The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly October 24-30 2011

Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill hosted a panel discussion on online voting that included numerous computer security experts. Anomalies in a Democratic County Committee election have exposed the unreliability and insecurity of electronic voting systems. The South Carolina League of Women Voters is fighting to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines. An 86-year-old World War II veteran was forced to pay for his “free” voter ID in Tennessee. The South Korean Election Commission was hit with a cyber attack during a municipal election. McCleans posted an editorial on proposed internet voting in Canada. Los Angeles County recorder/auditor Dean Logan has teamed with California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survey more than 1,000 voters, more than 1,000 poll workers, 26 city clerks from across the county and 64 staffers in Logan’s office about the county’s voting system overhaul. Thousands demonstrated in Morocco calling for a boycott of early parliamentary polls next month whose outcome will be key to the future of reforms crafted by the royal palace while Tunisia held the first election resulting from the “Arab Spring.”

National: Online Voting: Just A Dream Until Security Issues Can Be Fully Addressed, Experts Say | Courant.com
New Jersey: South Jersey voting-machine incident makes waves | Philadelphia Inquirer
South Carolina: Counting the Vote — Some Say South Carolina’s Outdated Machines Cause for Concern | Free Times
Tennessee: Veteran had to pay for voter photo ID | The Daily News Journal
South Korea: Cyber Attacks Hit South Korean Election Commission, Candidate | The Chosun Ilbo
Editorials: The Internet can’t fix democracy—only citizens can | Macleans.ca
Blogs: L.A.‘s Elections Overhaul Could Provide a New Model | governing.org
Morocco: Moroccans protest polls, violence in the capital | Top News | Reuters
Tunisia: Tunisians Hold First Vote Since Revolution | NYTimes.com

Oct 28, 2011
National: Online Voting: Just A Dream Until Security Issues Can Be Fully Addressed, Experts Say | Courant.com

Allowing citizens to cast ballots online would increase participation in elections and make democracy more accessible. But don’t expect to vote on your iPhone in Connecticut anytime soon; the technology just isn’t there to ensure secure elections, said several experts who participated in a panel discussion at Central Connecticut State University Thursday night hosted by Secretary of the State Denise Merrill.

“The biggest concern I have about Internet voting is that we don’t know how to do it securely,” said Ron Rivest, an expert in cryptology and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It sounds wonderful but it’s an oxymoron. … We don’t have Internet experts who know how to secure big pieces of the Internet from attack. Rivest called online voting a fantasy and said it’s at least two decades from replacing the methods currently in use.

Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, is another skeptic. He led a team of students from the university who successfully penetrated a test-run of Internet voting in Washington, D.C., in 2010. “We began … role playing — how would a hacker, a real malicious attacker, attempt to break in and compromise the vote and, within 48 hours of the start of the test, we had gained virtually complete control of the voting server and changed all of the votes,” he said.

Not everyone on the panel was a critic. Natalie Tennant, West Virginia’s secretary of state, said her state successfully piloted online voting for members of the military serving out of state in 2010. “We had no known breaches of security,” she said.

Tennant noted that no voting system is foolproof. A voting official counting paper ballots or tabulating electronic voting machines can tamper with a system just as easily as a distant computer hacker, she said.

In the West Virginia experiment, 165 people voted online, Tennant said. She said she received a great deal of positive feedback from participating military members, many of whom were stationed in war zones in distant lands. For them, the simple act of voting was deeply meaningful, she said.

The forum also featured Alex Shvartsman, director of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Voting Technology Research, and Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, the president and co-founder of the Overseas Vote Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps members of the military and other Americans living overseas participate in federal elections. It was moderated by WNPR’s John Dankosky.

During the 2010 legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill requiring Merrill’s office to issue a report on online balloting. She organized a forum as a way to gather facts, spur the discussion and generate public involvement.

Connecticut would do well to proceed with caution, advised Halderman. “The important thing in the voting process, the most important thing, is transparency, allowing people to know that their votes are being recorded correctly and that the entire process is being done in a way that ensures the security and integrity of the vote,” he said.

