Month: December 2007

Stamford Times: Advantages of new voting machines uncertain

Fortunato said it is too early to tell whether the new machines will save their owners money. Ballots for the optical scan machines cost 50 cents each but older model lever-action machines required costly maintenance.

“I think maybe at the end of next year, after you have the primary in August and election in November, you’d be able to determine was this more costly,” said Fortunato. “I don’t think you’d be able to do that right now.”

This article sets the complete wrong context and criteria: Is the paper cost of optical scan cheaper or more costly than paper for lever machines or DRE (touch screen) voting machines?

The voting machines and the entire voting system is worth nothing unless it provides integrity and confidence that the intention of the voters will be carried out. Cost of election administration per ballot? approximately $3.00; cost of the last Senate campaign? approximately $40 per ballot; cost of one mailing from your State Senator or Representative? approx $1.00; Cost of sufficient audits to protect our vote? $0.25; Value of preserving our right to choose our leaders? Priceless. <read the article>

Audit 54% of the Vote?

Last Monday, with less than 90 percent of the vote counted and the opposition leading by just 50.7 percent to 49.3 percent, President Chavez congratulated his opponents on their victory. They had defeated his proposed constitutional reforms, including the abolition of term limits for the presidency.

… An extremely large random sample – about 54 percent – of the paper ballots are counted and compared with the electronic tally.

Venezuela Is Not Florida by Mark Weisbrot <read>

Secretary of State Questions Electronic Voting

Electronic voting systems …still aren’t good enough to be trusted with the state’s elections, … she admitted having doubts as to whether the electronic voting systems will ever meet the standards she believes are needed … “I don’t rule out the ingenuity of some computer science student now in the eighth grade,” but what’s available now isn’t as transparent or auditable as the paper ballot systems they replaced…“When the government finds a car is unsafe, it orders a recall,” she said. “Here we’re talking about systems used to cast and tally votes, the most basic tool of democracy.”

Read the entire story highlighting California Secretary of State Debra Bowen <read>.

Continue reading “Secretary of State Questions Electronic Voting”

TalkNationRadio: Memory Card Junk Data and LHS Replacement – Integrity of Testing Procedures in Doubt

UConn is charged with testing a random sample of memory cards sent to registrars to be used in the election. If the actual cards used are replacements sent by LHS after the random card is sent to UConn, then there is no guarantee that the cards tested by Dr. Shvartsman were the same as those used in the election.

Once again Dori Smith presents significant information. Memory card failures are not just a Florida phenomenon. <listen>

Alex Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut’s Voting Research Team joins us to discuss his findings of “junk data” on memory cards delivered to the polls for the November 6, 2007 State and Municipal Election. The team will release their report on the memory card failures shortly.

Perhaps even more disturbing is instances uncovered in Dori’s work that indicate widespread failures during pre-election testing. Although its a small sample it indicates that problems may be much higher than those in Florida:

Continue reading “TalkNationRadio: Memory Card Junk Data and LHS Replacement – Integrity of Testing Procedures in Doubt”

Bysiewicz To Consider Elimination Of Manual Recounts

Last year the Legislature passed PA 07-194 mandating audits of the optical scan machines. Last year, Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz promised advocates that regulations would mandate that recounts be manual counts and did not need to be included in the law. Now with less than half the mandated audits complete, according to the New London Day she is reconsidering that promise. Just one example of why it is not safe to rely on regulations and procedures to accomplish what should be in the law: <read>

Bysiewicz said if those results continue, she would recommend that future recounts be done by feeding the ballots into a different optical scanner from the one used during the election. Election workers would have to count only ballots that could not be read by the machines.

It seems she may not recommend that change for audits, just for recounts. But don’t voters have even more interest in seeing that their votes were counted as intended in a recanvass?

The audits were specifically designed and specifically mandated to answer the question, how does the voter know the machine counted their vote the way they intended,” Bysiewicz said. “The only way to do that is to hand-count them.

Recall that races involved in recounts are currently exempted from audit. So, without action by the legislature, the most important races to verify would by law be exempted from a hand verification.

Also the current state law does not give audit observers the right to visibly see the ballots such that they can visibly verify that the marks on the ballot are counted correctly. Indeed, how is a voter to know. Maybe by ‘faith’ when the ballots are ‘independently’ counted by the local election staff conducting the election?

“It is important voters have faith that their vote will be recorded accurately,” Mrs. Bysiewicz said, “and that’s why the independent audits are so vital.” <source>

Remember the election might be overturned in a recount and the reason might be because the people failed to accurately program and test the optical scanner: <recently in Riverside>