National: Senator Urges Republicans to Fill Election Commission Vacancies | Roll Call

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., today called on Republican leaders to recommend nominees for a federal election agency that sat without a single commissioner, executive director or general counsel as voters encountered long lines, machine malfunctions and other problems on Election Day.
Boxer urged Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to take “immediate action” to fill the vacancies at the Election Assistance Commission by recommending names for the two open Republican commissioner positions after not doing so for nearly a year. “I believe the dysfunction we witnessed may have been reduced had this commission been fully staffed and operational,” Boxer wrote in a letter.

Florida: Almost 1K ballots found in Broward elections warehouse | WSVN

Nearly a thousand ballots that were not included in Florida’s final count have been found in a warehouse in Broward County. Tuesday morning and into the night, there was a buzz of activity at the Voting Equipment Center in Lauderhill, a week after the general election. There was a recount going on for two commission seats that were too close to call, one in Hallandale Beach and another in Dania Beach. Workers had to count those votes manually.

Massachusetts: Spider spins web, crashes voting machine in Rehoboth | Boston.com

When a voting machine in the town of Rehoboth mysteriously stopped working on Election Day, officials found a web of mischief spun not by a human, but by a saboteur with eight legs. During the morning rush Tuesday, one of the town’s machines malfunctioned and failed to recognize ballots because a spider web had blocked a sensor, said Town Clerk Kathleen Conti. “It was something as simple as that,” she said. “We were cursing that spider. He’s still at large and we’re still looking for him.”

National: ES&S plans for the worst on Election Day: No power | Omaha.com

If polling places along the East Coast are without power on Election Day, an Omaha company faces a powerful test. With much of the coast bracing for damage and prolonged power outages from the storm called Sandy, election officials and providers of voting equipment, including Omaha-based Electronic Systems & Software, spent Monday hashing out contingency plans, backup contingency plans and backup-backup contingency plans in case polling places remain without power on Nov. 6.

National: Paper prophets: Why e-voting is on the decline in the United States | Ars Technica

Ernest Zirkle was puzzled. The resident of Fairfield Township in Cumberland County, NJ, ran for a seat on his local Democratic Executive Committee on June 7, 2011. The official results showed him earning only nine votes, compared to 34 votes for the winning candidate. But at least 28 people told Zirkle they voted for him. So he and his wife—who also ran for an open seat and lost—challenged the result in court. Eventually, a county election official admitted the result was due to a programming error. A security expert from Princeton was called in to examine the machines and make sure no foul play had occurred. Unfortunately, when he examined the equipment on August 17, 2011, he found someone deleted key files the previous day, making it impossible to investigate the cause of the malfunction. A new election was held on September 27, and the Zirkles won. A decade ago, there was a great deal of momentum toward paperless electronic voting. Spooked by the chaos of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress unleashed a torrent of money to buy new high-tech machines. Today, momentum is in the opposite direction. Computer security researchers have convinced most observers that machines like the ones in Fairfield Township degrade the security and reliability of elections rather than enhancing them. Several states passed laws mandating an end to paperless elections. But bureaucratic inertia and tight budgets have slowed the pace at which these flawed machines can be retired.

Florida: Florida elections officials to oversee duplication of flawed Palm Beach County absentee ballots | Palm Beach Post

Underscoring the deep concern surrounding Palm Beach County’s latest election snafu, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner is sending two observers here on Monday as workers begin an unprecedented process of duplicating an estimated 27,000 absentee ballots. In a letter to Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher late Friday, Detzner said he is sending two deputies to “observe and examine the registration and election processes and the condition, custody and operation of voting systems and equipment.” The deputies, he wrote, are empowered to “supervise the preparation of the voting equipment and procedures for the election.” Both will report their findings to him and file a written report with Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Sharon Bock. State law allows the secretary of state to take such action “as he sees fit.” But the law also allows candidates, party leaders and others to request that observers be sent in. A spokesman for Detzner said, “This was the secretary’s decision.”

Voting Blogs: Using Electronic Pre-Poll Votes as Guide for the ACT Election Result | Election Blog

The ACT is the only Australian jurisdiction to make extensive use of electronic voting. All pre-poll voting centres use electronic voting equipment, though paper ballots are available for the technology challenged. The six pre-poll voting centres are also used as election day polling places with electronic voting available. In all 20% of votes at the 2008 election were recorded electronically. A total of 43,820 electronic votes were recorded, though only 42,668 were formal votes. The rate of informal and discarded electronic ballots was 2.6% compared to 4% for paper ballots. The electronic voting system guides voters through the numbering sequence, so you cannot make a mistake filling in your ballot paper without being prompted that you have made an error. This means that an informal electronic vote is a deliberate informal, as a voter cannot vote informal without over-ridding the warning message.