Full Article: Online Voting: Just A Dream Until Security Issues Can Be Fully Addressed, Experts Say — Courant.com….
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Oct 28, 2011
New Jersey: South Jersey voting-machine incident makes waves | Philadelphia Inquirer

When the returns came in for the Cumberland County Democratic Committee last summer, Cynthia Zirkle couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Only 86 votes were cast in the race to represent her district in Fairfield Township, and despite assurances from dozens of friends, Zirkle and her husband, Ernest, had managed to win just 19 votes between them. “I can’t believe that’s correct,” Zirkle told her husband, a retired veterinarian and the town’s deputy mayor.

The couple sued the Cumberland County Board of Elections and discovered that due to a programming error, their results had been switched with those of their opponents. In a rare turn of events, a new election was ordered, which the Zirkles handily won.

The case caught the eye of a Rutgers law professor who has spent years arguing that the touch-screen voting machines in use across New Jersey are prone to malfunction and hacking and need a paper backup that would allow for manual recounts. Provided with that real-life example of the machines’ fallibility, Penny Venetis, codirector of the constitutional litigation clinic at Rutgers-Newark Law School, is fighting to get the state Appellate Court to reopen her 2004 lawsuit and rewrite the rules on how elections are conducted in New Jersey. “The issues involved extend way beyond Cumberland County,” Venetis said. “It’s only because it was such a small election we know about this. If it was Newark, forget it. But that’s our point, stuff like this happens. Computers can be told to do whatever you want. They can play Jeopardy!; they can cheat in elections.”

The most famous case of voting-machine malfunction was in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, when the infamous “hanging chads” resulted in a series of election challenges that ultimately were decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Congress responded with legislation ordering states to improve voting technology.

With the advent of electronic voting machines, other problems have arisen. Computers can mix up candidates’ results and touch screens go on the fritz. In 2004, a voting machine in North Carolina stopped counting ballots, disenfranchising more than 4,000 voters, said Pamela Smith, president of Verify Voting Foundation, a nonprofit headquartered in San Diego.

In response, the majority of states have installed voting systems with paper backups that allow for a manual recount in the event of computer error or manipulation.

“When someone has a personal experience with a major malfunction or a near miss, it tends to change how they look at their system,” Smith said. “Nobody wants to be the next Florida.”

New Jersey is one of six states where paperless voting machines are in use statewide, though such machines are still in limited use in 11 other states, including Pennsylvania.

In 2007, the New Jersey Legislature had voted to install a paper backup on its machines at an estimated cost of $26 million. But two years later, lawmakers decided to hold off until federal money was made available, said a spokesman for the state Division of Elections.

New Jersey has approximately 11,000 voting machines, the majority of which are a model of the machine criticized in Venetis’ original 2004 lawsuit as particularly prone to hacking. That analysis appeared to be upheld by Mercer County Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg’s 2010 ruling, which said the machines were not secure and needed to have their security systems upgraded. The ruling did not require paper backup.

Full Article: South Jersey voting-machine incident makes waves | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/28/2011.
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Oct 27, 2011
South Carolina: Counting the Vote — Some Say South Carolina’s Outdated Machines Cause for Concern | Free Times

Barbara Zia has seen enough miscounts. As the president of the state chapter of the League of Women Voters, Zia is fighting for the state to replace its outdated voting machines in hopes of preserving another layer of security for democracy in South Carolina.

The league, praised for its nonpartisan concern for voting rights and access, recently commissioned an independent study of the state’s voting technology after snafus in the 2010 elections. According to Zia, the report found three basic problems with the current system.

One, the iVotronic machines were aging and replacement parts were no longer being manufactured. Two, the machines were too complicated for the committed poll managers to use, workers whom Zia said were basically volunteers working from before dawn to after daylight in some cases. And three, the electronic touch-screen machines do not provide enough of a paper trail to ensure truly correct elections.

Zia said that not only does the state need machines that provide a paper printout for poll managers and election officials to double-check, but voters need a printout of their vote so they can make sure their votes are being correctly recorded.

