The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly – May 7-13 2012

Electronic Voting in 2012

Marketplace notes that for the most part, that in 2012 Americans will vote on the same electronic voting machines that have caused problems over the past decades. With a dramatic speech in a late night Congressional session, civil rights icon John Lewis shamed his fellow Georgia Congressman into pulling a proposed amendment to defund enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The New York State and City Boards of Elections and ES&S released reports showing that a defect in the DS200 digital scanner – and not voter error – had been responsible for unusually high rates of overvotes in the South Bronx in 2010. In an ongoing series on election issues, the Palm Beach Post examines the ineffectiveness of State oversight in ensuring the integrity of Florida’s elections. Having cancelled two internet voting caucuses for lack of interest, serious questions have emerged regarding the viability of Americans Elect. Following Stephen Colbert’s example, several watchdog groups are forming SuperPACs to fight SuperPACs. The Economist described the cynicism leading up to Algeria’s elections this week and Forbes considered the ramifications the elections held in several European countries last weekend.

National: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace
National: John Lewis objects, and Paul Broun backs away from attempt to gut Voting Rights Act | ajc.com
New York: Overvotes: Phantoms of the Ballot Box | ReformNY
Florida: Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida | Palm Beach Post
Editorials: With Failures Rapidly Mounting, What Is Americans Elect’s End-Game? | AE Transparency
National: Using Super PACs to Get Rid of Super PACs | Roll Call
Editorials: Algeria’s election: Still waiting for real democracy | The Economist
Editorials: Europe’s Election Rumble: Noise, Then Fury? | Forbes

May 12, 2012
National: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace

Elections come and go and many issues change, but one seems to remain: electronic voting. Two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago — the story’s been about the same: the machines don’t seem ready for primetime, but we’re using them anyway. This week, the official verdict came back on some electronic vote-reading machines in the South Bronx that seemed a little fishy in the last congressional election, 2010. Larry Norden is with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and says sometimes the voting machine “was essentially overheating and because it was overheating, it was reading a lot of phantom votes — a vote that the voter didn’t actually cast, but that the machine saw.” The upshot is that in some districts in the Bronx, it turns out more than a third of votes weren’t counted. Things could get really scary in a state that’s gone all electronic, like South Carolina. University of South Carolina computer scientist Duncan Buell is worried for 2012: “I’m not sure there’s any real change from four years ago to now.” Seriously? What’s taking so long?

“First of all, software is very hard — unfortunately it’s one of the immutable laws of the universe. It’s not a trivial thing to make sure the software is written and works properly and works under all different configurations you have for local elections. One of the other problems we have is that there hasn’t been an update to standards. So we, for example, will vote in the fall on software that has not changed even the daylight savings time from 2007.” Buell just co-wrote a report on how that software performed last time, in 2010. And it ain’t pretty.

“If you say, ‘what possible things could go wrong,’ virtually every single one of those did go wrong somewhere in South Carolina. Machines that had cast-votes on them didn’t get counted because people didn’t follow the rules. There were machines that would not ‘close’ and the only way to collect those votes was to call (the manufacturer) in Omaha…and (their) people said ‘do this, do this, do this’ and magically votes appeared in the count.”

Full Article: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace from American Public Media.

My AJC colleague Daniel Malloy in Washington sends this report of a confrontation between two Georgia members of Congress that you may not have heard about: Around 10 p.m. last night, as House debate over a contentious spending bill stretched on, Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, approached with an amendment to end all funding for U.S. Department of Justice enforcement of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. This is the provision that requires states like Georgia to submit new election laws – last year’s statewide redistricting, for instance — for federal approval to ensure against disenfranchisement of minorities. Broun argued that this is a hammer held over only a few select states, and noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has suggested that the law has outlived its usefulness.

“It is also highly unfair, allowing some states to make changes to their election laws while other states wishing to make the same changes are forced to jump through a bunch of hoops,” Broun said. “I know firsthand how onerous this law is. My home state of Georgia, as an example, has long struggled with the U.S. Department of Justice over its voter identification laws.”

This did not sit well with Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta – a bona fide civil rights hero who was beaten during the Freedom Rides and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He arrived minutes later to give a rousing speech and a rare slap at a fellow member of the Georgia delegation.

Full Article: John Lewis objects, and Paul Broun backs away from attempt to gut Voting Rights Act | Political Insider.

The New York State Board of Elections, New York City Boards of Elections, and voting machine manufacturer ES&S each released reports yesterday detailing the results of an investigation into the abnormally high numbers of lost votes attributed to “overvoting” in the South Bronx in 2010. The upshot is that a machine defect led to “phantom votes” on at least one machine used in the 2010 election, resulting in some candidates receiving more votes than they should have, and the choices of many more voters being voided when the machines detected both actual and phantom votes in the same contest. Now that the reports on how this happened are out, election officials must make sure that what happened in the Bronx in 2010 does not happen again in the future. Voting machines record overvotes when they detect more than one candidate selected for a contest. In such cases, no vote is recorded for any candidate in the overvoted contest, regardless of the voter’s actual intent. The Brennan Center first uncovered a high number of overvotes in the South Bronx while reviewing documents produced for discovery in a litigation it brought against the State and City. It published its findings in Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes; the report notes that in some election districts up to 40% of the votes cast did not count.