Voting Blogs: Which States have the Highest Risk of an E-Voting Meltdown? | Freedom to Tinker

Computer scientists, including us, have long been skeptical of electronic voting systems. E-voting systems are computers, with all of the attendant problems. If something goes wrong, can the problem be detected? Can it be fixed? Some e-voting systems are much riskier than others. As the 2012 Presidential election approaches, we decided to evaluate the risk of a “meltdown scenario” in which problems with electronic voting equipment cause a state to cast the deciding electoral college vote that would flip the election winner from one candidate to the other. We’re interested in the risk of these technological problems, weighted by the relative voting power of each voter. So for example, here in New Jersey we use direct-recording electronic voting machines that have been found by a court to be inadequate, but with Obama polling at +14% it’s not likely that a snafu with these machines could change the entire state’s outcome. But in swing states that poll closer to even, like Virginia (where your voting machines can be modified to play Pac-Man), an electronic voting mix-up could have a much bigger impact. So, which states have the greatest risk of an e-voting meltdown affecting the result of the 2012 Presidential election?

Minnesota: An expensive proposition: Voter ID passage could increase Minnesota county’s election-related costs | The Stillwater Gazette

Washington County faces spending more than $750,000 for new voting machines and a central counting machine in 2013. But the county also stares at a hidden cost next year if Minnesota voters approve a proposed state constitutional amendment requiring voters show identification at the polls. That was the message from Property Records and Taxpayer Services Director Jennifer Wagenius Tuesday during a Board of Commissioners budget workshop. Although the majority of the department’s projected 2013 revenue, more than $5.684 million, comes from non-levy fees collected by recording documents, assessments and revenue collected at license centers, Wagenius said her office will rely more on levy revenue to replace election equipment.

Editorials: Voting Rights Act anniversary celebrated, yet threats rising | Chicago Sun-Times

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on Aug. 6, 1965, and when President George W. Bush renewed it in 2006, they were trying to prevent barriers to voting. It is tragic that efforts to bar millions of Americans from casting ballots have instead accelerated in recent years. Observers should not underestimate this threat — the very future of our democracy is at stake. Voter suppression efforts have only grown since 2000, when our worries were about the accuracy of voting equipment and Supreme Court bias. Even if the outcome was uncertain, however, most voters were rarely barred from participating in elections. Since then, broad swaths of our population have been targeted for attack. A national legislative campaign coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council has passed laws that could inordinately lock students, senior citizens, African-Americans and Hispanics out of their polling places. ALEC’s list of backers reads like a corporate Who’s Who: Koch Enterprises, Peabody Energy, UPS and Exxon Mobil, to name a few. These companies have millions to gain from legislatures favoring wealthy over low-income Americans.

Florida: Florida falls flat when it comes to rules for tracking paper ballots after elections | TCPalm.com

As the white-hot presidential contest heats up in this battleground state, a newly released national voting equipment study gives Florida passing marks — except for one glaring exception. Aside from using paper ballots, the ability to recount those ballots is the single most important means to ensure a fair election, many experts say, and Florida falls flat. At stake are the ballots of 11.4 million Florida voters and 29 electoral votes, more than enough to decide a tight election. After all, the 326-page report written by nonprofit advocacy groups Common Cause and the Verified Voting Foundation, as well as Rutgers Law School’s Constitutional Litigation Clinic, points out that George W. Bush won Florida in 2000 by a mere 537 votes. Florida’s myriad voting systems are ranked “generally good” by the report — the rough equivalent of a “C” — in part because the state mandates the use of paper ballots for everyone except some disabled voters. Martin County’s touch screen equipment and St. Lucie and Indian River county’s optical scan machines all produce paper ballots, officials confirmed. But Florida’s rules for tracking those paper ballots after an election come up short, the report concluded, and that’s key, given the fact that virtually all elections systems have demonstrated some type of technological failure. “We all know computers crash,” said Susannah Goodman, director of Common Cause’s Voter Integrity Campaign. “Voting machines are no different.”

