Editorials: Protecting your vote | Ron Rivest/Boston.com

Sometimes, a few votes make a huge difference. Just ask Rick Santorum. In January, Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses, but, because of vote counting and tabulation errors, Mitt Romney was declared the winner. In the two weeks before the error became clear, Romney’s campaign gained momentum, while Santorum’s withered. Unfortunately, the same problem – or worse – could easily occur in Massachusetts. This year, voters will choose the president, and control of the US Senate may come down to the race shaping up between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

Florida: State law hinders vote audits | Palm Beach Post

Candice Hoke votes, but with some skepticism: “There’s truly no legitimate basis for trusting this election software when we know it is erratic, that it sometimes produces valid results and sometimes not.” Hoke, founding director of the Cleveland-based Center for Election Integrity, said a ballot count after the election is one key way to sidestep vulnerabilities in technology. But there’s a problem. Under Florida law, supervisors can audit only a tiny slice of ballots after an election – typically no more than 2 percent of precincts – and only after the winners are formally declared. “In defense of the legislature in Florida and elsewhere,” Hoke said, “they are not trained in software; they have often been told software and computers can’t make mistakes.”

Florida: E-voting system awards election to wrong candidates in Florida village | Computerworld

An optical scan vote tallying system, now used by some 300 U.S. municipalities, misreported the results of a Palm Beach County, Florida, municipal election last month. Dominion Voting Inc.’s Sequoia Voting Systems device mistakenly awarded two Wellington Village Council seats to candidates who were found in a post-election audit to have lost their races. The results were officially changed last weekend after a court-sanctioned public hand count of the votes. According to a story in the Palm Beach Sun Sentinel , the Sequoia vote counting software was set up in a way that didn’t correspond to the Wellington County ballot distributed to voters. As a result, votes meant for one candidate were credited to a different candidate.  In a product advisory notice issued last Friday, Dominion warned customers that problems could arise if the contest order on a paper ballot does not match the ballot order programmed into Sequoia machine. “The contest order on the ballots in the database can become out of sync with the contest order shown on the corresponding paper ballots,” the company noted. If the issue is not identified during pre-election tests, “election results will show the correct number of votes, but assigns them to the wrong candidate” the company said in the advisory.

Florida: Tangled Web: Wellington, Florida Drama Highlights Complexity of Technology, Value of Audits | Election Academy

An extraordinary story is emerging from an election from the March 13 municipal election in Wellington located in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Election Night returns indicated that two hotly-contested council elections had been resolved in favor of two candidates, but then a routine post-election audit suggested that their opponents had actually won due to errors in tabulating the county’s optical scan ballots. Following a court-ordered manual recount, the revised totals were confirmed. As if that weren’t extraordinary enough, a battle is now underway between the county clerk and her vendor about who was responsible for the error. The clerk is blaming the vendor, saying that the error – which appears to have been caused by a “synchronization” problem between vote-counting and tabulation machines – is something she and her staff have never seen before and thus could never have been expected to catch, let alone fix.

Guam: Governor Vetoes Election Reform Bill; Democrats May Try Override | Pacific News Center

As promised, Governor Eddie Calvo has vetoed election reform bill 413. The governor cited provisions in the bill that call for a recount of the 2010 election as his reason for vetoing it saying that these provisions are a continuation of “mischief” caused by the Guttierez camp during the election. Meanwhile the Democratic Party’s Executive Director Carlo Branch called it ironic that the governor would veto the measure on a day he himself has deemed as transparency day.  Governor Eddie Calvo vetoed the election reform bill or bill 413 last Tuesday but the legislature has yet to receive an official veto transmittal. The governor says that he vetoed the bill because of the provisions that call for an audit of all absentee and provisional ballots cast something he says amounts to an attempted recount of an election that has already been certified.

Florida: Lawsuit filed to stop swearing-in of Wellington Florida elected officials | wptv.com

Two Wellington residents – one of them the village’s first mayor – have filed a lawsuit to try to stop Tuesday’s swearing-in of candidates whom a March 19 recount determined were elected to the village council. A hearing will take place at 8:45 a.m. Monday in Palm Beach Circuit Court in front of Judge Robin Rosenberg. The lawsuit, filed by former mayor Kathy Foster and Gaye A. Scarpa, also seeks to stop the village canvassing board from certifying any election results other than those certified by county Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher on March 16.

