Humboldt County CA’s Nov 3 ballots are now publicly viewable…Meanwhile, the struggle goes on in Aspen – a poll shows over 66% want ballots released to the public….So you think e-voting is as safe as using an ATM? Then consider this: “Hacking ring steals $9 million from ATMs globally”… Bo Lipari’s testimony about New York’s…
Testimony on the voting machine pilot I gave at the New York State Senate Election Committee’s hearing on November 30, 2009. Full submitted testimony is posted here.
New York State was wise to do a pilot of our new voting systems. It provides an opportunity to work out the kinks in new systems and the procedures for managing them, allows us to learn from the inevitable mistakes, and to apply what we learn in the future. In my opinion, New York’s just concluded pilot was extremely valuable and revealed some important areas that need improvement. Certainly, privacy and ballot design issues often came up. However, given my limited speaking time I will submit comments on those two issues with my written testimony. Today I will discuss another pilot experience from which important lessons can be learned – the failure of some of the new voting machines and how New York can benefit from this failure.
Questions Raised in NY-23 Congressional Race
The NY-23 Congressional race had national attention, with 9 of 47 pilot counties holding elections in this race. Despite assurances from vendors, some of the new machines were inoperable on Election Day. In cases where machines failed, paper ballots were treated according to New York State emergency ballot rules, assuring that all votes were counted. Indeed, this is the great strength of New York’s new voting system – it ultimately relies on the marked paper ballot which contains a software independent record of voter intent.
Benton county citizens fight to keep their paper ballots….A new Florida corporation calling itself “Voter Verified Inc” files patent infringement against ES&S (and Diebold/Premier)…Bloomberg Spent $102 Million to Win 3rd Term yet won by fewer than 5 percent points…Complaint filed with Westchester County NY Board of Elections when two candidates names were missing from ballot…
Reporting Error about election audits in Westport CT news story……Illinois petition challenge process must go… Voter turnout in VA Governor’s race went up in 2009… Impossible Numbers Certified in NY-23 says Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. an election fraud investigator. Phillips is known for his book, “Witness to a Crime: A Citizens’ Audit of an American…
Giving thanks and a great tribute: A reader/activist writes that although John Gideon is no longer with us, his work continues to make a difference today – “John Gideon continues to battle on through his Daily Voting News legacy. What a resource he’s left people everywhere who need the information required to work on attempting…
New Jersey needs a lemon law for voting machines: Counties that purchased voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems, which provides the majority of voting systems in the state, in many cases entered into contracts that leave them little recourse if the machines malfunction or require repairs, according to a report issued today by New Jersey…
NY-23 E-Vote Failures Merit Full Hand-Count in Response, An update to the reports of an e-voting ‘virus’, and other failures, in New York’s recent Special Election for the U.S. House…New Yorks CD-23 had a source code bug not virus, but questions remain…Hoffman to Decide About N.Y. 23 Challenge This Weekend… HAVA chuckle in Nassau County,…
The biggest threat to democracy quietly sneaks forward: The FCC seeks public comment on internet elections by Dec. 10 of this year… Clearly the e-voting movement is not keeping up. Problems with voting machines pale compared to the risks of internet voting. Voting online is not secure and is not secret according to many tech…
Erroneous reports are circulating that a virus caused a problem in the scanners used in the NY-23 Congressional race. The reports, based on an inaccurate article published in the Gouverneur Times, are incorrect. There was no virus in the NY-23 machines. How do I know? Well, in the first place, the Dominion ImageCast scanners in question run the Linux operating system, which is nearly immune to viruses due to its inherent ability to lock out programs that lack explicit permission to run, unlike the highly vulnerable Windows operating system. Second, the State Board of Elections gave an account of the problem at their public meeting on November 10, and which I confirmed in a phone conversation with staff earlier this week. Here’s what really happened:
Let’s be clear. While no votes were lost due the ability to independently count the paper ballots, a problem did occur that affected certain machines around the state. The issue was a bug in the Dominion source code that caused the machine to hang while creating ballot images for certain vote combinations in multiple candidate elections (the ImageCast, like the other scanner used in New York, the ES&S DS200, creates digital images of each ballot which can be reviewed after the election). So if, for example, a “vote for three candidates out of five” race was voted in a certain way, the scanner would hang. This is one reason why the defect affected some, but not all machines with ballots containing this type of race, because only certain combinations of votes caused the memory problem. But here’s the thing – the problem was discovered before the election.