Zia, who lives in Mount Pleasant, is concerned that continued goof-ups could shine a negative light on South Carolina, with the first in the South 2012 presidential primary looming. “We’ve got to get this right,” Zia said.

The league has formed a task force to look into what kind of technology needs to be purchased to quickly replace the iVotronics system. But “quickly” may be in the eye of the beholder.

S.C. Election Commission spokesperson Chris Whitmire said last week that the current system, which cost $34 million originally, was only “halfway” through its useful lifespan. Paid for with the help of federal money in 2004, the system was fully implemented statewide in 2006. Whitmire said the current machines could see action as late as the 2016 elections.

But in September 2010, the commission’s executive director, Marci Andino, was quoted as saying the system was graying and that it would be fiscally irresponsible for the state to put any more money into add-ons to keep it absolutely current.

Full Article: Free Times: State Government — Counting the Vote.

World War II veteran Darwin Spinks is wondering why he had to pay $8 to get a voter photo ID that should have been free when he recently went to the driver’s license testing center here. The state Legislature passed a law this spring requiring voters to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot. It included the requirement that any Tennessee resident who didn’t have a photo ID could get one free of charge.

But when the 86-year-old Spinks visited the testing center about a month ago on Samsonite Boulevard to get a photo ID for voting purposes, he said he had to pay.

Spinks said Tuesday he needed the photo because when his driver’s license with a photo expired the last time, the driver testing center issued him a new license without a photo on it. State law allows people over 60 to get a non-photo driver’s license.

The retired print shop worker who moved here 17 years ago said he told people at the driver center he wanted an ID for voting purposes. He was sent from one line to another to have a picture taken, then was charged.

“I said, ‘You mean I’ve got to pay again?’ She says, ‘Yes,’” explained Spinks, a resident of County Farm Road, who was stationed on the USS Goshen in World War II and was called to duty again for the Korean War.

“I served my country in two wars. Most of that fighting blood was gone after World War II,” he said.

Tennessee has 126,000 registered voters over age 60 who have non-photo driver’s licenses, according to the Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

Full Article: Veteran had to pay for voter photo ID | The Daily News Journal | dnj.com….

The websites of the National Election Commission and the pan-opposition candidate for Seoul mayoral by-election, Park Won-soon, were paralyzed by cyber attacks on Wednesday morning as voters went to the polls. The onslaught was a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack whereby hackers effectively overload certain websites by activating masses of zombie computers that have been infected with a virus.

“A DDoS attack interrupted access to the commission’s website from 6:15 a.m. to 8:32 a.m.,” an official with the election watchdog said. “We took an emergency measure with a DDoS defense system, but to no avail. So we diverted web traffic to a cybershelter provided by KT.”

A follow-up attack then intermittently slowed access to the commission’s website, the official added. “We’ve since been investigating who masterminded the attacks, while getting ready to defend ourselves against further attacks in cooperation with the National Cyber Security Center and the National Police Agency,” he said.

Park’s website was also attacked by a DDoS from 1:47 a.m. to 1:59 a.m. and from 5:50 a.m. to 6:52 a.m., according to the agency’s Cyberterror Response Center.

“We’ve detected Internet Protocol addresses used in the attacks and have since been trying to analyze them,” an official with the response center said. “We don’t know whether the websites of the Commission and Park were attacked by the same perpetrator.”

Full Article: The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea — Cyber Attacks Hit Election Commission, Candidate.

The technology of voting has changed substantially since ancient Athenians tossed coloured stones in jars and scratched names on pottery shards. Today it’s paper ballots that seem ancient and outdated.

Poor turnout by voters in Manitoba and Ontario this month has prompted renewed calls for online voting. “We have to do something,” vowed Greg Selinger, recently elected premier of Manitoba, referring to his province’s depressing turnout numbers. “We’re going to take a look at e-voting.” Elections Canada plans to test electronic balloting in a federal by-election ~~by 2013~~ sometime after 2013. Many municipalities across the country are already using the new technology.