Canada: Officials mum about source of cyber-attack meant to disrupt online voting | thestar.com

New Democrats remained tight-lipped Sunday about the cyber-attack that kept the country waiting for hours at Saturday’s leadership convention. Party brass refused to disclose the source of two Internet Protocol addresses that they say perpetrated an attack meant to disrupt its online voting system, as they tried to manage Thomas Mulcair’s first day as head of the federal NDP. The party is investigating the attack, in tandem with its voting system provider, Scytl, auditors Price Waterhouse Cooper and a number of “experts,” party president Rebecca Blaikie said on Sunday. “At this point, there is not a single point person,” Blaikie said of the investigation. “We’re going to investigate what (the attack) is, where it came from. . . As soon as we know that, we’ll be able to decide what to do next.” Blaikie said neither police nor Elections Canada have been contacted. The NDP identified the IP addresses, essentially identification tags assigned to web-wired devices, as perpetrators of a denial-of-service (DNS) attack. While the party insists the results were not compromised, some are questioning the integrity of the final, fourth-round ballot, which propelled Thomas Mulcair to victory after more than 12 hours of voting.

Florida: Dominion Voting Systems: software ‘shortcoming’ led to Wellington election fiasco | Post on Politics

The supplier of Palm Beach County’s voting and tabulating equipment says a software “shortcoming” led to votes being assigned to the wrong candidates and the elections office declaring the wrong winners in two recent Wellington council races. Ballots from the March 13 Wellington election were counted properly. But the results were matched to the wrong races. Council candidates Shauna Hostetler and Al Paglia were declared winners on election night, but an audit six days later showed John Greene and Matt Willhite had in fact gotten more votes.

Florida: Dominion Voting Systems releases statement taking the blame for Palm Beach County vote problem | South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

The supplier of Palm Beach County’s voting and tabulating equipment says a software “shortcoming” led to votes being assigned to the wrong candidates and the elections office declaring the wrong winners in two recent Wellington council races. County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher, who insisted a computer glitch rather than human error was to blame for the fiasco, claimed vindication after Dominion Voting Systems released its statement. Wellington and 15 other municipalities held elections on March 13. In Wellington, the ballot was set up with the mayor’s race first, the Seat 1 council race second and the Seat 4 council race third. Unbeknownst to elections officials, the vote totals for the mayor’s race ended up being reported and later certified as the results of the Seat 1 race. The Seat 1 vote totals were certified as the Seat 4 results and the Seat 4 vote totals were certified as the mayoral results. The problem wasn’t discovered until six days after the election, during a routine audit. The audit found no similar problems in the 15 other cities that held elections. The fact that the audit is conducted after winners are certified is a requirement of state law. Bucher said her office “will be working with the state to ask for the necessary law changes.”

Florida: Wellington election results tossed out, but legal ground uncertain | Palm Beach Post

In Palm Beach County’s latest voting embarrassment, Wellington decided Tuesday to toss out its tainted March 13 election results while Secretary of State Ken Detzner pledged to find answers and County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher continued to blame a computer software glitch for the tabulating turmoil. After a Monday recount showed the elections office had declared the wrong winners in two of three races, Wellington’s canvassing board voted to scrap the results and scheduled a decision for Tuesday on whether to instead accept the revised vote tallies. That would allow John Greene in Council Seat 1 and Matt Willhite in Seat 4 to be sworn in after it appeared they lost their races last week. But the decision to consider the recount numbers did little to clear confusion surrounding the race and how to resolve it.

Florida: Lawsuits brewing as all four candidates in Wellington recount stand their ground | Palm Beach Post

The Wellington council candidates wrongly named winners during last week’s election aren’t convinced Monday’s vote retabulation was accurate, nor will they give up their seats to the apparent winners. But the winners, whom Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher said were denied victory because of a software glitch, have no doubt Monday’s count was correct, and one has taken legal action. “It’s my responsibility to make sure the village of Wellington voters are heard. I’m filing it on their behalf,” said Vice Mayor Matt Willhite, who filed a complaint Tuesday in Palm Beach County Circuit Court against Wellington’s canvassing board and whose campaign declared him a “decisive” winner. The county elections office mistakenly named candidates Al Paglia and Shauna Hostetler winners in two council races and certified the March 13 results to the state on Friday. But a routine audit on Monday revealed that Willhite had easily defeated Paglia, while John Greene had edged past Hostetler. On Tuesday, the Wellington canvassing board that oversees election results tossed out the March 13 numbers and scheduled a meeting March 27 to decide whether to certify Monday’s retabulated numbers instead. But confusion and emotion were running high on Tuesday.

