From the Styx by Peggy Tibbetts

On Monday (August 28), the Brennan Center for Justice released their report: The Machinery of Democracy: Usability of Voting Systems.

BRENNAN CENTER REPORT FINDS IMPROVEMENTS IN NEW VOTING TECHNOLOGY BEING IMPLEMENTED IN SEVERAL STATES

Report Finds Precinct Count Optical Scan and Scrolling Touch Screen Systems Have Lower Lost Vote Rates

Report Faults Continued Use of Full-Face Ballot Touch Screen Systems

NEW YORK, NY - The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, today released a report and policy proposals, concluding that two of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems today are better at recording voter intentions than older systems like the punchcard system used in Florida in 2000. At the same time the report faulted one electronic voting system under consideration in New York and in use in parts of New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee that continues to unduly hamper voters’ ability to easily and accurately cast a ballot for their preferred candidate without undue burden, confusion and delay.

Among the report’s key findings:

Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) and scrolling Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems are more accurate at recording voter intention than older voting systems. In 2004, residual vote rates were less than 1% for both technologies.

Full-face DRE systems continue to be plagued with an unacceptably high residual vote rate. In 2000, 2002 and 2004, it exceeded that of either PCOS or scrolling DRE systems.

Residual vote rates among voters earning less then $25,000 are higher on full-face DREs (2.8%), than on either PCOS (1.4%) or scrolling DREs (1.3%).

“The good news is that most states are selecting machines and designing ballots that will record more voters’ choices accurately. The bad news is that major jurisdictions like Philadelphia, and perhaps New York City, plan to use voting technology that is known to have high error rates,” said Lawrence Norden, Associate Counsel at the Brennan Center and lead author of the report.

“This report makes clear that there is a real difference between so called ‘full-face’ systems and all other voting technology. Put simply, full-face systems make it harder for people to cast their votes. We should be encouraging all election officials to reject full-face ballot requirements and adopt technology that is user friendly for all voters,” stated David Kimball, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a co-author of the report.

For the most part, the Brennan Center report analyzes voting machine usability but does not address vulnerability to fraud.

The key paragraph in the report can be found on Page 19, Efficiency and Voter Confidence:

The existing research concerning the time each system requires to complete the voting process, …

Voters and election officials already know voting on a machine takes longer than voting on a paper ballot. I voted on a machine this month. It took a long time.

… the burdens imposed on voters, and the confidence each system inspires among voters remains extremely limited.

Burdens of time and expense. HAVA allocated $3.86 billion to states for election reform but most of the funds are going into purchasing voting machines and training workers how to use them – an enormous taxpayer cost for a system we have no confidence in.

After two years of studying election issues, I believe HAVA (2002 Help American Vote Act) stands out as an obstacle to free and fair elections.

* HAVA requires states to purchase voting machines. Studies continue to show that voting machines are unreliable, expensive, difficult to use, and can be pre-programmed or hacked.

* HAVA creates confusion over voter ID requirements by allowing states to make their own rules.

* HAVA requires states to hand out provisional ballots but does not require election officials to count them.

I vote by mail whenever possible. It’s easy and convenient. Is it safe? No way. Optical scan voting machines are used to count mail-in (absentee) ballots. A Black Box Voting investigation uncovered serious vulnerabilities with Diebold optical scan machines in the 2004 election in Florida.

Tallahassee, FL: “Are we having fun yet?”

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold’s opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted localities.

New regs: Counting paper ballots forbidden

Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be “unauthorized recounts” and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand-counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds.

A little man living in every ballot box

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered “empty” at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold — yet the system was certified anyway.

The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks.

Based on their investigation, Black Box Voting, Inc. issued a report on July 4, 2005: Critical Security Issues with Diebold Optional Scan Design. This is it in a nutshell from the Executive Summary:

The findings of this study indicate that the architecture of the Diebold Precinct-Based Optical Scan 1.94w voting system inherently supports the alteration of its basic functionality, and thus the alteration of the produced results each time an election is prepared.

So there you go. With our current election system brought to you by HAVA, votes on paper ballots are not even safe from hackers.

Where do we go from here?

From my perspective and experience as an Election Judge, I advocate:

* Scrap or re-write HAVA to be inclusive and Constitutional
* Get rid of ALL voting machines, including optical scan vote counting machines
* To protect voting as a democratic process, people should count votes, not machines
* Bring back to paper ballots
* Train and pay election officials and workers
* Election Day (same day) voter registration
* Early voting
* Mail-in voting
* No ID requirement for registered repeat voters
* Enact IRV – instant runoff voting nationwide

Colorado Common Cause paid for the legal firm that represented the class action lawsuit I participated in 2 years ago. The Common Cause website publishes their own Election Reform Agenda.

Be sure to click through and read their recommendations, which go much further than my own. I agree with everything except the voting machines. Common Cause recommends the voter verified paper audit trail and testing standards for voting machines. Again, my own research tells me voting machines are unreliable, expensive, difficult to use, and can be pre-programmed or hacked.

No matter what, we still have a long, long way to go to achieve meaningful election reform.

For more information on election reform check out these websites:

Common Cause

Vote Trust USA

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