By Luther Weeks on February 5, 2019
Yesterday, the Connecticut House Committee on Contested Elections concluded its work on the contested election in Stratford. They provided two options to the House: Leave the certified winner in office or hold a re-vote. You can read more at CTMirror: House committee deadlocks on disputed Stratford election The CTMirror article includes the final report.
The crux of the issue is that after a recanvass the certified winner was ahead by 13 votes. 75 voters were given the wrong ballot, without that race. The votes counted in the pooling place district favored the loser, in fact if the 75 had voted as the rest of the district, on average the loser would have picked up 12.55 votes, thus on average, all but even odds for each candidate. The crux of the disagreement is around the issue of if that evidence brought the uncertainty of the election in question enough to justify a re-vote.
Posted in CT Law, Legislature 2019
By Luther Weeks on January 25, 2019
The Committee on Contested Elections had its 1st day of testimony yesterday. Two registrars, a moderator, and a deputy registrar and then a bombshell.
The registrars spent lots of time in their testimony explaining how they emphasized in training that eight of the ten polling places had two districts and that every pack of ballots should be checked by the ballot clerks that it was in the right district. The Moderator emphasized that he trained all the ballot clerks in the morning before the polling place opened. They also highlighted that they are two of the ten trainers for the state, responsible for delivering Moderator Certification classes.
Starratt said he had never been in a polling place before that day, presumably never even voting? He was recruited two days before and had no pre-election training. That is a clear violation of state law which requires that every polling place official receive such training before every election. Even late recruits are often brought in for an hour or two of one-on-one training to fulfill that requirement.
Posted in CT, CT Law
By Luther Weeks on January 20, 2019
On Friday the Committee on Contested Elections met to determine who they would hear on the election contested. The election was decided by some 16 votes while some 76 voters were given the wrong ballot and thus were disenfranchised in the election. I was there. Listening to the Committee members and their lack of knowledge of election administration was painful/disappointing for me:
- They did not seem to know how many moderators there are in a polling place, and if one of them was the head moderator. (Generally there is one moderator and if the town has more than one polling place, as Stratford does, there is one head moderator in headquarters that is responsible of the election and the results.)…
Posted in CT Law, Legislature 2019
By Luther Weeks on November 15, 2018
On Sunday the Hartford Courant lead Editorial proposed fixes to its perceived problems with Connecticut’s election system: 5 Fixes For State’s Broken Election System. Note that all the statewide races were decided by 8:00am on Wednesday morning after the election.
To the Courant’s credit, for the second time in a row, they published a letter of mine criticizing an editorial.
Proposed Fixes Could Make Problems Worse
The editorial “Five Fixes for State’s Broken Election System” misses the mark on at least three of its five proposals
Posted in Costs, CT, CT Law, Mail/Absentee Voting, Our Editorials
By Luther Weeks on November 11, 2018
There were long lines for Election Day Registration (EDR) and it took a whole 10 hours to count enough votes to determine the Governor in Connecticut. Our EDR is a problem, but waiting ten hours for result is just a concern hyped up by a overly impatient press and used as a opportunity by advocates to promote early voting as a solution.
As of this time the states of California, Colorado, Florida, and Georgia are still counting votes. They all have mail-in early voting. California has a Friday deadline to receive mail-in ballots postmarked by election day and counts them for weeks after election day. As of Friday all those other states were still counting.
There real are problems and there are reasonable solutions.
Posted in Costs, CT Law, Legislature 2019, Mail/Absentee Voting, NonScienceNonsense
By Luther Weeks on September 24, 2018
Merrill said her office will likely also increase its audits. Currently it randomly selects voting precincts to have primary results audited following elections; five percent of polling places that use optical scan machines are subject to the audit, as prescribed by Connecticut General Statutes 9-320f. Those counts are then matched against vote totals from optical scan machines.
Posted in CT, CT Law, Internet Security Issues
By Luther Weeks on June 18, 2018
As this CTNewsJunkie post implies, it will always be called The Bysiewicz Test <read>
Ambiguously defined in law and only slightly less ambiguously by the Connecticut Supreme Court. All we know for sure is that you have to be a lawyer in CT for at least ten years and have different experience than Susan Bysiewicz had in 2010. As I commented in on the article:
I always find it interesting that the AG and Judge of Probate are the only offices that have qualifications, as far as I know. They are both related to law. I wonder if the composition of the General Assembly makes the legislature realize how important qualifications are, in just these cases?
There remains no necessary training whatsoever to be Secretary of the State, while some of her employees, but not all, need to be lawyers to give advice to the public, would be candidates, and election officials. That could be going better, but of course, certification by itself does not preclude errors and incompetence, or as Jon Lender puts it Bungling
Posted in CT, CT Law, CT Skulduggery and Errors
By Luther Weeks on May 17, 2018
I testified in my capacity as Executive Director of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit. I was the only member of the public providing testimony.
Why are post-election audits and paper ballots a critical component of protecting our elections? “[D}data protection involves prevention, detection, and recovery”. Cybersecurity and other measures protecting voting equipment and voting systems are primarily prevention measures and to a lesser degree detection measures. No matter how much effort we put into cybersecurity, software testing, and hardware maintenance there will always be a significant level of vulnerability.
Paper ballots, sufficient post-election audits, and recounts provide a primary means of detecting cyber, software, human, and hardware failures. They also provide a means of recovery. They provide for, so called, software independent verification of election results, resulting in justified public confidence.
Posted in Chain of Custody, CT, CT Law, Electronic Vulnerability, Internet Security Issues
By Luther Weeks on April 5, 2018
Connecticut will have available somewhere around $5 million to spend on election security in the new “omnibus” appropriations bill. Woefully inadequate for states that should be replacing touch-screen voting with all paper ballots. etc., for a state that already has paper ballots, a lot can be accomplished.
Denise Merrill is already thinking about how to spend it: CTMirror: Omnibus has millions to strengthen CT voting system against cyber attacks.
Secretary Merrill asked me for suggestions in a brief conversation a couple of weeks ago. At the time, off the top of my head, I suggested and we briefly discussed three things. After consideration I would suggest some more things. Security is not just cyber security and training officials. It also requires physical protection of ballots, physical protection of voting machines, and understanding the situation before determining the training needed.
Posted in Chain of Custody, Costs, CT, CT Law, Electronic Vulnerability
By Luther Weeks on March 17, 2018
On Thursday the GAE Committee held testimony on most election bills this year. (There was one last week and a couple more will be on Monday). For once, I was able to support more bills than I opposed!
Opposition and support by the Secretary of the State and Registrars was mixed. In addition to supporting and opposing various bills, I offered several suggestions for improvement. And one suggestion for radical improvement.
Posted in Chain of Custody, CT, CT Law, Mail/Absentee Voting, Post-Election Audits