Florida: Palm Beach Elections Chief Bucher: ‘This is not a human error’ | Post on Politics

Palm Beach County’s elections office appears to have figured out the correct results for three Wellington elections after declaring two wrong winners last week and certifying the results to the state. But in the home of the 2000 “butterfly ballot,” does the fact that erroneous results went undetected for nearly six days in an election with fewer than 6,000 voters carry implications for the November presidential election? Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher characterized the problem as an isolated and unprecedented software glitch that was detected and corrected using routine audit procedures. She said no one in her office is to blame — and she took exception to questions about whether voters might question her office’s ability to deliver accurate results in the future. “This is not a human error. This is a computer-generated error, one that is on a computer system that is tested and certified by the state of Florida,” Bucher told reporters.

Guyana: No massive tampering of votes – APNU’s Granger | Demerara Waves

The main opposition A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) on Sunday for the first time openly conceded that verification of the results would not change the outcome of the general and regional elections held almost two months ago.
“We do not expect that the verification will reverse the major outcomes of the 2011 elections but we still need to get the elections right,” APNU Chairman, David Granger said on Christopher Ram’s weekly interview programme, Plain Talk. He, however, said his opposition coalition would still be pushing for the Statements of Poll for the November 28 polls to be reconciled as part of a process to clean up the operations of the Guyana Elections Commission.
“Regardless of what the examination or the verification comes up with, we should move beyond running some sloppy elections. The results are too slow, the logistical arrangements are too backward and people need to know within a matter of hours what the outcome is,” Granger said.

Voting Blogs: New Equation for Voting Technology: Auditing > Testing? | Doug Chapin/PEEA

Berkeley’s Philip Stark and David Wagner recently shared a paper they have submitted for publication entitled “Evidence-Based Elections“. While subject matter is highly technical, the authors do a nice job of making it accessible to the informed layperson – and tucked into the piece is an observation that could significantly revamp the approach to voting technology at every level of government nationwide. Stark and Wagner start with this assertion: “an election should find out who won, but … should also produce convincing evidence that it found the real winners – or report that it cannot.” Working from that premise, the authors describe various recent elections where voting technology failures created controversy about the validity of the results.

Missouri: State audit faults St. Louis Election Board in several areas | St. Louis Beacon

The St. Louis Election Board, under fire for more than a decade and the subject of a federal lawsuit, fared only slightly better in the latest state audit — which questioned some of the agency’s practices when it comes to finances, following the state’s open-meetings laws, tracking voters and monitoring campaign finance reports.

The audit was, however, a dramatic improvement from the 2004 audit — which found costly missteps with cell phones, and far more problematic practices. Overall, this latest audit rated the board’s operations as “fair.”

The audit, released today by state Auditor Tom Schweich, faulted the board’s preference for closed meetings — which by law must be only for certain types of personnel or procurement actions.

Colorado: Ballot transparency a statewide debate | AspenTimes.com

A candidate’s request to inspect ballots cast in Aspen’s 2009 municipal election has set in motion similar efforts around Colorado. The end result might be new rules that govern the review of ballots or that withhold them from public inspection altogether.

Meanwhile, Aspen resident and 2009 mayoral candidate Marilyn Marks is expected to review on Tuesday 100 ballots cast in Pitkin County’s Nov. 1 election. Rather than simply eye the ballots, though, Marks has suggested that county Clerk and Recorder Janice Vos Caudill and a group of election officials look over 100 to 200 ballots with Marks and discuss whether any of them are “identifiable.”

The potential to link a voter to a particular ballot via various election information that is available to the public through the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) has emerged as a concern among county clerks across the state as they respond to ballot requests from Marks and others.

Kansas: Secretary of state fined $5,000 for errors in campaign reports | KansasCity.com

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s campaign was fined $5,000 Wednesday for mistakes made in filing expense and contribution reports for the 2010 election. The Governmental Ethics Commission voted 7-2 to impose the maximum fine after questioning Kobach’s campaign treasurer, state Rep. Tom Arpke of Salina. At issue was nearly $80,000 that was omitted from the reports.

