Voting Blogs: Outside Looking In? Public Access to Election Databases | Election Academy

The Indianapolis Star recently ran an editorial calling on the Marion County Election Board to give access to five “unslated” (i.e., non party endorsed) candidates running in the Hoosier State’s May 8 primary.

Here’s the crux of the issue, from the editorial:

The unslated candidates point out that the database is a public record compiled at taxpayer expense. The state Public Access Counselor has informally sided with them, but has advised that the Marion County Election Board adopt a policy ordering the registration board to act.In a special meeting last week, County Clerk Beth White moved to do so. Neither of her fellow election board members offered a second. Patrick Dietrick and Mark Sullivan both are party appointees; but each said he needed to know more about the cost and complexity of releasing the data, as well as the privacy implications.

Tennessee: Former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis says he was denied right to vote | The Tennessean

Former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis said he and his wife Lynda were denied the right to vote Tuesday in his Fentress County hometown. “We walked in and they told me I was not a registered voter. I had been taken off the list,” said Davis, who served two terms representing the fourth congressional district of Tennessee, leaving office in 2011. “These are people who I grew up with. I told them I live here. I went to school about 20 yards away.” Davis has been voting in Pall Mall, Tenn., since 1995, he said. He has also voted in city elections, in Pickett County’s Byrdstown, where he served as mayor from 1978-82, for about the last 15 years, he said.

Georgia: Georgia could implement online voter registration | ajc.com

Georgia’s voter registration process could add an online option under a proposed bill that includes the technology provision as one of several updates to the state’s current voting laws. HB 899, sponsored by Rep. Buzz Brockway, would allow the secretary of state’s office to develop an online system voter registration system for state residents.  Applicants must have a Georgia driver’s license or identification card from the Department of Driver Services, and the information would be matched to the state’s Driver Services database. The bill was passed by the House on Monday and is on its way to the Senate for consideration.

United Kingdom: Data-matching: Electoral Commission throws a spanner in the database | politics.co.uk

Government plans to meddle with who gets to vote in British elections appear to have suffered another setback today. All parties support moves to switch from household registration to individual electoral registration (IER). But there are fears six million voters could fall off the list of those eligible to vote, and the coalition has been under serious pressure to come up with ways to fix this. Its solution is ‘data-matching’, which would see the government use its other databases – for driving licences, benefit payments and the like – to retain up to two-thirds of the current electoral register. Ministers have placed great store by this – constitutional reform minister Mark Harper, as recently as February 9th, stated: “I am confident we now have a set of proposals behind which we can all unite.”

Wisconsin: Glitch puts some Wisconsin voters in Africa | JSOnline

Clerks in the state are scrambling to assign voters to the right districts after last summer’s redrawing of legislative maps, with changes to the process putting voters in incorrect locations across town or even across the Atlantic Ocean. The problems could add to the confusion for voters who may already be affected by the redistricting law approved by legislators last summer. Primaries for spring races are being held on Feb. 21, leaving little time to sort out the problems. The errors affect thousands of voters around the state and stem from different sources, including inaccuracies in U.S. Census Bureau data and problems with a new way of assigning voters to districts in a state database.

California: Debra Bowen and The Lessons of Technology | NBC Bay Area

Quietly, a political storm is growing over technology, access and the state of California. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is in the middle of it. She is facing serious criticism over how she manages technology. The state’s Cal-ACCESS system — which provides the public with vital data on campaign contributions and lobbyist activist — went down three weeks ago. A database that verifies voter registrations also went down.

These problems come on top of earlier criticism that Bowen’s office was not moving fast enough to enable on-line voter registration. (And then there are a few people like your blogger who have argued that she should be more open to electronic signature gathering for ballot initiatives and referenda). Some criticism is warranted, but much of it is unfair — and misses the crucial context.

One of Bowen’s greatest public services has been her smart skepticism about technology in voting. The secretary of state may well have saved the state from serious election problems by challenging the technology and security of electronic voting machines.

