Verified Voting
On Monday might, The Brad Blog reminded us that most of the votes in the Pennsylvania primary would be unverifiable:
On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't.
This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."
Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.
With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen sued a Nebraska voting machine company on Monday, seeking fines and reimbursements of nearly $15 million from the firm for allegedly selling nearly 1,000 uncertified machines to San Francisco and four other counties.
San Francisco's 558 AutoMARK ballot-marking devices were among 972 of the machines that Election Systems & Software sold in California last year without putting them through the state testing process. [...]
"ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught," Bowen said in a statement after filing suit against the company. "I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into the state, ignore the laws and make millions of dollars from California's taxpayers in the process."
OK, folks, the numbers are coming in and the carefully concealed extra costs of the electronic voting machines are coming home to roost — twice this year and again in 2008. Julie Rose, KCPW, reports the SLC Council is experiencing sticker shock:
The Salt Lake City Council is ready to bite the bullet and pay three times more for its municipal election than it has in previous years. The extra costs are mainly because the new electronic voting machines require more training for poll workers at higher wages. The machines are also in short supply, which could mean fewer polling locations, which troubles City Councilman Dave Buhler:
"I worry about what that does for voter involvement and participation — particularly for some of our older voters who may have a harder time getting out if the location is further away," says Buhler.
The men to call to account are Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert and his Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Cragun. The latter misled the SL County Council by saying The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) required a total conversion to the electronic voting machines (DREs). In fact HAVA only required one such machine at each polling place to accomodate voters with vision or hearing impairment. BTW, the DREs do nothing to accomodate voters who cannot enter polling places.
D4U member (and Democracy for Utah website administrator) Ryan Stokes got his letter published in the Deseret News today:
Vote 'no' on machines
I read your editorial (May 24) about people who want paper ballots to record votes, with probably the same sense of self-assuredness you must have felt writing it. I also feel that only ignorance or fear could produce an opinion contrary to mine on the matter of verified voting.
So to address your stated fears, I want to assure you that those opposed to this misuse of technology need not be uncomfortable with advances in technology, nervous Nellies, afraid of gremlins, older than 40, fuddy-duddies or Luddites.
The mark of education and understanding is turning the unknown into the known. Simple simulations have already shown that the voting machines we used in Utah can simply start out with more votes for one candidate than the other.
And you would demand I give my faith freely to my elected officials; I cannot have faith in elections that can start in favor of one candidate, or in which votes are discarded or invented. As far as I can see, humans are not outdated technology.
Ryan Stokes
Holladay
Ryan's letter was in response to the D-News' name-calling editorial from last Thurdsay. The full text of Ryan's letter is available below.
An unusually bilious screed in the Deseret News — did someone let Joe Cannon write this editorial?
Right now, some people are worried there are gremlins in the current voting machines — that electronic voting is unreliable and open to tampering. They spout anecdotal evidence of irregularities here and there to fuel their fear and want paper ballot backups to fend off any conspirators. It's the same kind of itchy-witchy thinking that leads people to hide bags of money under their mattresses.
And dare we say that almost all of those those skittish souls are likely older than 40? The younger generation sees the outcry for the tangible comfort of paper ballots as a hallmark of the fuddy-duddy. The notion sounds, to young ears, like people demanding election results be chiseled into granite for security. [...]
Utahns do not have the time, money or obligation to create a "security blanket" of paper ballots for Luddites to wrap around themselves in the night.
Did you get the message? If you think electronic voting isn't secure, you're a superstitious throwback to the 16th century who's afraid of technology.
You can respond to this "argument" at letters@desnews.com.
While proposed changes to the nation's voting laws may not require replacing Utah's 2-year-old electronic voting machines, time-consuming and potentially expensive equipment updates would probably be necessary.
The changes could cause enough difficulties that many of Utah's county elected officials are weighing in with resolutions opposing HR811, a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., that would require all electronic machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot that is "durable." [...]
"We've literally spent millions of dollars to implement this machinery, and it was all accurate," said Sandy Hoffman, Utah County elections coordinator. "If they forced us to use a scanned ballot it would take us forever and the press would maybe not even get election results on election night, it would take that long."
Hey, if it means I can be sure my vote was counted accurately, I'm willing to wait.
Florida's experiment with touch-screen voting machines is over.
The Florida Legislature voted Thursday morning to spend nearly $28 million to scrap the ATM-style machines used in 15 Florida counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, and replace them with ones that use paper ballots.
The push to switch Florida from the touch-screen machines was a top priority of Gov. Charlie Crist, who said he doesn't want the state to be embarrassed anymore by its elections. [...]
Under the bill that Crist will sign, the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines will have until summer 2008 to replace them with optical-scan machines. The bill gives counties until 2012 before disabled voters must also have access to machines that have a paper trail.
A Pennsylvania court held late today that voters have a right under the commonweath's constitution to reliable and secure voting systems and can challenge the use of electronic voting machines "that provide no way for Electors to know whether their votes will be recognized" through voter verification or independent audit.
The ruling by the Commonweath Court allows the continuation of a suit filed last year by 26 individual Pennsylvania voters against the Secretary of State that challenged the certification of Direct Electronic Voting systems (DREs) used in 56 counties across the state. [...]
In the voters' complaint, they alleged that the DREs failed during elections in Pennsylvania and in other states by losing votes, registering votes for one candidate when the voter was attempting to vote for another candidate; causing high "undervote" rates; failing to register votes when the ballot contained only one question; counting votes twice; failing to print "zero tapes" to demonstrate that no lawful votes were stored on the machine prior to the election; printing "zero tapes" after votes had been cast; reporting phantom votes and other irregularities.
The private voting machine company which manufactured the touch-screen hardware and software used during Sarasota, Florida's contested District 13 Congressional election between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R) sent a letter in December of 2006 to David Drury, the chief of the state's Bureau of Voting Systems Certification, dictating the terms of the state-run audit convened to investigate the causes for massive undervote rate which seems to have tipped the election.
The extraordinary 3-page letter [...] from Electronic Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) Vice President, Steven Pearson, is described as an "agreement" and instructs Drury on what may and may not be disclosed in the state's final audit report regarding the investigation. [...]
The long list of ES&S narrow dictates of what may or may not be discussed in the state report, which was finally released last month to much criticism from Jennings and others, includes (but is not limited to):
[...]
- No statements rendering opinions on proper uses, improper use, or correctness of source code
- No statements rendering opinions on security techniques employed or not employed
- No statements discussing relevance of any discoveries made in this review to any elections or contests outside the 2006 Sarasota General Election, U.S. House of Representative District 13 race
- No statements regarding conformance to source code standards of any type or kind
After years of DRE supporters, and indeed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, using the canard that blind and disabled voters must use DREs to vote privately and independently, a number of leaders in the disabilities community are speaking out against their having been used as a wedge to force the nationwide implementation of such disenfranchising, dangerous voting systems.
Two different landmark statements on the issue have now been released, The BRAD BLOG has learned. One statement [PDF] released last week by the Disability Law Center and the ACLU speaks in support of the decision by the Massachusetts Secretary of State to approve the use of ballot marking devices, as opposed to DREs, for use by the state's disabled voters.
The second, released today to The BRAD BLOG in advance of Congressional subcommittee hearings tomorrow, is signed so far by more than 20 leaders of the blind and disabled communities and calls for "an immediate ban" on DRE voting systems. Like the release from the Disability Law Center, the newly released statement crushes the long-overused myth that such unsecure, disenfranchising, failed technology is required for disabled access to private, independent voting.
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