National: Only 5 states very well-prepared to handle voting machine errors, study finds | ABC News

How equipped is your state to handle voting machine errors? Chances are, not overly prepared. Apparently just five states—Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin—are “exceptionally well-prepared” to deal with voting machine problems and breakdowns, according to a new study released Wednesday by Common Cause in conjunction with the Verified Voting Foundation and the Rutgers Law School Constitutional Litigation Clinic. And six states are underprepared, said the study: Colorado, Delaware, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. “Recent election history reminds us that equipment does fail and votes will be lost without key protections,” Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, said in a statement. “We’re dependent on complex electronic voting systems that must be surrounded by robust procedures to safeguard votes and verify results if we are to avoid known and unknown risks of election failure. Do-overs are never an acceptable part of an election plan. Fair elections are at the heart of our democracy, yet many states are not yet prepared to survive voting system failures that could change results.” With expected close elections in many of the unprepared states, voting errors could have a significant impact on the 2012 results.

National: Book review: Broken Ballots | ZDNet UK

Few people — the security expert Rebecca Mercuri being the notable exception — thought much about the mechanics of voting before the Bush-versus-Gore presidential election in 2000. A few weeks of watching diligent poll workers holding up ballots to look for hanging chads changed all that. The timing — coincidental with both the rise of the internet and the dot-com bust — suddenly put voting technology on everyone’s agenda. The UK, like a number of European countries, had a brief flirtation with electronic voting. Notably, the Netherlands reverted to pencil-and-paper after a group of technical experts proved their point by getting the voting machines to play chess. E-counting is still on the UK’s agenda, however, despite objections from the Open Rights Group on technical and cost grounds. Most recently, it was used in London’s May 2012 mayoral elections. In the US, Bush v. Gore led to the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandated the updating of voting equipment and set off substantial controversy.

Ireland: Taxpayers stuck with €370,000 bill for empty e-voting shed | Independent.ie

The Taxpayer faces the prospect of a bill of more than €350,000 to rent an empty shed which was used to store the controversial e-voting machines. The Irish Independent has learned that the Department of the Environment is locked into a 25-year lease at a premises in Co Monaghan, and that there is 17 years left to run at an annual rent of more than €21,500. This means that unless there is a break-out clause in the lease — which allows either side to terminate the contract — the State faces paying almost €370,000 between now and February 2029 to rent an empty shed. The shed is located outside Clones in Co Monaghan, and is owned by Martin Duffy. Mr Duffy was awarded the lucrative contract in 2004 by his aunt, former Cavan/Monaghan returning officer Josephine Duffy, after she viewed a number of premises. The Government announced earlier this week it had sold the infamous €54m e-voting machines for scrap for just over €70,000, or €9.30 each.

Verified Voting in the News: Voting Technology: Current and Future Choices | The Canvass

In the next several years, new voting equipment will need to be begged, borrowed or bought in most of the nation’s jurisdictions. This raises at least two questions: In an age of galloping technological advancement, what should we buy? And, who’s going to pay for it? …  When levers and punch cards went out, what came in? Two systems, one based on electronics (often with a touch screen) and the other based on optical scanners that “score” hand-marked paper ballots in the same way that standardized tests are scored. The electronic machines (aka DREs, short for “direct recording electronic” voting machines) dominated the market in the early part of the 2000s; but by 2008, optical scanning equipment had become more common. (See the map provided by Verified Voting.org for details.) A debate still rages between advocates of the two systems. Those who distrust electronic machines say they make votes hard to recount when an election is contested. Additionally, “there should be a way that a voter can check on a hard copy—independent from the software—that their vote was captured as they intended it to be,” says Pam Smith of Verified Voting.org, an organization that advocates for a voter-verifiable paper trail for elections.

Florida: ‘Phantom’ votes raise doubts for November election in Florida | Palm Beach Post

Almost half of Florida’s voters will have their ballots counted this November by machines that can malfunction in as little as two hours and start adding votes. A New York study found that the precinct-based vote counter added votes in some races on a ballot, which can invalidate some or all of the votes. Although not used in Palm Beach County, Election Systems & Software’s DS200 scanner will count votes in some of the most populous counties in Florida, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Orange. State elections officials stand behind the scanner, which they say has been thoroughly tested. Even so, the manufacturer issued a nationwide bulletin warning that the scanner needs to be carefully cleaned to avoid adding “phantom” votes.