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.

National: 13 States Plugged Into Electronic Poll-books | The Canvass

“I’ve been doing elections for 33 years, and I think electronic poll-books have been the best advance in elections I’ve seen since we began computerizing many years ago,” says Wendy Noren, county clerk in Boone County, Mo.

What is an electronic poll-book? In Boone County, it is a system of networked computers in each polling place pre-loaded with data on registered voters. This system has shortened voter check-in time at polling places from 5 to 6 minutes to just 15 to 20 seconds, which everybody likes. That translates into huge savings; in 2012, Noren expects to hire 25 percent fewer poll workers, dramatically reducing one of her two largest expenses.

The other big expense? Training for poll workers. Here, too, electronic poll-books have provided savings. A well-designed, uncomplicated electronic poll-book reduces training needs and associated costs.

Editorials: North Carolina voter law changes hinder ballot access | Salisbury Post

In cities across the state, North Carolinians are going to the polls this week to exercise the most fundamental right of our democracy: the right to vote. The underlying principle of our democracy is that we are all equal in the voting booth: black or white, young or old, rich or poor. When we cast our ballot, we all raise an equal voice to determine the shape of our government.

Sadly, some North Carolina legislators seem determined to reduce the chorus of voices that will be heard in the 2012 elections. Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed an onerous bill to make voters show a government photo ID when they vote. It may seem like a common-sense requirement, but more people than you may imagine don’t drive or have a photo ID — and they are disproportionately people of color, the elderly, low-income citizens, women who change their names and the young. For example, a match-up of motor vehicle and election databases shows that while African Americans are 22 percent of N.C. registered voters, they are 32 percent of the roughly 500,000 registered voters without a state-issued ID.

California: California comes online…sort of – Governor signs legislation allowing for online voter registration | electionlineWeekly

With the stroke of a pen from Gov. Jerry Brown, California recently once again legalized online voter registration providing an additional opportunity for more than six million residents of voting age to register to vote. California law already allows for online voter registration, however the process on the books before the new legislation was approved was contingent upon the completion of the state’s federally approved voter registration database — VoteCal.

While the state does have a statewide voter registration database, the current system does not make it possible to fully register to vote online. Tired of waiting for the state’s fully federally compliant statewide voter registration database to come online San Francisco Senator Leland Yee introduced SB 397 which would allow counties to offer online voter registration now.

“This is an important first step toward fully upgrading California’s voter registration, making use of better technological tools to make the voter registration process more accurate, less expensive, and more efficient,” said David Becker, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Election Initiatives.

Pakistan: Election Commission of Pakistan excludes 37.1 million suspected votes from electoral rolls | South Asian News Agency

Election Commission of Pakistan excluded 37.1 million suspected voters from the electoral rolls and the new electoral roll is composed of more than 87.2 million voters. The Secretary ECP Ishtiak Ahmad Khan issued details from headquarter of Election Commission of Pakistan on Saturday.

Ishtiak Ahmad Khan said the ECP handed over its database of Electoral Rolls-2007 to NADRA on 11th February 2011 for verification of voters against their database. NADRA reported back on 05/03/2011 that out of 81 Million voters registered in Final Electoral Rolls 2007, 44 Million voters were verified against CNIC database whereas approximately 37 Million voters were not verified which was made public by the ECP through a press release dated 8th March 2011.

After deletion of these 37 million unverified voters from the Draft Electoral Rolls, 2011, NADRA added 36 million who had obtained CNIC after preparation of Electoral Rolls-2007. NADRA can provide evidence from its database with regard to 37 Million unverified voters as well as 36 Million voters who have been added into the Draft Electoral Rolls, 2011.

Pakistan: Voter fraud: 65% of votes in Balochistan were bogus | The Express Tribune

Balochistan had the highest rate of fake voters during the 2008 general election, according to findings from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA).