Hot story today: VIRUS found in the VOTING MACHINES Tainted Results in NY-23…Myrtle Beach’s missing 260 votes “found” when “correct” memory card put into machine to gather votes, voters will just have to trust the delayed digital count since there are no paper ballots – does that inspire confidence?…Benton County Arkansas officials do their citizens…
Our apologies if you did not receive a Voting News yesterday, there was a problem with our feedburner delivery… 260 votes lost or uncounted in a Myrtle Beach SC muni runoff election…Lackawanna PA will use a machine to recount its other failed machine count. Which machine count would you trust?….Phantom congressional districts get stimulus money…In…
A national survey of the public’s attitudes towards basic voting rights would shock the activist community – the poll shows majority support (55%) for literacy tests…Was Acorn defunding and “bill of attainder…an example of class warfare?”…The University of Connecticut’s analysis of the state’s 2008 post election audit is out…NY 23 can Doug Hoffman un-concede?…its a…
In a move to enfranchise soldiers deployed overseas, the Michigan House of Representatives has passed legislation that would allow blank absentee ballots to voters overseas by fax or e-mail. If House Bill 5279 passes the Senate and becomes law, local election officials will be able to send and receive applications for absentee ballots via fax or e-mail, and also be able to send blank absentee ballots to voters electronically. Voters will then print, mark and send the completed physical ballots to their local Michigan election officials. H5279 passed the House unanimously on November 5. Senate committee action is likely in December, according to Emily Carney, an aide to Senate Campaign and Election Oversight Committee chair Sen. Susan McManus.
House Bill 5279 implements a central recommendation of the Pew Center on the States’s January 2009 report “No Time to Vote“. The Pew report stated that Michigan currently does not allow overseas and military voters sufficient time to vote because ballots have to be sent and received via postal mail. The Pew Center recommended that Michigan allow election officials to e-mail blank absentee ballots to overseas and military voters, and accept completed ballots beyond the current election-day deadline.
Last week the state Massachusetts, intending to improve military voters access to the ballot while serving overseas, approved a law which throws the integrity and security of those ballots into question by allowing their return by email. The original bill contained excellent provisions which would have helped solve one of the biggest problems facing overseas military personnel – timely receipt of absentee ballots. Currently, absentee ballots are sent by conventional mail, which can take two weeks to reach military voters. The problem is further exacerbated when soldiers are deployed in the field where they may not receive mail for long periods of time.
In its original form, the Massachusetts bill allowed military only to acquire an absentee ballot online. The downloaded blank ballot could then be printed, voted on and sent back, greatly enhancing the availability of ballots. But, in an ill conceived last minute addition, the bill was modified to also allow return of voted ballots by email. In terms of voter privacy and ballot security, email return of ballots is one of the worst choices and should never have been inserted in the bill let alone been approved. It’s not like the data wasn’t available. All lawmakers needed to do was consult a 2008 NIST research document which lays out the problems with email return of ballots in gruesome detail.