Maryland: Election board looks at online ballot marking | MarylandReporter.com

The State Board of Elections may move to implement an online ballot marking system for all absentee voters in time for this year’s elections, depending on an opinion from the attorney general. But some voter advocacy groups worry about the potential for fraud. The move to online ballot marking comes after a 2010 federal mandate that required states to provide overseas voters and active military personnel with access to online absentee ballot applications. The attorney general’s opinion, requested by Sen. Edward Kasemeyer, would say whether or not the elections board should seek federal and state certification for the online ballot marking tool. The board staff is currently developing the device through a Department of Defense grant. Certification would test the system and look for vulnerable areas, including where fraud or manipulation could occur. All whole voting systems are federally required to receive certification, but the state board argues the ballot marking tool would be only part of a voting system.

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: Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida | Palm Beach Post

Harri Hursti may be the best-known hacker you’ve never heard of. Largely unknown to the voting public, the Finnish computer programmer gained national notoriety among elections officials in 2005 when he broke into voting equipment in Leon County – at the supervisor of elections’ invitation – just to show it could be done. Hursti has since gone on to examine voting systems for other states. His conclusion: “Some systems are better than others, but none is nearly good enough.” In fact, a decade’s worth of Florida vote counting has been tripped up by technology of all makes and models, despite a state certification process designed to guard against such problems. Nationally, studies of the secret code underpinning election software have uncovered an array of troubles.

Colorado: Marks prevails in Jefferson County CO case | AspenTimes.com

A District Court judge has deemed election records in Jefferson County open to public review and has awarded attorney’s fees to Aspen election activist Marilyn Marks, who was denied access to the information. Judge Randall Arp, in a ruling issued Monday, directed Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder Pamela Anderson to provide the records requested by Marks and rejected the clerk’s claim that release of the information could violate voter rights to an anonymous ballot. Any information that could potentially lead to identification of an individual voter who cast a ballot could be redacted, Arp concluded. Marks said Tuesday that her legal expenses in the case total about $100,000. Jefferson is among several counties in Colorado where Marks has asked to view ballots or other election data under the Colorado Open Records Act, or CORA, helping fuel statewide debate about whether ballots cast by voters should be subject to the open-records law.

Missouri: Voting Machine Veto Stands; St. Charles County to Re-Bid Election Items | St. Charles, MO Patch

For the second time, St. Charles County send out bids for 260 optical scan voting machines. The council lacked the five votes necessary during its Monday meeting to override County Executive Steve Ehlmann’s veto on buying 260 voting machines for $1.2 million. So, the council opted to re-bid the items. Council members Terry Hollander, Ward 5, and Paul Wynn, Ward 4, were absent. Election Authority Director Rich Chrismer said the bid results will be the same. “We will get only one bid,” he said. “There are no other companies. Is that a shame that only one company can bid in the state of Missouri? Sure it is.” Chrismer said only one company is certified under 2005 standards by both federal and state government to supply the voting machines, and that’s Henry Adkins & Son. “You could not buy new voting equipment unless it’s certified according to the 2005 standards (according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission),” Chrismer said.

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.”

Hawaii: $1.2M to settle Hawaii election machine dispute | CanadianBusiness.com

The Hawaii Attorney General’s Office is requesting $1.2 million to settle a 2008 protest filed over a contract for electronic voting machines. Attorney General David Louie’s office says former Chief Election Officer Kevin Cronin violated state procurement code when he awarded a multi-term contract for voting equipment without conducting the required analysis of the proposals. Cronin abruptly resigned at the end of 2009. Hart InterCivic Inc. was awarded a $43.3 million contract for new electronic voting machines through the 2016 elections, with an option to extend to 2018. Another vendor submitted a competing bid of $18 million.

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.

Voting Blogs: Small Isn’t Always Beautiful: New Data Suggests Lack of Scale Affects Election Costs in Smaller Jurisdictions | Doug Chapin/PEEA

In case you missed it over the holidays – I know I did – on December 27 Pew’s Election Data Dispatches looked at some new research on election costs in California and Colorado. Both studies found – as similar research had in North Dakota – that less-populous counties had a higher cost per registered voter. More specifically (from the Dispatch):

In California, the study examined election expenditures between 1992 and 2008 and found a 1 percent increase in county population correlated with a 0.05 percent decrease in expenditures per registered voter. For example, San Diego County had an average cost of $6.57 per voter, while Modoc County, the third-smallest county in the state, spent $18.07 per voter. Similarly, the Colorado report found the average cost per voter in 2010 for small counties was $10.21 versus $4.95 for medium counties and $4.92 for large counties.