The appeal of online voting is obvious. Voter turnout is poor across the board, but particularly dismal among the youngest cohort of voters. Since this generation has grown up immersed in online communications, its members might be enticed to vote in greater numbers if the ballot was in a format familiar and convenient to them. Voting at home via a smartphone certainly seems more attractive than walking down the street to a public school or community hall, standing behind a cardboard screen and putting an X on a piece of paper.

And yet it is not clear online voting actually has the power to draw more people to the polls, whatever their age. From the municipal election evidence in Canada, it appears online voting may boost the number of people who vote in advance polls, but does little to change overall voter turnout. A large-scale experiment in Britain was abandoned in 2007 after numerous technical glitches and no appreciable improvement in turnout. All of which suggests online voting provides already-committed voters with a more convenient means of voting, but fails to address the underlying apathy of those who don’t.

This makes intuitive sense. Declining voter turnout is unlikely to stem from the physical requirements of voting—it is no more difficult to vote than to go to the grocery store, something most Canadians of all ages manage to do on a regular basis. Rather, what is crucial to the decision to vote is the time invested before that walk.

Casting an informed vote requires a mental effort that far outweighs the physical act. Thinking about the election, learning about the candidates and their platforms, getting involved in politics in general; it is social failure in these areas that has produced the poor voter turnout. Any real solution to the voter turnout question thus lies not in new technology but old-school effort. Parties and candidates need to stir greater excitement among the voting public. And voters themselves need to take the time to understand how politics affects them personally.

One of the great ironies of the Internet age is that while it has made it far easier for voters to inform themselves about elections, it has done little to increase the interest that people show for democracy in general. If there is a role for the Internet to play in reducing the democracy deficit, it should come in improving the level of public engagement and altering voter behaviour prior to election day, through the use of forums, blogs and various other online tools. This is where the innovation ought to occur.

Full Article: The Internet can’t fix democracy—only citizens can — Opinion — Macleans.ca.

Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder/county clerk in Los Angeles County (the largest voting district in the country), is currently facing a daunting goal that will affect over 4 million voters: completely overhauling its dated election system over the next five years. Recognizing that it’s time for a change, Logan and his office are now trying to determine what, exactly, should they replace their election system with. They might wind up with something truly unique, something of the people.

The current system, Logan says, lacks the flexibility to suit the county’s increasingly diverse population. The county currently uses something like a punchcard voting system adapted from technology developed more than 40 years ago. Voters slide a paper ballot into a template with candidate names and mark it with ink. The ballots can be tabulated quickly, are easy to store, and provide a physical record of each vote. But they don’t list candidate names on the actual paper — those appear on the template — so it’s difficult for those who use the increasingly popular mail-in option to case their votes. The system also offers little in the way of of sophisticated language assistance or help for disabled voters.

“It’s old technology,” Logan says. “It’s not going to sustain a whole lot longer.”
None of the system’s original developers are employed by the county, and it’s become increasingly difficult to find people “with requisite skills in obsolete mainframe technologies” to replace retiring staff, according to a county report. Purchasing a new system don’t fit well with L.A. County’s operations: direct-recording electronic (DRE or touchscreen) machines are too expensive to be rolled out and maintained across 5,000 polling locations. A low-tech system — such as one that relies on hand-counting — could yield inaccuracies in a county as large as Los Angeles.

Yet L.A. County is so large that it may be able to get the private-sector or a non-profit to develop something original. And as Logan sees it, he has no other choice than to go that route. “The market, as it exists today, can’t meet the needs of L.A. County,” he says.

So Logan’s office is trying a different process: giving the people what they want. As part of an effort to determine how Angelinos should vote, the county teamed up with a partnership between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survey more than 1,000 voters, more than 1,000 poll workers, 26 city clerks from across the county and 64 staffers in Logan’s office. Participants are being asked what they like about the current voting system and what they’d like to see in the future. The county also got input from various stakeholders like advocates for the disabled and those with limited English skills, as well as local party officials.

The findings left no question about the needs for a change. “[T]he current system lacks the flexibility to meet voter preferences, as it does not offer voters an intuitive and user-friendly interface that retains confidence that votes are being cast and counted in a secure and efficient manner,” Logan wrote in a memo to county leaders earlier this year.