The investigations conducted by the City, State and ES&S conclude that the unusually high overvote rates were not due to voter error, but rather a malfunction in the voting machine once it became heated after a couple hours of use. The malfunction resulted in a distortion of the ballot images as read by the machines, causing blank ovals to appear darker than they should have. The machines registered these darker images as votes. These “phantom votes,” either led to some candidates getting extra votes (if no candidate had been chosen by a voter) or overvotes (if the voter had filled out a different oval for another candidate in the same contest).

While the machines in New York provide voters with a warning when ballots cannot be read because of overvoting, the warning used complex election jargon that gave voters misleading cues about their options. Voters in these predominantly Hispanic South Bronx districts apparently chose to override this message without understanding the result was that their votes were not counted. Fortunately, as part of a settlement agreement reached with the State, New York’s voting machines will be reprogrammed before the presidential election in November with an overvote warning message that uses plain language that more clearly explains to voters if the machine is having problems reading their ballot.

Full Article: ReformNY: Overvotes: Phantoms of the Ballot Box.

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.

The stakes are high. “These are fundamental constitutional rights,” said Candice Hoke, associate law professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and a founding director of the Center for Election Integrity. “It’s not a matter of ‘oh well, the technology didn’t work this time.’ The right to vote is not participation only; it also is the right to have the vote counted as cast.” Time and time again, that hasn’t happened.

Full Article: Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida.

Having now been forced to cancel two primary ballots in a row due to the American electorate’sutter failure to respond to its spiel, Americans Elect may now be judged by any rational observer of the political scene to be an abject failure, and dead in the water. So what happens now? When Americans Elect’s predecessor, Unity08, failed similarly in 2008 (albeit much earlier in its existence, before a single ‘vote’ had been cast), that organization simply silently evaporated. That was really the only option available to Unity08′s leadership, because it was a worthless property: it was merely a thin web site, with no money behind it, and its founders had scattered to the four winds (many to their next failure, a ‘Draft Bloomberg’ initiative). So its operators simply abandoned it. Like a rusty old Buick up on cinder blocks in a weed-choked vacant lot, its twisted carcass had no significant scrap value.

But Americans Elect is, today, a new and very different kind of failure. Sure, it is now widely disparaged…even openly laughed at…not only here at AE Transparency, but more recentlythroughout the media. And, equally surely, it is a painful public embarrassment not only to its founder, Wall Street tycoon Peter Ackerman, but also to its star-studded cast of Directors, Board of Advisers members, and other fellow-travelers, including such luminaries as:

ex-Governor Christine Todd Whitman
Harvard law professor Lawrence “Thank God For Tenure” Lessig
Tufts University Dean Stephen “I’m With Peter” Bosworth
past futurist Esther Dyson
former Disney CEO Michael Eisner
royalist zillionaire Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild
former FBI and CIA chief William Webster
former Comptroller General David Walker

But the similarity to Unity08′s disaster ends there, because — unlike Unity08 — Americans Elect’s corpse still has significant monetary value. This is so because, even in death, Americans Elect still has a tangible (albeit, distressed) asset: third-party ballot access for the November presidential election in 25 states (with the promise of achieving 50-state access before November)..

Full Article: AE Transparency: With Failures Rapidly Mounting, What Is Americans Elect’s End-Game?.

Want to get big money out of politics? Set up a super PAC. That seemingly incongruous formula has been seized on by a growing number of watchdog groups, self-styled reformers and student activists who have set up more than a dozen super PACs aimed at putting a stop to unrestricted campaign spending. With names such as America’s Super PAC for the Permanent Elimination of America’s Super PACs, Citizens Against Super PACs and No Dirty Money Elections, these protest political action committees are sober-minded, satirical or sometimes both. Take CREEP, a super PAC set up by Georgetown University graduate student Robert Lucas. The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference the Nixon-era Committee for the Re-Election of the President, which organized the Watergate break-ins 40 years ago. But Lucas, 23, has a high-minded goal of “raising voices, not dollars,” as he put it and is pushing for both public financing of campaigns and tax code reforms that would pull back the curtain on election-related spending. He has no plans to back candidates or party committees.

On the lighter side is Everyone’s Favorite Group of Socially Acceptable People Who Have Happy Funtime Ideas and Team, which registered with the Federal Election Commission on April 6 with no stated Web address or objectives. By contrast, the newly registered Friends of Democracy PAC is the work of a pair of well-known progressive organizers: David Donnelly, executive director of the Public Campaign Action Fund, and Ilyse Hogue, who has worked as a senior adviser with Media Matters for America. Friends of Democracy will function both as a super PAC and a conventional PAC and will advocate campaign finance changes.

Other super PACs protesting big money in politics include the Occupy Wall Street PAC; People Against the Corporate Manipulation of Election and News, which on its website touts its organizers as “everyday, non-billionaire, non-lobbyist people”; and You Forgot Us, which on its site asks: “Tired of the Big Money controlling the country? Wondering what you, the average American citizen, can do about it?”