Ohio: Agency finds defects in ballot scanners – ES&S DS200 | USAToday.com

The federal agency responsible for inspecting voting equipment said Thursday that a ballot scanner used in several key battleground states can freeze up without warning, fail to log errors and misread ballots.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission said the ballot reader, made by Omaha-based ES&S, is not in compliance with federal standards. And while it’s the first time the 8-year-old agency has taken such a step, it falls just short of decertification — a move that could force election officials to abandon the machines on the eve of the 2012 presidential primaries.

The DS200 optical-scan system is designed to read paper ballots fed into the machines by voters themselves at their precincts. It’s used in all or part of Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York and Wisconsin.

South Carolina: Deputies recover voting machine from Atlantic Beach | TheSunNews.com

After refusing to turn over voting machines used in the November election, Atlantic Beach officials were forced Tuesday to hand them over after Horry County Sheriff’s deputies came to the town a court order. Horry County typically delivers voting machines the day before the election and picks them up the day after the election, Horry County spokeswoman Lisa Bourcier said in an email. Atlantic Beach repeatedly refused — in person, by phone and by email — to return the machines that were last used in the Nov. 1 vote, according to court documents.

“Atlantic Beach would not release our equipment, this was the only way to get them back,” Bourcier said. The county plans to review the machines, she said but referred questions about any actions or investigations to the state election commission.

The S.C. State Election Commission could not be reached Tuesday, but a letter that executive director Marci Andino sent to Horry County Voters Registration and Election Director Sandy Martin on Monday advised the county to take immediate action.

Voting Blogs: Forgotten But Not Yet Gone: Is This the End of the EAC? | Doug Chapin/PEEA

On Friday. U.S. Representative Glenn Harper [R-MS] posted a press release on Facebook suggesting that the two remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission had resigned, leaving the agency with no members and rendering the EAC, in his words, a “ZOMBIE AGENCY.”

Harper, of course, is the sponsor of recent legislation to terminate the EAC, which was approved earlier this month in a largely party-line vote in the House. If indeed the EAC is now empty (while the resignations aren’t yet public, I have no reason to doubt the reports are accurate) we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the EAC and its duties under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA).

There will be lots of opportunities to discuss the work of the EAC – and more importantly, what will happen to that work if the agency does indeed disappear – but as part of that discussion I think Congress as an institution needs to own its role in the birth and life of the EAC and what impact it might have had on the agency’s performance and potential demise.

Indiana: Monroe County To Vote On Buying Election Equipment Monday | Indiana Public Media

The Monroe County commissioners have postponed a vote on purchasing 2012 voting equipment until Monday because of an Election Board vote that rejected a proposal for vote centers. Commissioner Iris Kiesling says they needed more time to decide what equipment would give them the best deal for their money.

“Now that we have to provide service to eighty-two precincts, although some of those might be co-located, we have to look at our numbers and see what the best proposal is that we have before us,” she says.

Kiesling quoted a Financial Policy Institute report released last year that said vote center elections would cost Monroe County nearly $87,000. Precinct elections would cost $161,000. That does not include the 15 new precincts that will be added this year. County Clerk Linda Robbins, who voted in favor of the vote centers, says the higher cost is why finding the voting equipment could be difficult.

National: The GOP’s War on Voting Comes to Washington | Mother Jones

Republicans in state legislatures across the country have spent the past year mounting an all-out assault on voting rights, pushing a slew of voter ID and redistricting measures that are widely expected to dilute the power of minority and low-income voters in next November’s elections. Now that effort has come to Capitol Hill, where a congressional committee will vote Thursday on a GOP-backed bill to eviscerate the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—the last line of defense against fraud and tampering in electronic voting systems around the country.

The EAC was created in the wake of 2000’s controversial presidential election as a means of improving the quality standards for electronic voting systems. Its four commissioners (two Republicans and two Democrats) are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The commission tests voting equipment for states and localities, distributes grants to help improve voting standards, and offers helpful guidance on proofing ballots to some 4,600 local election jurisdictions. It also collects information on overseas and military voters and tracks the return rate for absentee ballots sent to these voters.

On Friday, a House subcommittee on elections will vote on Rep. Gregg Harper’s (R-Miss.) bill eliminating the EAC along with the longstanding public financing system for presidential campaigns. Republicans claim that the commission has already achieved its aim of cleaning up elections. Its responsibilities, they argue, can be reabsorbed by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which oversaw voting machine certification prior to the EAC’s creation in 2002. Ending the EAC, Republicans estimate, will save $33 million over the next five years.