper records of votes cast, and post-election audits. The report reveals a broad range of preparedness across the country to address Election Day voting system meltdowns.

How does Connecticut rate? Continue reading “Report: Is America Ready To Vote?”

Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Audits

(Full disclosure: I contributed to, participated in reviewing, and editing this document)

Released today at a press conference in Alexandria, VA, after many months of work:

http://www.electionaudits.org/files/best%20practices%20final_0.pdf

These principles were written to guide the design of high-quality post- election audits. They were developed by an ad hoc group comprising many stakeholders, including election officials, public advocates, computer scientists, statisticians, political scientists and legislators.

Nearly all US elections today are counted using electronic voting systems. Such voting systems have produced result- changing errors through problems with hardware, software, and procedures.[1] Errors can also occur in hand counting of ballots or in the compiling of results. Even serious error can go undetected if results are not audited effectively.

No person, voting official, legislator, or expert can comprehend the whole voting and auditing process. At some point we must rely on the considered judgment of experts rather than only on individual experience. Using these principles state legislators can assess and improve current election and post-election audit laws. Using the principles and best practices election officials can improve the integrity and confidence of the post-election audit process. In turn providing integrity and confidence in our elections and democracy.

The last page of the document has the list of endorsing groups:

VerifiedVoting – Common Cause
Brennan Center For Justice – American Statistical Association
Advocate groups from MN, MI, MA, CO, FL and CT

Update:  PCWorld Coverage

Update: New Mexico Independent Coverage

Caught Between The Glitches and The Gotyas

We have been covering a significant report by VotersUnite.org, Vendors are Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections. , the report summarizes the bind Connecticut and other states are in:

Violations of Federal Law Leave States in a Double Bind. The federal government fails to meet its HAVA deadlines for giving guidance to the states on how to comply with HAVA, yet states are held accountable to comply.

News from Florida of our vendor, Diebold Premier continues to reveal the disappointing quality of their products and the Federal testing programs. From the Harold Tribune a short sour story <read>

Two Diebold glitches in one month? That’s no way to rebuild confidence in automated elections.

Sarasota and Hillsborough counties experienced one of the problems Tuesday night. They suffered delays from a software flaw that revealed itself when officials tried to integrate absentee ballot totals into overall election results…

The manufacturer is Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold — a name long connected to doubts about the security of voting.

Earlier this month, Premier accepted blame for the other glitch — a coding error that can sometimes prevent precinct vote totals from electronically transferring to central tabulation systems. The problem could afflict 34 states.

Good news, bad news

The good news about these flaws is that faulty counts can be detected by cross-checks and refuted by a paper trail of ballots. The votes still exist, in other words, though they can be harder to find.

The bad news is that confidence has been shaken, yet again, in automation that is critical to democratic elections. The extra vigilance required to thwart these potential glitches adds to election administrators’ burden and cost.

The fact that the Premier problems occur intermittently, undiscovered during certification or testing procedures, is especially troubling. In Sarasota County, for example, the high-speed scanner/software glitch did not surface in a mock election held last month…

Despite many reforms since the 2000 fiasco, voting systems are nowhere near as credible, secure or user-friendly as they should be.

Here is the good news and bad news for Connecticut:

The good news is that these latest glitches do not apply here because we total results manually from election night paper tapes, rather than accumulating memory cards.

The bad news is we are totally dependent on Premier and their distributor, LHS, for our elections – they are rightfully in the spotlight and being sued for poor quality and generally remain in denial. The lack of security and poor quality of the AccuVote-OS has been proven by independent scientific studies commissioned by CT, CA, and OH.

Moderate good news is that Connecticut has chosen optical scan which is the best system available which meets standards set by the Help America Vote Act.

The bad bad news is that there is no alternative in sight. All the vendors have poor products with no better products or vendors in sight. While some states are improving their laws, procedures, and actions, proposed Federal laws in the Senate would “fix” the Help America Vote Act by making the situation much worse.

The Outsourced State

Last week we covered a significant report by VotersUnite.org, Vendors are Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections. The report describes the multiple ways that states have become dependent on vendors for elections, how Federal laws and actions have placed election officials in an impossible bind, how arrogant vendors take advantage of the situation, that elections are at risk, and democracy in peril. It also highlights some states that are completely dependent on vendors for almost every phase of every election.

Looking at Connecticut, we outsource less than the states that are highlighted in the VotersUnite report. You could conclude that we are much better off, our elections much less at risk. You might be wrong.