Commission Chairwoman Sabrina Standifer said the maximum fine was imposed, in part, because the campaign maintained that it reported the omissions to ethics officials. “The commission does not condone lack of candor before the commission,” Standifer said. “This is in no way, shape or form self-reporting.”

South Carolina: Audit finds anomalies in Beaufort County’s 2010 election data | islandpacket.com

An audit of the 2010 election released late last month by the S.C. League of Women Voters shows a few irregularities in data from Beaufort County’s voting machines. County elections executive director Scott Marshall said he’s not yet certain how many votes might have been affected by problems, but he said that number is small enough that it wouldn’t have affected any results.

Nonetheless, Marshall said irregularities in the data are “unacceptable” and said he will work to understand what caused them. “Anytime there is an opportunity for error in results being reported, I’m concerned about it,” he said. “We want to make sure that we do get it figured out, so we don’t repeat that.”

To perform its audit, the league analyzed the log files stored on memory cards inside county voting machines. “What we have seen around the state is that all the possible things that could go wrong have gone wrong somewhere,” said Duncan Buell, a University of South Carolina computer science professor, who helped lead the project.

South Carolina: Audit Of Election Results Cites Problem In Oconee County SC | WSPA

A recent audit of the 2010 general election results has raised questions about some counties’ ability to account for every vote cast. The audit was commissioned by the South Carolina League of Women Voters and performed by Duncan Buell, a USC computer science professor. Buell says eight counties, including Oconee, had “significant problems” in terms of being able to determine if vote totals were correct. According to Buell, Oconee County failed to save about two-thirds of its audit files: voting data stored on small memory cards – or “flash cards” – that are supposed to be removed from voting machines and uploaded to a central computing system.

“Only about a third of the cast vote records show up in the files,” says Buell. “They’re just missing 2/3 of the vote data which makes it impossible to do a serious audit.”

Connecticut: Secretary of State’s office selects precincts for post-primaries audit | NorwalkPlus.com

Deputy Secretary of the State James Spallone today joined Connecticut voting rights advocates from CT Voters Count and Common Cause for a public drawing to randomly select 12 precincts that will have election results audited following the September 13, 2011 municipal primaries that took place in 21 Connecticut communities. A complete list of the precincts selected is below. Precincts from Bridgeport, where municipal primaries were held on September 27th, will be drawn at random for a post election audit at a later date.

“On September 13th voters went to the polls across Connecticut to choose nominees to run in November’s general election to fill very important roles in local government,” said Deputy Secretary of the State James Spallone. “Our audit law exists to hold our election process accountable and reassure the public to have continued confidence that all votes were recorded accurately. We will repeat this process again in the near future for the city of Bridgeport, whose primary was held two weeks after other cities and towns.”

Editorials: Independent vote audit needed in South Carolina | The Post and Courier

During the last legislative session, a Senate judiciary subcommittee heard testimony from the State Election Commission and its critics about problems in the 2010 elections. The committee suggested that the two sides work together to recommend improvements to the process.

So far that hasn’t happened. Critics of the system, including the League of Women Voters, contend that the state’s electronic voting system is inherently flawed. The State Election Commission says the system is functional and that problems experienced in the last general election can be fixed.

Given the continuing disagreement over the electronic voting system, which is used throughout the state, an independent look at the situation is in order. The Legislative Audit Council ought to be given the task. A column on our Commentary page from former Clemson computer science professor Eleanor Hare cites problems with verifying data from the 2010 election.

Iowa: Communication gap blamed for election error | Fort Madison Daily Democrat

A communication gap at the Lee County Auditor’s Office led to incorrect tallies posted on the county website after the Keokuk School Board election Sept. 13, causing a losing candidate to request a vote recount.

Auditor Ann Pedersen explained Tuesday to Lee County Supervisors Gary Folluo, Ernie Schiller, Larry Kruse and Janet Fife-LaFrenz how the gaffe occurred and whether it changed vote totals.

“Entering the unofficial results had no bearing on the outcome of the election, but unfortunately it changed who won and who lost,” she said. “The first thing I did was call Chris Lindner and informed him that he had lost. Then I called Michael Beaird, who thought he had lost, and told him that he had won.” The official count of votes was made Friday, revealing the situation.