Logan sees this initiative as an opportunity for the future. His challenge will be to balance the needs of younger voters who are familiar with higher-tech devices with older residents who favor a more traditional approach. There’s also the demands of choosing voting technology that’s flexible enough to allow for multiple translations and disability services while convenient enough to be used for mail-in voters.

Full Article: L.A.‘s Elections Overhaul Could Provide a New Model.

Thousands of Moroccans demonstrated in cities across the country on Sunday, calling for a boycott of early parliamentary polls next month whose outcome will be key to the future of reforms crafted by the royal palace. The protests are the latest in a series of regular peaceful demonstrations by the youth-led opposition February 20 Movement, inspired by uprisings that ousted leaders in Tunisia and Egypt to demand a parliamentary monarchy and punishment for officials accused of graft.

In the capital Rabat, a Reuters reporter saw dozens of riot police with truncheons beating and kicking protesters who had gathered in front of the parliament building at the end of a march by around 3,000 people. A local elected official in the country’s biggest city, Casablanca, said about 8,000 people took part in a similar protest there. Several thousand took part in protests in other cities including Fes and Tangier.

“These nationwide protests were held around the common theme of calling for a boycott of November 25 parliamentary polls,” said Omar Radi, an activist from February 20 Movement’s local committee in Rabat.

“It is obvious that the polls will bring to power the same figures who have for years been plundering the wealth of the country and holding hostage the future of the Moroccan population,” he added.

King Mohammed has promised in recent speeches that the elections will be fair and transparent. The main opposition Justice and Development Party (PJD) has decried laws recently passed for the polls as doing too little to prevent vote-buying.

Full Article: Moroccans protest polls, violence in the capital | Top News | Reuters.

Millions of Tunisians cast votes on Sunday for an assembly to draft a constitution and shape a new government, in a burst of pride and hope that after inspiring uprisings across the Arab world, their small country could now lead the way to democracy.

“Tunisians showed the world how to make a peaceful revolution without icons, without ideology, and now we are going to show the world how we can build a real democracy,” said Marcel Marzouki, founder of a liberal political party and a former dissident exile, as he waited for hours in a long line outside a polling place in the coastal town of Sousse. “This will have a real impact in places like Libya and Egypt and Syria, after the fall of its regime,” he added. “The whole Arab world is watching.”

In another first for the region, a moderate Islamic party, Ennahda, is expected to win at least a plurality of seats in the Tunisian assembly. The party’s leaders have vowed to create another kind of new model for the Arab world, one reconciling Islamic principles with Western-style democracy.

Results are expected to be tallied within days. In the meantime, those still struggling through the postrevolutionary uncertainty of places like Libya and Egypt watched Tunisia “with a kind of envy,” said Samer Soliman, a professor at the American University in Cairo and an Egyptian political activist.

Libyans and Egyptians acknowledge that Tunisia was not only the first but also the easiest of the Arab revolutions, because of its relatively small, homogenous, educated population and because of the willingness of the Tunisian military to relinquish power. The success of Tunisia offers inspiration, but perhaps few answers, for Egyptians or Libyans who hope to follow in its footsteps.

Libya’s interim leaders on Sunday proclaimed their revolution a success and laid out an ambitious timetable for the election of their own constituent assembly. But they have yet to solve the problem of unifying the loosely organized brigades of anti-Qaddafi fighters under the control of an interim authority to govern Libya until then, much less lay the groundwork for elections.

And with Egypt a little more than a month away from a vote for a new Parliament, its interim military rulers have so far balked at adopting many of the election procedures that enabled Tunisia’s election to proceed smoothly. Among them are inking voters’ fingers to ensure people vote only once, transparent ballot boxes, a single election day rather than staggered polls, and weeks of voter education before the balloting. Also, in Egypt, the interim military rulers have not agreed to relinquish any of the army’s power over either the next Parliament or a planned constitutional panel.

Full Article: Tunisians Hold First Vote Since Revolution — NYTimes.com….

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The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly October 24-30 2011

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