A glance at statistics from the province do not reflect well on the electoral process. In Killa Abdullah there were total of 387,823 registered voters and only 70,820 could be verified. In Kech, of the 218,953 registered voters only 84,500 were legitimate. In Loralai there were 226,658 registered voters, of which a meagre 52,657 could be verified. Of Jaffarbabad’s 391,608 registered voters, only 98,919 were not bogus.

The legitimacy of our current government has been severely questioned by recent findings that almost half of the entries in voter lists at the last election were fake. The startling facts emerged as the ECP and NADRA were preparing new voter lists based on computerised national identity cards(CNICs). Discrepancies emerged between the electoral rolls used for last general election and succeeding by-polls held so far.

Colorado: Arapahoe County completes successful test of Web-based voter check-in | Littleton Independent

The Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office completed a “stress test” Aug. 3 to determine the viability of using a web-based voter check-in system in the 2011 Coordinated Election. The goal of the test was to determine whether the county would be able to successfully connect to SCORE, the Colorado Secretary of State’s web-based pollbook of all registered voters, from 17 Vote Center locations on Election Day, Nov. 1, 2011.

“The stress test simulated an Election Day scenario, with a large number of voters being artificially checked in at our 17 vote center locations at once in order to place strain on the SCORE server and our network connections,” said Clerk and Recorder Nancy Doty. “Our systems handled the volume beautifully with no major issues with connectivity or download speeds. We plan to move ahead using the web-based pollbook starting this year, instead of the inches-thick paper pollbooks we have used for decades.”

Voting Blogs: Florida’s “hacktivism” controversy and its lessons for the election community | PEEA

Recently, the Miami Herald ran a story about the boasts of a hacker named Abhaxas that he had twice compromised Florida’s election systems by gaining access to servers with sensitive data. State and local election officials – and their vendors – vehemently denied the hacker’s claims and insisted that their systems (and the personally-identifiable voter data on them) remained insecure.

That didn’t stop what the Herald called “major geek news clearinghouses” like Gizmodo and Slashdot from publicizing news of the alleged hack, leading to lots of “here we go again” in the comments.

Even more importantly, the hacker appears to have taken the public denials of harm as a challenge – and has invited others to do the same. Last week, he tweeted the location of the vendor’s server, saying it had a “hack me” sign on it and noting “hack one, have access to all”.

New Mexico: Secretary of State Dianna Duran ruffles feathers | latimes.com

Dianna Duran, New Mexico’s secretary of State who took office in January, sounded a tad pugnacious in March when she reported that 117 foreign nationals with phony Social Security numbers had registered to vote and 37 had cast ballots in elections. There was, she said, “a culture of corruption” in the state.

Duran, who had ordered her staff to check 1.16 million voter registration records against motor vehicle and Social Security databases, also raised eyebrows by referring 64,000 voter registration records to the state police, citing irregularities.

No one has been charged with a crime, and Duran, a former Republican state senator and county clerk, has since taken fire from Democratic legislators, public interest groups and news organizations that say she has overstated her case, scared voters and withheld proof of her claims.

Pakistan: Election Commission of Pakistan postpones registration of new voters | The Express Tribune

The Election Commission of Pakistan (EC) has postponed a door-to-door campaign for the registration of new voters, Express 24/7 reported on Tuesday.

The campaign has been postponed due to a delay in the printing of electoral rolls. Chairman National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) Ali Arshad Hakeem had requested that the schedule be reconsidered due to problems being faced in the printing of lists containing 80 million voters.
Following the request, the election commission decided to start the campaign from next month.

New Mexico: Top elections official says review of voter rolls is about accuracy, not fraud | The Republic

Secretary of State Dianna Duran repeatedly told a panel of lawmakers Friday her office is not pursuing any political agenda regarding voter registration in New Mexico and she flatly denied allegations that she’s targeting illegal immigrants in a review of the state’s voter rolls.

Duran, a former Republican state senator and county clerk, said she’s simply making good on a campaign promise to verify that all of the 1.16 million people who are registered to vote in New Mexico are in fact legally eligible to cast a ballot.

