July, 2010 | CTVotersCount.org

Will Gov Patrick assign MA votes to states with touch screens and voter suppression?

Perhaps Governor Patrick will consider the arguments of Democrats like Connecticut Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz who opposes the Agreement and Minneosota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie who objects for the difficulty in counting the popular vote. We are not in principle against a national popular vote, but as a prerequisite we would require sufficient uniform national voting franchise and integrity laws, enforceable and enforced.

Recently both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature passed the National Popular Vote Agreement/Compact. StateLine.org story: Anti-Electoral College pact could expand <read> The StateLine article and their earlier one attempted to present arguments from both sides, however, missing are the most important arguments against the NPV, especially via the Compact as we have covered in our Case Against “The National Popular Vote“:

The franchise is not uniform from state to state
We cannot trust reported results
Reported popular vote totals are a fiction
The Agreement is likely to result in Presidential Elections being decided by the Supreme Court

The franchise is not uniform from state to state

Candidates Qualify For Public Financing For Primary

With a couple of close calls near the deadline, it seems that all the statewide office candidates that wanted to participate in the program have met fundraising criteria.

CTNewsJunkie story <read>

With a couple of close calls near the deadline, it seems that all the statewide office candidates that wanted to participate in the program have met fundraising criteria. Several candidates are not planning on participating either because they do not believe in the program or want to be able to raise and spend higher amounts. Others have claimed the qualifying bar may be a little too high for the statewide offices. So far, it seems that every statewide candidate who put in the effort managed to qualify. Others may have dropped out because they felt they were not likely to qualify or felt the work involved might not be worth it if they were to loose the election in the end.

Two Courts Rule For And Against Citizens Election Program

Disagreeing with the lower court on leveling the playing field for 3rd party candidates. Lifting the ban on lobbyist contributions, while leaving the ban in place for state contractors and apparently also ruled against providing supplemental grants to candidates faced with high spending opponents.

Many people believed that the U.S. 2nd Court of Appeals would leave Connecticut’s campaign finance law alone until after the November elections, but they ruled to today, just as candidates are qualifying before the Primary deadline.

Its a mixed bag, disappointing in my view. We would like to see the playing field leveled, lobbyist contributions at least limited, and the supplemental grants provided. It makes no sense that giving supplemental grants to one candidate limits the free speech of an opponent, or that erecting higher standards for third party candidates serves a vibrant democracy.

Meanwhile, also today, the Superior Court ruled in favor of the State Election Enforcement Commissions interpretation of the law, allowing for the combining of contributions from Governor and Lieutenant Governor.

New Haven Independent <story>

Hartford Courant <blog>

AP <story>

Some good news in the New Haven Independent Article:

[State Sen. Andrew McDonald], noted that the Second Circuit ruling doesn’t immediately take effect. The panel returned the case to a lower court judge who originally decided it, Stefan Underhill, for review. That can take weeks or months. And the gubernatorial campaigns were not parties to the federal suit.

In addition, the State Elections Enforcement Commission, which administers the law, intends to ask the the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to review Tuesday’s decision en banc (before all 25 judges); and barring a victory there, to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal advised candidates to proceed under the current law’s rules for now.

Internet Voting Called Unfair, Not Observable, and Not Transparent

“Voting methods that utilize web-based technologies and telephone-based balloting do not allow the necessary levels of observability and transparency that exist within the current election process.”

While states prepare to risk military and overseas votes on Internet, email and FAX, the National Association of Manufacturers calls it unsafe for union elections. Their concern is union members being intimidated in remote, unobserved locations. They are correct. Intimidation or the selling of votes is just one of the risks of Internet voting. <read>

Recently the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) published a request for information regarding industry solutions for procuring and implementing “secure electronic voting services for both remote and on-site elections.” The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is concerned with the Board’s intention to pursue the use of electronic systems to allow union representation elections to take place off-site and outside the supervision of the NLRB. The NAM firmly believes the current practice of NLRB-supervised elections that take place on employees’ worksites protects the integrity of the union election process and safeguards employees from intimidation and coercion from third parties…

Voting methods that utilize web-based technologies and telephone-based balloting do not allow the necessary levels of observability and transparency that exist within the current election process. Currently, union organizers are entitled to receive employees’ personal contact information from employers for the purposes of union organizing efforts. Introducingmethods of remote-access elections combined with this access to information exposes workers
to potential unwanted intimidation and harassment…

Such changes to the election process would be a drastic deviation from current practice
and run counter to the principles of fairness and balance inherent in our labor laws. We strongly
urge the Board to maintain the integrity of the current NLRB-supervised union representation
process and refrain from introducing new technologies that remove the necessary protections
currently afforded to employees.