The Herald Tribune says Sarasota Florida new voting-machine problems must be remedied, and statistically significant audits should be implemented state wide…Did you think the ballot you cast in the 2008 election was secret? Think again if you live in Hawaii…Three Indiana county precinct election results flipped….Northern Kentucky set to get new scanning machines, why isn’t…
Thank you for inviting comments on your Precinct Level Data Pilot Project, which seeks to provide precinct-level vote tabulation data to the public. We applaud Secretary Bowen’s pilot program. Timely precinct-level election results from California counties are crucial for establishing the integrity of California’s elections, for supporting analyses of election results and for designing and conducting post-election vote-tabulation audits. We have examined the sample data from the four counties—Orange County, Sacramento County, San Francisco County and San Luis Obispo County—that provided data for the Pilot Project.[1. See: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2009-special/precinct-data/index.htm] We submit these comments in the hope that you find them helpful as the Pilot Project goes forward.
A ‘Post-Racial’ America? Not yet….On the law surrounding lines at polling places…Pay to play in New Jersey ?…Ex-first selectman has lawyer probe Middlebury CT voting, machine malfunction and some ballots photocopied…They don’t float: Clark County Indiana found out the hard way that if you store voting machines in a basement they may get water damage,…
Internet voting whack-a-mole and its inherent security risks and privacy loss – done on the backs of our troops: National voter groups urge MA Gov Deval Patrick to ask Legislature to remove dangerous e-mail voting provision from veterans bill, a Michigan bill would have military vote by email….Aspen CO seeks dismissal of suit for ballot…
Unfortunately Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed military internet voting bill Wednesday even after National and State Voting Rights Groups urged him not to …Verified Voting has a new blog, you can sign up for updates…. …D.C. takes up same day registration, so should Congress…Brad Friedman on Acorn and “protecting” the taxpayers….Study shows permanent mail voting…
UPDATE November 13: Massachusetts Lawmakers are listening to the concerns raised by computer scientists and civic organizations, and there is interest in correcting the oversight in the bill signed on Wednesday with new emergency legislation. Please visit the VerifiedVoting Action Center to send Massachusetts lawmakers an email urging protection of soldiers’ right to secret, verifiable…
Bad for the country, bad for New York
On the face of it, it would seem that the proposed merger of Premier Voting Systems (aka Diebold) and Election Systems & Software (ES&S) shouldn’t matter much to New York State. After all, Premier pulled out of the state over a year ago, and ES&S splits the state’s voting system sales with a competitor, Dominion Voting Systems. But there’s plenty of reason for New Yorkers to be wary of further consolidation of the rapidly shrinking voting machine industry. Recall the not so distant past when ES&S, along with Sequoia Voting Systems, jointly decided that paperless voting was New York’s future and offered only touch screen DREs to the state. When New Yorkers for Verified Voting organized the first ever demonstration of a paper ballot system with an accessible Ballot Marking Device and an optical scanner at the Albany State Capitol, the makers of the AutoMark ballot marking device, with whom we had arranged the demo, were ordered by ES&S to remove the scanner because it didn’t fit their product plans. The New York Daily News reported this story in 2005:
At the Capitol recently, a lobbyist managed to shut down a demonstration of optical scanning by getting his client to pull its machine from the display. Assemblywoman Sandra Galef of Westchester called the company to object and was told that New York is “a touch-screen state.” ” I said, ‘We are?’” Galef recalled. “I’m a legislator. I don’t think I’ve voted on anything.”
Verified Voting today joined with computers scientists and advocacy organizations in signing the following recommendations on post-election audits to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
We, the undersigned, participated in a working meeting on vote tabulation audits hosted by the American Statistical Association (ASA) on October 23 and 24, 2009. We write to emphasize that future iterations of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) should facilitate effective vote tabulation audits. We applaud the VVSG II’s requirement for independent voter-verifiable records (IVVRs). This requirement is necessary to enable verification of election outcomes independently of the tabulation systems; it should be adopted as soon as possible. However, if election outcomes are to be verified efficiently, vote tabulation systems must meet requirements that go well beyond the draft VVSG 1.1.
When I heard that New York City had found that a photocopy of a ballot could be successfully scanned by both of the two systems being used in New York State, my first thought was that this is Sun-Rises-in-the-East news. It didn’t surprise me, and the first line of defense against attacks involving any type of fake ballot, photocopied or printed, is well designed and implemented ballot management security procedures. But this is a complex issue which bears some discussion.