“I told the people of the state of New Mexico last year … that I would do my best to serve in the best possible way that I could to assure integrity in the election process, integrity in the election system,” she said. “That’s all that is going on here. It is not a witch hunt. It is not a fishing expedition.”

New Mexico: Duran praised, attacked for voter fraud investigation | Alamogordo Daily News

A legislator on Friday asked Secretary of State Dianna Duran to end a state police investigation of 64,000 registered voters, but Duran said she was duty-bound to continue it. She said the expertise of police investigators would help her office make sure that New Mexico’s voter rolls were updated and accurate.

State Rep. Richard Vigil, D-Ribera, said Duran had mishandled the case by involving police without any evidence that a crime had been committed. “I have a piece of advice for you,” he said to Duran during the end of a three-hour legislative hearing. “Bring those files back from the Department of Public Safety. Hand them to the 33 county clerks” who have expertise in voter registrations and elections.

If the clerks find any evidence of voter fraud, Vigil said, the case should be turned over to the appropriate district attorney for criminal prosecution.

Florida: Did hacker get ‘inside details’ of Florida voting systems? | MiamiHerald.com

Florida was the joke of tech websites this week after a hacker boasted he tapped the “inside details of Florida voting systems.” Twice in a week, the anonymous Twitter user @Abhaxas posted links to lists of voting-related files.

“Who still believes voting isn’t rigged?” he wrote above one list. “If the United States government can’t even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? FAIL!”

Except he didn’t breach any voting systems, the Florida Division of Elections says. And a major Web vendor to most of the state’s elections supervisors, VR Systems, doesn’t use the same kind of servers accessed by the hacker.

Oklahoma: Cherokee justices order voter comparison in recount appeal | Tulsa World

Cherokee Supreme Court justices Saturday ordered a comparison of the 15,000 voters who participated in the June 25 election for principal chief with the 300,000 registered Cherokee Nation members who are eligible to vote.

The action came during a hearing on Principal Chief Chad Smith’s appeal of the election. He had asked the court to order an electronic recount or to invalidate the election and call a new one. Bill John Baker is the chief-elect, having won by a 266-vote margin in a hand recount on June 30.

The comparison could match names of voters who should not have been able to vote, as first reported in a Tulsa World review of databases provided by the Cherokee Election Commission.

Florida: Abhaxas Hacks Florida’s Voting System Again | Zeropaid

In an apparent effort to show that election votes can be tampered with, Abhaxas previously dumped parts of the Florida voting database to PasteBin. Officials since then downplayed the hack, but suggested that the systems are more secure than ever before. Even though authorities, on top of this, were contacted, it seems that Abhaxas decided to hack the database again. Call it whatever you like, but it seems that Florida is in for a repeat of what happened last week.

Apparently, since the initial hack, Florida officials downplayed the incident saying that there is no reason to fear because of a paper trail and that only a select few are able to have access to the votes to begin with.

Florida: Florida Election Servers Hacked Again | InformationWeek

For the second time in a week, a hacker has broken into systems connected with voting in Florida, stolen data, and released it to the public. The most recent breach occurred after Florida election officials had touted the security of their systems. “Glad you cleaned things up, pretty secure now guys,” said the hacker responsible for the attack–who goes by the name “Abhaxas”–in a post to Pastebin uploaded on Thursday. That post also contained data obtained during the second hack.

We spoke with Chris Sather, Product Management for Network Defense at McAfee about McAfee’s next generation firewalls that analyze relationships and not protocols.

Via Twitter, Abhaxas said that hacking into the servers–using well-known and what would be easy-to-close holes–took him about 10 minutes. Furthermore, he said he had access to all 310 databases on the server, though only publicly released information from two of them.

