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The Voting News Daily: Wisconsin Recount Mess, Vancouver approves Internet voting

WI: Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Election ‘Recount’ is a Mess – The Brad Blog

Where Minnesota’s post-election hand count of the 2008 U.S. Senate election between then Sen. Norm Coleman and now Sen. Al Franken was, as we wrote at the UK’s Guardian at the time, “one of the longest and most transparent election hand-counts in the history of the US,” Wisconsin has made it extremely difficult (putting it nicely) to know what the hell is actually going on in their statewide “recount” of the April 5th, 2011, state Supreme Court election between Justice David Prosser and Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg. Where Minnesota’s chief election official, Sec. of State Mark Ritchie, oversaw a process to ensure that updated and accurate numbers were easily tracked and transparently shared with the media on a daily basis, Wisconsin’s chief election authority, their Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), has posted (and even sometimes removed) confusing, misleading, and unclear updates, often with inaccurate information, on various schedules, and frequently with little or no explanation for wholesale changes and deletion of data. Where Minnesota counted every vote by hand with full public scrutiny, including photographs and video cameras, Wisconsin is tabulating ballots, often by the same oft-failed, easily-manipulated computer systems that counted them in the first place, behind barriers that preclude broad public oversight, under an agreement between both campaigns which disallows the use of video cameras by observers. The count, which began last Wednesday, often feels as if it’s happening in virtual darkness, at least to those of us trying to observe from afar, but the same sentiment has been shared with us by many we’ve spoken to who are there on the ground. There is an alarming lack of transparency to help the citizenry oversee the process in order to ensure accountability and an accurate count. To make matters worse, if that’s possible, chain of custody issues for the ballots appear questionable in a number of reported cases, after ballots have been kept in the same darkness by election officials — sometimes securely, sometimes not — for the three weeks following the election and prior to the “recount.” Read More

Canada: Vancouver approves Internet voting in advanced civic election polls – Vancouver Sun

On Tuesday the Vancouver city council approved in principle a pilot project to allow online voters to cast ballots in the advance polls for the Nov. 19 civic election. In a 10-1 vote, council said the benefits — increased voter turnout, elimination of lineups and less costly elections — far outweigh some of the potential downsides, including the potential for stolen voter packages, technical difficulties and hacking attacks and difficulty in identifying voter identification. “I totally appreciate for some that voting online is a totally, totally strange thing to do,” said Coun. Andrea Reimer, who wants to see more of the city’s business done online. “To my mind there are risks to online voting but there are also risks to have so few people voting. It isn’t about forcing anyone to vote online but to give people choices.”

The Voting News Daily: Nelson blasts Florida election-law fixes, Report shows that 1 in 6 recounts changed results

FL: Nelson blasts Florida Legislature’s 2012 election-law fixes – Legislature – MiamiHerald.com

Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson blasted state Republican lawmakers Monday for an election law overhaul that he says will block college students and military personnel from having their votes counted next year when he and President Barack Obama both seek re-election. Then Nelson waded into a controversy of his own when he suggested the U.S. special forces that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden could be blocked from voting if the Legislature passes the bill. “Should we deny those very military that carried out this very successful decapitating of the al-Qaida snake?” Nelson asked at a Capitol news conference. “Should we deny them because they have signed their voter registration card in a different way than they signed their absentee ballot overseas?” Full Article

Report: Recounts rarely impact state elections | California Watch

Between 2000 and 2009, recounts in state elections were extremely uncommon and rarely resulted in reversals when they did happen, according to a new study [PDF] by the Center for Voting and Democracy. Out of 2,884 statewide general elections there were 18 recounts, only three of which resulted in a change in decision. “There are people who have been pretty critical of the way that we do a lot of voting, thinking it could be done better. But at the same time the basic function of tallying ballots once the voter gets them to their poll worker or the machine, it seems to actually be doing well,” said Robert Richie, co-author of the study. … Having an automatic recount procedure for a race won by 0.5 percent, that’s way too high, absent some reason to think that there’s something that was systematically done in error or fraud.”

But Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, said the systems used in many states can’t be recounted because of their design. And even where recountable systems are used, fraud and error can easily go undetected if a race is not close enough to merit a recount. “You’ve got 18 recounts out of close to 3,000 contests, three of which resulted in decisions being reversed,” she said. “Well, three isn’t a large percentage out of 3,000, but it’s a sixth of 18. If those are the only cases that you’re doing a recount in, I think you have to look at that.” Californians have been nothing if not skeptical when it comes to using electronic machines and adopting methods like ranked-choice voting. But Smith said California is ahead of the curve when it comes to many of these issues. The state has been conducting a baseline manual tally of 1 percent of precincts in every county for decades. And in 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen commissioned a “top-to-bottom review” of voting systems and created a Post Election Audit Standards Working Group [PDF]. California also recently passed legislation launching a “risk-limiting audit” program to increase the scrutiny of electronic voting machines, which is something that Richie calls for in the study.