Congo: Police fire tear gas at opposition protesters | BBC News

Police in the Democratic Republic of Congo have fired tear gas at opposition protesters accusing the electoral commission of fraud. Hundreds of protesters were stopped as they approached the commission’s headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa.

Opposition candidate Jacquemain Shabani is due to stand against President Joseph Kabila in November polls. His Union for Democracy and Social Progress claims some voter registration has been fraudulent. Mr Shabani has called for an audit of the electoral register.

South Carolina: Audit of 2010 South Carolina Elections Shows Widespread Problems | Free Times

The State Election Commission is auditing voting data from the 2010 statewide elections, and as it does, critics of the state’s iVotronic touch screen voting machines say the government audit is proving there are problems with the system — problems the agency doesn’t dispute.

“They’re admitting that there’s holes in the data,” says Frank Heindel of Mount Pleasant, who runs the watchdog website SCvotinginfo. He adds that the elections agency also admits that there are counties where auditors haven’t been able to obtain proper election data. Emails and comments from agency officials back that up.

“We never received complete data from Charleston … No data is available for Lancaster and Orangeburg,” wrote Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire in one email to Heindel about the ongoing audit. The reason no information was available for Orangeburg was because a computer with the audit data on it there crashed, Whitmire said.

South Carolina: Local Governments wants an audit of State’s ES&S iVotronics | The Post and Courier

The Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments approved a resolution Monday asking for the state to audit how its voting machines are working. The proper functioning of South Carolina’s machines has drawn increased skepticism following human errors made during last year’s elections.

The council’s resolution noted, “a concern frequently expressed about voting machines is they do not incorporate a ‘paper trail’ that could facilitate unequivocal confirmation of election results.”

The action Monday did not come as a surprise. Council members, who represent most local governments in the tri-county area, agreed in April to draft such a resolution.

South Carolina: County voting records absent in South Carolina state audit | The Times and Democrat

An audit of electronic voting records by South Carolina election officials did not include local files, Orangeburg County Voter Registration Director Howard Jackson says. “The state sent our office a software program to extract data from the (November 2010) general election,” Jackson said. “When we installed it, it crashed the whole computer system.

“We now have a new system in place but that data is gone. We usually catalog and save data soon after an election but we ran into problems involving the special election for (Orangeburg County) sheriff.”

Following the November 2010 election, the Election Commission determined several counties certified inaccurate election results. As a result, it conducted audits of all 46 counties’ results beginning in January. Federal law mandates voting records must be stored for 22 months. Jackson said he provided state officials with paper tapes taken from the voting machines used in each precinct in the election.

New Jersey: “Human error” found in Fairfield New Jersey election results | NJ.com

A supposed malfunction of the problematic and much-debated Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines is being chalked up to human error. Results from Primary Election day last month puzzled two candidates who expected the exact opposite. Less than a month later, there’s a line in the sand being drawn between a second election and inspection of the voting machine itself.

“On Election Day, the votes cast for Candidates Vivian and Mark Henry registered for Candidates Cynthia and Ernest Zirkle, respectively,” read a statement addressed to all affected by the Democratic County Committee election in Fairfield.

According to documents provided to The News, Cumberland County Board of Elections Director Lizbeth Hernandez takes responsibility and regrets a pre-election programming error. Attached to a legal petition filed by the Zirkles were 28 affidavits from voters swearing they supported the two candidates. Those 28 votes of the 43 total cast on June 7 make up the majority.

Connecticut: Audit Report: Flawed by lack of transparency, incomplete data, and assumed accuracy | CTVotersCount.org

Last week, the University of Connecticut released its official post-election audit report on the November 2010 election, just short of seven months after the election: Statistical Analysis of the Post-Election Audit Data, 2010 November Election <read>

Like previous reports, this official report fails to provide confidence in the post-election audit process and in the accuracy of the election itself.

Colorado: Editorial: Restore Saguache voters’ faith with public recount | The Denver Post

A statewide grand jury’s finding that Saguache County’s controversial elections last fall ultimately were decided correctly should reassure local residents. Members of the panel went through events in minute detail and wrote a report that persuasively explains how procedural problems did not affect the outcome of the election.

It seems that information and transparency can go a long way toward defusing an explosive situation. We wish Saguache County Clerk and Recorder Melinda Myers, who was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, would fully embrace that message.

Myers remains engaged in a court battle with Secretary of State Scott Gessler over his plan to hold a public recounting of votes in that election.