Florida: Officials say hacker did not steal sensitive Florida voting database information | Bridget Carey/Miami Herald

Florida elections officials said no sensitive information was exposed following a Saturday morning Twitter post by a hacker who claimed to access a Florida voting database. The hacker, who writes under the Twitter name Abhaxas, posted lines of data and passwords said to be “inside details of Florida voting systems.”

The information was from a poll worker training program within a Liberty County elections website, according to Marcia Wood, supervisor of elections for Liberty County, which is based out of the Panhandle city of Bristol.

“It has nothing to do with vital information at all,” Wood said. “It’s not confidential information. As far as the actual passwords they claim to have gotten, it was for poll workers to be able to log on to view training videos.”

California: Online voter registration moves closer in California | Central Valley Business Times

Legislation that would allow Californians to register to vote via their county’s election office website has been approved by the Assembly Elections and Redistricting Committee.

If the measure makes it into law, California would joins several other states that already offer online registration. California has lagged behind awaiting implementation of the statewide online database system known as VoteCal, which has been delayed until at least 2015.

SB 397, authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, also puts into place greater safeguards to fraud than the current paper registration process.

Florida: Hacker allegedly breaches Florida voting database | The Raw Story

Voters concerned about the reliability of electronic voting may now have another reason to worry. A hacker known as Abhaxas claimed Saturday to have released data from one of Florida’s internal voting databases.

“Who believes voting isn’t tampered with?” Abhaxas asked Twitter followers.

Data in the file uploaded to Pastbin is dated between 2003 and 2010. One section seems to list candidates from the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. Another section contains the file names of ballots from various years.

Pakistan: Whopping 37 million ‘bogus votes’ removed from voter lists in Pakistan | Daily India

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has been informed that 37 million bogus votes have been excluded from voter lists.

Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) Secretary Ishtiaq Ahmed Khan also informed the court that 36 million new voters would be included with the assistance of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA).

Earlier, ECP Joint Secretary Sher Afgan had said that 37 million votes in the electoral lists were not bogus, but unverified votes, and could not be removed until next year.

Australia: F1Esc Dumping Australian 2011 Election Data to ThePirateBay | ZeroPaid

It would appear that ThePirateBay is one of the most popular data dumping grounds for scores of hacked data. One of the latest data dump appears to be an ongoing release where data from the Australian 2011 elections are being posted. As of this writing, 5 data dumps have been posted so far.

The AntiSec movement isn’t really tied to any one country or any one or any group of hackers. In a tweet early last month, F1Esc tweeted that he had obtained 76GB of data from the Australian 2011 elections. It wasn’t until more recently that the data was being posted on to BitTorrent site ThePirateBay.

The release is being posted in batches. Part 1 is 180MB, part 2 is 513MB, part 3 is 1.69GB, part 4 is is 37MB and the most recently released part, part 5, is 276MB.

Angola: Electoral commission learns about functioning of data processing office | Angola Press

The chairwoman of the National Electoral Commission (CNE), Suzana Inglês, on Tuesday here received detailed information about the functioning of the Data Processing Office of the Ministry of Territory Administration (MAT).

During a visit to the office, accompanied by the minister of Territory Administration, the chairwoman of CNE  checked the premises and watched a video on the steps that have already been taken in the process of updating the voters’ registration database, as well as the mapping of the location for the future voting stations.

Editorials: In voter fraud case, officials err on the side of secrecy | NMPolitics.net

My efforts to obtain the evidence behind Secretary of State Dianna Duran’s claim that she has found instances of foreign nationals illegally voting have been shot down again, this time by the Taxation and Revenue Department.

Two months ago I asserted that Secretary of State Dianna Duran failed the open government test because she put a number of hurdles – some of them illegal – in front of my efforts to obtain the “evidence” she claims to have found of foreign nationals illegally voting in elections.

Since then, I tried a backdoor route to obtain some of the information, filing a public records request with the state’s Taxation and Revenue Department (TRD) for e-mail correspondence between its Motor Vehicle Division and Duran’s office, and all documents attached to those e-mails.