Paper Vote Canada

Verified Voting, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Common Cause have released a report: The Secret Ballot at Risk

http://secretballotatrisk.org/

It describes how US voters often have to waive (sign away) their right to a secret ballot in order to vote online.

It's being widely reported in the media, including:

• MIT Technology Review - Internet Voting Leaves Out a Cornerstone of Democracy: The Secret Ballot - by Mike Orcutt (@mike_orcutt) - August 18, 2016
• Mother Jones - Voting Should Be Easier—But Not Like This - by AJ Vicens (@AJVicens) - August 18, 2016
• Washington Post - Online voting could be really convenient. But it’s still probably a terrible idea. - by Andrea Peterson (@kansasalps) - August 18, 2016

Labels: internet voting, online voting, privacy, usa

Minnesota uses optical scan systems and a small amount of hand counting.

Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State: Voting Systems map (PDF)

When a recount is necessary:

* You can see the ballots.
* You can determine for yourself whether they are being unfairly accepted or rejected, and how they should be counted.
* You can determine, therefore, whether you think the results fairly reflect the will of the people.

This is important because the current Senator-Elect, Al Franken, is certified as having won by 225 votes. Out of over 2.8 million votes cast in the 2008 US Senate election in Minnesota.

Voting systems matter because elections can be very close,
which means they will be challenged,
which means you must have VISIBLE EVIDENCE of the votes that can be counted by anyone,
so that the public can determine if the results are fair.

CNN: Minnesota canvassing board certifies Franken win - January 5, 2008

Labels: recount, usa

The classic Canadian example I usually use is the last Referendum on Quebec independence where it was 50.58% "No" to 49.42% "Yes".

There is another great example going on right now in the Minnesota senate race.
According to Daily Kos, "Today's latest results show [Democratic challenger Al Franken] is now trailing Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by 204 votes."

Wikipedia currently shows the tally at

Popular vote Coleman:1,211,562 Franken:1,211,356 Barkley:437,389

If you want that in percentages that's Coleman 41.988%, Franken 41.981%

That means if your voting machines have even a .01% error rate, they've already thrown the election. And the high-tech threat to Minnesota's optical mark-sense scanners? Dust.

Undecided Minnesota Senate Race Used Machines that Flunked Accuracy Tests - Wired - November 5, 2008

In an earlier posting, Wired writes

The problems occurred during logic and accuracy tests in the run-up to this year's general election, Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson disclosed in a letter submitted October 24 (.pdf) to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The machines at issue are ES&S M-100 optical-scan machines, which read and tally election results from paper ballots.

Johnson worried that such problems -- linked tentatively to paper dust build-up in the machines -- could affect the integrity of the general election this week.

ES&S Voting Machines in Michigan Flunk Tests, Don't Tally Votes Consistently - Wired - November 3, 2008

Say what you will about human failure modes, but dust usually isn't one of them.

Given that
1. Elections are often surprisingly close
2. Integrity of the count is paramount (your vote must be correctly counted)
3. Machines have many failure modes
4. A paper count by humans can be open and easily verified and rechecked

Then the best option to ensure confidence in election results is: hand-counted paper ballots.

(I don't know whether the Minnesota recount will require hand-counts.)

Labels: election, electronic voting, optical scan, usa

500th post.



What's interesting (and sad) is that Oprah blames herself for her voting problems.

First of all, if the machine doesn't record your vote, that's because the machine is badly designed. Second of all, it means you shouldn't be using machines.

It doesn't seem to occur to Oprah that the fault could lie with the machine.

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

shape-shifting electronic votes are more than fantasy, according to reports from states including West Virginia, Missouri, Nevada, Georgia and Colorado. Whether by accident or design, touch-screen voting machines have "flipped" votes from a caster's chosen candidate to one he opposes.

Unlike the old days when campaigners hung around street corners haranguing voters with handouts and pints of beer, the electronic era presents a sophisticated challenge to democracy.

Now, says Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and Subversion of Democracy 2000-2008, changes can occur seamlessly, without a breath of suspicion. Electronic glitches are only one of a range of mishaps, mistakes and dirty tricks that may decide outcome on Nov. 4.

Complaints about the electronic machines have mounted, along with calls for a return to paper ballots, like Canada's.

"More traditional systems are better," says Jeremy Epstein, a technological security expert and member of two Virginia legislative commissions that studied voting machines. "Paper-based and hand-counted ballots are fast, accurate and cheap. Studies show that machines are insecure and vulnerable to attack."

Fraud fears grow as [US] voters throng polls - The Toronto Star - October 21, 2008

(The article title is not great, something like "voting machine errors and voting surpression plague election" might have been closer to the mark.)

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

Election Data Services provides the US November 2008 voting equipment composition (I'm tempted to say "breakdown").

I should mention that they use some confusing terminology.
To me electronic voting covers optical scan, DRE and Internet voting.
They consider electronic voting to cover only DRE (usually touchscreen) machines.

An optical mark-sense reader is an electronic device just like a touchscreen machine. It uses optical sensors to read a dot on paper, rather than to record a fingerprint. It is subject to most of the kinds of attacks that a touchscreen suffers from: you can compromise the software/firmware, there may be errors in the software/firmware, the optical sensors may be mis-aligned or malfunctioning, the paper path may jam, the power can fail, etc.

As well, if you record the order in which voters submit their ballots for scanning, you can reverse this to determine exactly who voted for whom, by going down the stack of ballots - once again the secret ballot is compromised.

It is true that IF AN ERROR IS DETECTED or IF A RECOUNT IS MANDATED, you can then hand-count the ballots (albeit going slightly crosseyed staring at tiny circles for hours).

Of course if you were a clever hacker, you would just program the scanner to distort the election by a margin smaller than that which would trigger any investigation. A similarly small error would also not be detected.