The Voting News Daily: Misplaced Ballots in Arizona and Wisconsin

AZ: Ballots ‘misplaced,’ raising concern over all-mail vote – Arizona Daily Star

The U.S. Postal Service “misplaced” about 85 mail-in ballots for an upcoming all-mail election in Sahuarita, Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez said Friday. While replacing the ballots was relatively easy for a smaller-city election, the incident is raising questions about the Tucson City Council’s recent decision to switch to all-mail voting. This is the first time the Recorder’s Office has heard of the Postal Service losing ballots, said Rodriguez. The disappearance of what “appears to be a single mail tray” of ballots was discovered when voters, all in the same section of the Quail Creek neighborhood, started reporting they hadn’t received theirs a week after they were mailed out. Just over 12,000 ballots were mailed to Sahuarita voters on April 21. So far, 85 voters have requested replacements. Rodriguez said the problem appears to be limited to “a single tray” of ballots intended for that neighborhood. With 1.6 million mail-in ballots sent in Pima County over the last decade, “this is a very rare occurrence,” she said. Postal workers “haven’t found any evidence that any mail was misplaced,” said Robert Soler, a spokesperson with the U.S. Postal Service in Tucson. Still, both Soler and Rodriguez urged voters to call the Recorder’s Office if they hadn’t received a ballot and they would be mailed before the election on May 17. “The voters have been issued second ballots and we have taken care of them,” Rodriguez said, who added that measures are in place to make sure there would be only one vote per person. Full Article

WI: Missing Verona ballots cause glitch in Supreme Court race recount – madison.comt

Newly appointed Dane County Clerk Karen Peters initially had doubts that the county could finish hand counting some 182,000 Supreme Court ballots within a 13-day deadline. But on Thursday she expressed confidence that it could be done. But that was before the glitch. On Thursday afternoon official “tabulators” were busily counting ballots from the city of Verona when the votes came up more than 90 short of what the electronic readout from the voting machines said they should. That sent Verona officials on a hunt, and a rubber-banded stack of 97 ballots turned up in the office of Verona City Clerk Judy Masarik. “There’s a table in the clerk’s office, and there was a binder and some other papers on top of the ballots,” said City Administrator Bill Burns, who found the stack. The statewide recount, requested by challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg after her narrow loss to incumbent David Prosser, has the potential to change the outcome, so the Verona situation caused much consternation. On election night, all the ballots were supposed to be secured in sealed bags, which were then supposed to be signed by local elections officials. The seals were supposed to remain intact. Full Article

The Voting News Daily: The Democracy Theater of Online Voting, Tennessee Needs Paper Ballots

CT: Online voting is risky and expensive | The Connecticut Mirror

Online voting is an appealing option to speed voting for military and overseas voters. Yet it is actually “Democracy Theater”, providing an expensive, risky illusion of supporting our troops. Technologists warn of the unsolved technical challenges, while experience shows that the risks are tangible and pervasive. There are safer, less expensive solutions available. This year, the Government Administration and Elections Committee held hearings on a bill for online voting for military voters. Later they approved a “technical bill”, S.B. 939. Tucked at the end was a paragraph requiring that the Secretary of the State “shall, within available appropriations, establish a method to allow for on-line voting by military personnel stationed out of state.” In 2008, over thirty computer scientists, security experts and technicians signed the “Computer Technologists’ Statement on Internet Voting,” listing five unsolved technical challenges and concluding: “[W]e believe it is necessary to warn policymakers and the public that secure internet voting is a very hard technical problem, and that we should proceed with internet voting schemes only after thorough consideration of the technical and non-technical issues in doing so.” Full Article

TN: Tennessee needs reliable paper ballots – The Tennessean

Now The Tennessean reports that this session of the state legislature may repeal the never-implemented Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (April 25). It was the fine work of an earlier session to give us this law. It is a reliable system of voting that requires the use of paper ballots for a possible real check on the accuracy of the electronic vote if and when it becomes necessary. This is quite impossible with the system that Tennessee has been using, which relies totally on electronic voting machines without paper ballots. These machines have been shown in many different places to be subject to large errors or even deliberate manipulation. There is no way to verify an election with these delicate machines. The present Tennessee law requiring a paper ballot record of every vote as counted by electronic counters was passed years ago. It had the strong support of most legislators, Republican and Democrat, but the law’s implementation has been deferred until the 2012 election. Some in this legislature are bent on repeal of the law, claiming that it will cost too much. But Tennessee for years has had money in the bank from the federal government which covers the full cost of the new equipment. Full Article