The VotersUnite report uses the theme of outsourcing being a tunnel that undermines elections. Here are the major outsourced elements covered by the report. Like most states, Connecticut does not outsource them all (here we cross out those not completely outsourced by Connecticut):

  • Equipment
  • Software
  • Installation
  • Training/Troubleshooting
  • Ballot Programming
  • Pre-Election Testing
  • Maintenance/Repairs
  • Election Day Assistance
  • Results Retrieval
  • Trouble Shooting/Investigation
  • Recount Management

We prefer a different theme: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link(s)”.

Two of these elements represent a significant risk to Connecticut elections:

  1. Ballot Programming – Before each election memory cards are programmed by a vendor, LHS Associates, in Massachusetts, by people over which we have no supervision.
  2. Maintenance/Repairs – Over this last summer each of our optical scanners was subject to mandatory maintenance planned and performed by LHS Associates.

This summer’s maintenance was to be performed under the observation of election officials but not the public – how hard would it be for a busy, untrained, non-technical election official to look away for a few seconds while a scanner was open, giving the vendor time to replace the permanent program chip in the machine with one with the same external label but with a rogue program inside? What guarantee is there that the original chip had the approved program when the scanners were originally delivered?

“Oh” you say, “this is so far fetched and local officials perform pre-election testing before each election.”

A recent paper by the University of Connecticut clearly demonstrates the ways in which clever coding in the permanent memory of our AccuVote-OS optical scanners can defeat pre-election testing. The report title almost says it all: Tampering with Special Purpose Trusted Computing Devices: A Case Study in Optical Scan E-Voting <read>

Also a memory card test by UConn commissioned by the Secretary of the State surprisingly revealed that less than half of local election officials were able to fully follow pre-election testing procedures.

Reports by UConn and those commissioned by the Secretaries of State of CA and OH also demonstrate the risks of the memory cards and their vulnerability to insiders.

The companies we keep:

Recall that our State’s chief election official incorrectly believes that LHS invented the AccuVote-OS

via Outsourcing: Democracy is Lost

A report this week from VotersUnite.org describes the devastating damage caused by outsourcing our elections and giving over complete control to vendors:

Vendors are Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections
A VotersUnite report on the current situation and
how to reclaim elecitons — in 2008 and beyond

The report comes with an Executive Summary
A fourty page Full Report
And a Lou Dobbs video interview with the author

This report is sad, devastating, important, and very readable. You can and should read the whole report. The summary or a few quotes cannot do it justice. Here are a few quotes to encourage you to read the entire report:

As we approach the 2008 general election, the structure of elections in the United States – once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public – has become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public. Most local officials charged with running elections are now unable to administer elections without the equipment, services, and trade-secret software of a small number of corporations.

If the vendors withdrew their support for elections now, our election structure would collapse. However, some states and localities are recognizing the threat that vendor-dependency poses to elections. They are using ingenuity and determination to begin reversing the direction…

Such dependency has allowed vendors to:

  • Coerce election officials into risk-riddled agreements, as occurred in Angelina County, Texas in May 2008.
  • Endanger election officials’ ability to comply with federal court orders, as occurred in Nassau County, New York in July 2008.
  • Escape criminal penalties for knowingly violating state laws and causing election debacles,
    as occurred in San Diego, California in 2004.

Analysis of the impact of laws and decisions at all levels of government demonstrates that lawmakers and officials have facilitated the dependence of local elections on private corporations. This report explores:

  • How the mandates of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and the inaction of the federal government left the states and localities with nowhere to turn but to the vendors.
  • How state laws, passed by ill-informed representatives, limited the options of local officials to the voting systems developed by big corporations.

Voting system vendors’ contracts, communications, and histories explored in this report reveal that vendors exploit the local jurisdictions’ dependency by charging exorbitant fees, violating laws and ethics, exerting proprietary control over the machinery of elections, and disclaiming unaccountability…

Continue reading “via Outsourcing: Democracy is Lost”

EVEREST Reports Devistating

Earlier I had promised more on the USENIX/ACCURATE Conference in San Jose. In addition to the panels, the presentations on the Ohio EVEREST studies provided information that we have not covered here at CTVotersCount.org. Released in mid December, following the California Top-To-Bottom review the Ohio reports have gotten less attention by many, including me. Two presentations on EVEREST at the conference grabbed my attention – they not only confirmed the CA reports but added additional vulnerabilities and devastating conclusions.