Full Article: Using Super PACs to Get Rid of Super PACs : Roll Call Politics.

Parties competing in Algeria’s general election on May 10th faced a weary cynicism among voters. So far the Arab spring has passed the country by. Still recovering from the grim legacy of a civil war of the 1990s, in which at least 100,000 Algerians are thought to have died, few people seem tempted to take the revolutionary road. But nor do many see much of a way forward using the ballot box, at least not in the form being presented by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Since a general election in 1992 was interrupted by the army to prevent a win by the Islamic Salvation Front, Algeria’s powers-that-be have not left national elections to chance. Mr Bouteflika came to power in 1999 after six leading candidates had withdrawn from the contest in protest against alleged fraud. With a nod to demands for democracy elsewhere in the region, this time the authorities let in more than 450 foreign election observers, including, for the first time, 140 from the EU. They do not seem to be making much of a difference. In any case, few commentators predicted that as many as the 35% who turned out last time would bother to vote. Yet 21 new parties had been approved since February. The authorities’ preferred outcome is said to be a parliament made up of a “mosaic” of parties, with no strong block having a dominant voice. A handful of genuine opposition parties, including the old Socialist Forces Front (FFS in French) and the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Front (FJD), evidently believed it worth striving to limit the scope for fraud. So they highlighted the dearth of their party representatives at polling stations and secured, as a last-minute concession, the interior ministry’s agreement to put party representatives on the commissions that supervised vote-counts at governorate level.

Parliament anyway has little sway. Instead, a select group of unelected civilian and military “décideurs”, known to Algerians as “le pouvoir” (“the power”), rules the roost, even deciding who should be president. The constitution provides for a strong executive head of state. The most powerful man in the land may be Mohamed Mediène, known as Toufiq, who has headed military intelligence for two decades. Mr Bouteflika, of the former ruling party National Liberation Front (FLN) is due to continue as president until 2014, but at 75 is increasingly frail and unlikely to run for a fourth term. Credited with overseeing the end of the civil war, he also wins some favour for house building and for big infrastructure projects such as the Algiers underground railway. Nervous of the Arab spring elsewhere, he has increased funding for unemployed young Algerians hoping to start their own businesses. Unemployment has dropped since he came to power but is above 20% among university leavers. Mr Bouteflika says he will present the new parliament with a series of constitutional reforms next year. Algeria, according to its officials, has embarked on its own democratic transition—at its own pace.

Mr Bouteflika hopes that his timid reforms may head off demands for a Tunisian-style constituent assembly that would make a clean break with the past and prepare a new constitution. Among prominent Islamists calling for change, Abdallah Djaballah of the FJD enjoys some kudos for having so far managed to keep the regime at arm’s length. He has a following in the east of the country, especially in Constantine, where he was a student activist in the 1970s. Bouguerra Soltani, who heads Algeria’s Hamas party, took part in the outgoing coalition government led by Ahmed Ouyahia. Algeria’s main Islamist parties are aligned with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and echo many of the ideas put forward by Nahda, the Islamist party that won last year’s election in neighbouring Tunisia; at the more extreme end of the Islamist spectrum, Algeria’s Salafists shun parliamentary politics altogether.

Full Article: Algeria’s election: Still waiting for real democracy | The Economist.

The headline news from Sunday’s elections in Europe is the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy for a second term as president of France. Although this was frequently billed as a right vs. left runoff with the victor, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande, it looms less likely to be an ideological result than the more obscure voting elsewhere on the continent–in Greece, Serbia and in a German state. First, to France: Hollande’s near 52% of the vote is a decisive if not overwhelming rejection of Sarkozy, whose initial mandate to re-energize French productivity on his win in 2007 fell afoul not just of the subsequent financial crisis but also of the statist overhang of the nation, where government accounts for a clear majority of GDP and state-shielded unions have a grip on key sectors, public or private. Tinkering with its labor laws was not enough to restore competitiveness, so growth stayed slow and unemployment high.

Sarkozy, unpopular personally as well, reverted to familiar protectionist and jingoist bents, goaded further in that direction by the cultural right-winger Marine le Pen, who ran strongly in the initial vote round two weeks ago. Ultimately, “Sarko” was not representative of classical liberalism, although his defeat is being read as a rejection of the German monetarist harder line in the European debt crisis. The ousted Frenchman was a public, if reluctant, partner of Germany’s Angela Merkel in negotiations over Europe.

Ironically, a German model may now be most useful to Hollande as he tries to square his “no layoff” pledges to France’s militant trade unions with the reality that an uncompetitive economy cannot be sustained no matter what the political passions. More than a decade ago, Germany’s Social Democrat leader, Gerhard Schroeder, won acceptance of significant workplace concessions by his own guilds in return for job guarantees. Although Schroeder paid for this at the polls, in defections from his left base, the reforms are now widely credited for the subsequent German boom, which has put most of the rest of Europe (especially France) to shame. Hollande will need quickly to get a similar pact if he’s to have any hope of squaring his new political circle.

Full Article: Europe’s Election Rumble: Noise, Then Fury? – Forbes.

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The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly – May 7-13 2012

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