Before discussing the security threat, let’s look at a technical question – should a scanner be able to detect a photocopied ballot? One of the challenges posed by modern high resolution copiers and printers is that they are capable of producing all manner of difficult to detect counterfeits. This became an extremely serious problem in the 1990’s as convincing counterfeit currency became easy to produce using the off the shelf copiers. In response, the United States has been replacing currency with new bills containing anti-counterfeiting features. So it’s no surprise that a modern copier can create a ballot that can be successfully scanned.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: Will Voters’ Choice Be Outdone by Sponsorship?…Security expert: no way to secure Internet voting…Hackers cracked military systems and cut mains power…Internet voting too dangerous, especially for our military…. D.C. passes same day voter registration…Audit finds that Venice FL ballots were counted properly…Vanderburgh County Indiana wrangles with voting monopoly ES&S…
The Election Day Survey plays an ongoing, important, and unique role in collecting and publishing data on election administration in the United States. Balancing the right of the public to know how our elections function with the burden of reporting useful data by those who administer our elections is clearly a complex task but one we feel is extremely worthwhile. There are several categories of data we believe are very useful to collect, and our recommendations address those categories specifically.
Voting System Reports
Beginning in 2004, Verified Voting collaborated with various partners to collect voters’, observers’ and others’ reports about incidents or malfunctions including those involving voting systems, the mechanism by which voters cast their votes. These reports came to the “Election Incident Reporting System” (EIRS) primarily via calls to a hotline operated by the Election Protection Coalition, part of an effort to protect the rights of voters to cast a ballot and have confidence that their ballot was counted. We made available a free public dataset of those reports. The project was cited in a GAO report about electronic voting security and reliability in 2005.
We’re still seeing articles on Nov 3 voting problems… Ellen Theisen has updated Voters Unite’s database on Voting Problems By State to the November elections. This database has been key evidence used to help get paper ballot laws passed in several states and was key to passing a law in my home state of North…
Tennessee Judge Says No to Tennessee Voter Confidence Act Injunction, Yes to Crucial Plaintiff Claim, the Secretary of State will issue requests for proposals for NEW voting equip sometime in December or January…A programming error caused 2,452 straight-party votes to go uncounted in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania…Cuyahoga County sheds its reputation for troubled elections with smooth…
Many states run elections as if they are beta tests. An prime example are the Vote Centers in Galveston County Texas. Officials ran into surprises when all vote centers tried to start up at beginning of day, causing the state’s voter registration database to crash. And since these vote centers are dependant on the online…
Sarasota Election Supervisor Kathy Dent was aware that the Diebold OSX optical scanners did not consistently read blue ink. She knew this before the Venice Florida election that was held on Nov 3. But what does the sample ballot for Venice Voters say? It says“Use only the marker provided or a blue or black pen.”…
Verified Voting Foundation Board of Advisors member Joseph Lorenzo Hall and Aaron Burstein submitted the following response to the EAC’s letter from October 21 2009.
Thank you for your reply of October 21, 2009, to our letter of October 13, 2009. We appreciate your pointing out that relevant documents are available on the EAC’s website. Of course, it was the EAC’s commendable policy of making these documents publicly available that allowed us to initiate this dialogue. As you know, neither test plans nor test reports were available under the NASED qualification testing program; this change is important for establishing a more trustworthy voting system testing and certification program under the EAC. After carefully reviewing your letter, however, we continue to question whether iBeta’s test plan for the Premier system fully incorporates some of the lessons of the California Top-to-Bottom Review (TTBR) into EAC testing and certification. Even for the examples the EAC points to in its reply, the test plan does not state in sufficient detail what iBeta proposed to do to test the system. For example, an element of the security test—“port access is controlled” (test plan p. 73)—states a desired result or conclusion but does not describe how iBeta would arrive at that conclusion nor under what conditions would this element fail.