Links:
Ohio One Page EVEREST Summary
Ohio Secretary of the State’s Executive Report
USENIX Hart and Premier [Diebold] Paper
USENIX ES&S Paper
HOPE Conf ES&S Video Presentation

From the Ohio Secretary of State’s summary:

Ohio’s electronic voting systems have “critical security failures” which could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State, according to a review of the systems commissioned by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

“The results underscore the need for a fundamental change in the structure of Ohio’s election system to ensure ballot and voting system security while still making voting convenient and accessible to all Ohio voters, “ Secretary Brunner said Friday in unveiling the report…

“To put it in every-day terms, the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant,” Brunner said.

(Note: Since Connecticut uses Premier [Diebold] equipment that report’s findings are most relevant. Note, however, that all the findings do not apply to Premier and that Connecticut uses a subset of their products – yet all the findings indicate the state of the industry, our vendor, and the general qualities and security of our electronic election equipment.)

From the Hart/Premier report:

As in previous studies, we found the election systems to be critically flawed in ways that are practically and easily exploitable. Such exploits could effect election results, prevent legitimate votes from being cast, or simply cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election itself. In this

effort we identified new areas of concern including novel exploitable failures of software and election data integrity protection and the discovery of dangerous hidden software features…

there were several important failures detailed by this study that were not known prior to the release of this study. Several important discoveries include:
Continue reading “EVEREST Reports Devistating”

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.

Continue reading “French Study: More Errors With Electronic Voting”

Revised November Audit Report – Suffers From Legendary Computing Problem

Earlier this week Dr. Alex Shvartsman of UConn sent us a revised, Version 2, of the Statistical Analysis of the Post Election Audit Data, November 2007 Elections <read>

This report is based on the added investigations of the discrepancies reported in the initial audit data reported in the Observation Coalition Report <read> followed by the original UConn Report.

While I have no reason to question the revised data or results, overall I see little reason to change the earlier Coalition conclusion that:

The audit statistics and observations leave us without the information necessary to vouch for the accuracy of many of the hand-counting results, whether those results indicated discrepancies or agreement with the counts obtained by the optical scanners.

I find no obvious flaws in UConn’s portion of the work. Nor do I question the integrity of the Secretary of the State’s Office. However, the report suffers from the legendary computing problem of “garbage in, garbage out”:

1. Since the discrepancy review, as I understand it, was conducted by a single person, no matter how trustworthy and reliable, it lacks the necessary transparency that would support credibility.

2. Since the review was conducted with ballots no longer under seal, such a count could use ballots that could be easily altered by insiders after the fact. Of course, modification is unlikely to occur in cases where the count was simply done inaccurately. However, modification after unsealing would be a very important part of covering up a programming error or fraud.

(Connecticut law is unclear if ballots need to be sealed after 14 days, while post election audits cannot begin until 15 days after the election. In addition to chain of custody concerns before and during the post election audits, most municipalities did not maintain ballots under seal after the initial audit count was conducted)

3. Our understanding is that many of the explanations reported in the review were not based on a review of actual ballots but a review of numbers reported looking for reasons that would provide differences that would approximate the difference between the machine and the hand counts, and attributing any such errors to inaccurate hand counting.

While hand counting errors might often be the actual case, if there were machine errors they could easily go undetected: Many such errors in programming could be expected to be approximately the same size as those attributed to human counting errors, since in both cases discrepancies would likely be caused by the same errors made consistently.

4. An investigation and report concluded some five months after an election falls far short of time-frames necessary for serious action based on significant reported discrepancies that might indicate errors, fraud, or the possibility incorrect election results. (As we have indicated occasionally, the motivation and paradigm of the current Connecticut audit law seems to be based on finding general flaws in voting machines, rather than anticipating, reacting to and correcting individual race results)

Science Says We Have A Problem. Can The System Answer?

Is requiring that a vote be overturned in cases where the evidence shows over a 95% chance that the election system failed the voters and democracy a radical solution? When should there be a re-vote? Or simply overturn an election?

Two important articles in the spring issue of CHANCE, from the American Statistical Association present some stark evidence and raise some necessary questions: <read both>

Florida 2006: Can Statistics Tell Us Who Won Congressional District-13?
by Arlene Ash and John Lamperti

Statistical Solutions to Election Mysteries
by Joseph Lorenzo Hall

The first looks at what statistics can tell us about the missing 18,000 votes in Florida-13 in the 2006 Congressional election. Some of its conclusions:

Continue reading “Science Says We Have A Problem. Can The System Answer?”