NOTE: some kind of rendering bug puts this table far down on the page.

Type	% Registered Voters
Punch Cards	0.10
Lever Machines	6.72
Hand-Counted Paper Ballots	0.17
Optically-Scanned Paper Ballots	56.17
Electronic (DRE / Touchscreen) Systems	32.63
Mixed	4.22

from 2008 Voting Equipment Study (PDF)

According to votingmachines.procon.org the numbers previously were

2004: 1% paper, 35% optical scan, 29.5% DRE
2000: 1.5% paper, 29.5% optical scan, 12.5% DRE

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time.

...

so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

...

In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish.

An extensive New York Times Magazine report from January 6, 2008: Can You Count on Voting Machines?

And these are just the obvious, visible ways in which machines can fail.
There are many other silent ways in which the machines could fail internally that you would never detect.

You can move to optical mark-sense, but these are still machines:
* the poll workers need to get trained on them
* the paper can jam
* the scanners can fail
* the entire machine can fail

and on and on and on.

In case you think those are unlikely scenarios, they are already happening in advance voting in the United States.

The Jacksonville Times-Union reported long lines in northeast Florida, with at least two counties reporting problems with voting machines. In Duval County, 7 of 15 optical scanning machines used to count ballots had to be replaced, the newspaper reported.

Early voting suggests 2008 may see record turnout, expert says - CNN - October 21, 2008

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

One way to illustrate the simplicity of paper voting is to talk about how machines can fail, so...

On November 4, 2008 voting systems will fail somewhere in the United States in one or more jurisdictions in the country. Unfortunately, we don't know where. For this reason, it is imperative that every state prepare for system failures. We urge each state to take steps necessary to insure that inevitable voting machine problems do not undermine either the individual right to vote, or our ability to accurately count each vote cast.

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

Labels: electronic voting, usa

My friend Jessie sent me a link to this awesome clip of Homer trying to vote for Obama

Labels: electronic voting, simpsons, usa, video, voting machines

DOBBS: For more than two years here, we've been reporting on the serious threat that electronic voting poses to this democracy. As a result, some states have begun to scrap their e-voting machines altogether. But a third of the nation will still be using e-voting machines in November. And more disturbing a new report says election officials often are outsourcing their responsibilities to the very companies that make the e-voting machines, even trusting those companies to count the votes. Kitty Pilgrim has our report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Ellen Theisen has been a software writer for more than two decades. Living in Washington State, she was disturbed by electronic voting problems across the country, so she formed a nonpartisan citizen's activist group to investigate voting irregularities. A new report by that organization, VotersUnite.org, says that private companies now run many elections.

ELLEN THEISEN, VOTERSUNITE.ORG: Elections should be accountable to the people and run by public officials who are selected by the people to run them. So when that's handed over to private vendors, these public elections are no longer public.

PILGRIM: According to the report, many jurisdictions in the country are entirely dependent on the voting machine companies. The companies also tabulate results. State officials have to take their word for the results. The company owns the software and equipment and doesn't have to share it. It's proprietary. Election officials often can't do a recount without help. One state that rejected that arrangement is Oklahoma. In 1992, Oklahoma put in its own optical scan system, which is still owned and operated by the state.

MICHAEL CLINGMAN, OKLAHOMA STATE ELECTION BOARD: Election night, it's really all public officials dealing with the election and nobody else.

PILGRIM: Oklahoma wasn't tempted by new federal funds in 2002 when many other state and local governments used the Help America Vote Act money to buy touch screen machines.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was really nothing on the market we would buy then and there's still nothing we would want to buy today.

Lou Dobbs Tonight - August 20, 2008

Labels: electronic voting, usa

Rep. Rush Holt

Anything of value should be auditable. ...

To give voters the confidence that they deserve that their votes will be counted as they intended... in every election there should be an audit.

See the full interview



Countdown with Keith Olbermann - #4 Man vs. Machine

via Black Box Voting forum

Labels: usa, video

The basic premise of e-voting went something like this:

1) Electronics makes things "efficient" and will save money.
2) Elections are a government service just like any other.

Underlying this was an extraordinarily naive concept of elections as uncontroversial events that would never be challenged, and that no one would ever make a serious attempt to commit election fraud. There would never be close races. In essence, a disdain for the whole voting process, because it implies that a single vote will never make a difference.

This is simply demonstrably untrue, as elections with contested results have been a worldwide problem, with accusations flying, often with violent repercussions. Time and time again we have seen incredibly close elections.

The reality is: the more complicated and indirect you make the voting process and the vote counting process, the more you open the system to suspicions of fraud, and associated loss of confidence in the results of the election.

As I've said before, voting is an incredible act of civic alchemy, in which the will of the many is transmuted into tremendous power for a very few (e.g. in the US, a few hundred people leading a nation of 300 million). WITHOUT COMPLETE CONFIDENCE, this cannot work; a million people are not going to hand over power to a single politician unless they are confident s/he was actually selected by a fair vote.

In a partisan environment with close-fought elections, this means that now

EVERY SINGLE ELECTION WILL BE CHALLENGED

Oh, brilliant cost savings there, you idiot technocrats. Instead of pen and paper and election results in hours with full confidence of the electorate, elections will now turn into endless recounts, court challenges, and code examinations. Since it is almost impossible to prove that machines weren't hacked, any case where there is not a full paper trail will end up basically unresolvable.

Hand counted paper ballots were never broken,
the only way to fix this problem is to go back to them.

New Hampshire is lucky they have optical scan (the least-worst of the electronic options) so that confidence can be restored by a manual recount.

For a taste of what's to come, see ArsTechnica - Analysis: Why the "Hillary hacked NH?" story is important (Updated)

Labels: electronic voting, optical scan, rant, usa