What Do YOU [still] Want?

You are committed to the proposition that Democracy survive and flourish. We have serious work to do. It can happen in Connecticut. Voting Integrity, like the Constitution, can start here in the Constitution State and spread to the Nation. “Anything worth doing is worth failing at, and failing at, and failing at…until you succeed”

Looking on the right hand column of CTVotersCount we feature “This Week Past Years”. This week in 2008 there was a panel in Fairfield. I opened with remarks on “What Do You Want”. I said voters want five things and what Connecticut could do about them in the short run (three steps over two years). The two years have passed and little has changed:

My topic for the next few minutes is simple. It is: “What Do You Want”.

Let us begin with a quote from Colorado’s Secretary of State, Mike Coffman whose words inspired this talk and a quote from our own Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz.

Secretary Bysiewicz sent a letter in March to voters like you, who signed our petition last year. She said, in part: “We still have a lot of work to do and we need concerned citizens like you to stay involved…I share your belief that we should make our audit law the strongest in the nation and that its size and scope is adequate to achieve its goals…”

In June, Colorado’s Mike Coffman gave his view, of activists like CTVotersCount, “I think they have a fundamental belief that anything electronic, as it relates to voting, is evil and undermines our political system,”…”They believe in a world of conspiracy theories and are highly motivated. No matter what I do, so long as it leaves some form of electronic voting intact, it will be wrong by their standards.”

I agree with both of them. With Secretary Bysiewicz that we still “have a lot of work to do”; With Secretary Coffman, that voting advocates are “highly motivated”.

However, I do not believe that “anything electronic” is “evil” nor do I have a goal of eliminating “anything electronic” from voting.

So, What Should You Want?

Most fundamentally, five things:

That the ballot is secret, votes cannot be bought, coerced, added, lost, or modified

That your vote is counted, counted accurately, and counted exactly once

That everyone’s vote is counted accurately and reflected in the election results

That everyone has confidence that everyone’s vote is counted accurately

That, failing any of the above, appropriate corrective action will be taken

You deserve no more and no less. Democracy requires no less. Do you want anything less? Do you believe democracy can exist and flourish with less?

I’m open to any solution that will ensure Democracy. Whatever we can implement that ensures Democracy and is most efficient for officials and most convenient for the voters, I will support it.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

We do not have a blank slate. We have just spent millions of dollars on purchasing the most cost effective, most voter verifiable, and auditable type of electronic voting system available, that meet Federally mandated requirements.

I could talk of the long term, realistically six to ten years off. But Democracy cannot wait. There are real risks now. There are actions we can take over the next two years to ensure Democracy in Connecticut – to lead the way for the Nation. Yes, I said two years, if we start now, taking decisive action, with the equipment we have.

The Short List

Let me finish with the short list of what we need to do now, over the next two years. The three items I think of when Secretary Bysiewicz says “We still have a lot of work to do”:

First, an element of prevention. Each of our elections is programmed in Massachusetts by contractors; Contractors over which we have little, if any, oversight. UConn has developed an outstanding program to independently test the memory cards to detect many potential errors or fraud. 100% of our memory cards need to be tested independently in Connecticut with that program; before the cards are shipped to election officials; before the cards are used in any election.

Second, an element of detection and confidence: We need strong post-election audits to detect errors and fraud. Our current audits are insufficient, unreliable and ineffective. Our audits should be based on the current science of election auditing and recognized post-election audit principles.

Third, a solid chain-of-custody to make credible elections and audits possible. We need to protect and account for ballots before, during, and after the election. Ballots, memory cards, and optical scanners must be protected from illegal modification or covert access whenever they could be compromised.

Would you trust chain-of-custody standards less than those we require for evidence in criminal cases?

In Summary

You are committed to the proposition that Democracy survive and flourish. We have serious work to do. It can happen in Connecticut. Voting Integrity, like the Constitution, can start here in the Constitution State and spread to the Nation.

CTVotersCount is dedicated to pursuing “What You Want”. As a recent teacher said “Anything worth doing is worth failing at, and failing at, and failing at…until you succeed”

New York: Leveling the playing field for mail-in voting?

We suggest that anyone concerned with the disenfranchisement from New York’s ill programmed voting machines should also be concerned and warn the public of the even greater risks they take when they mail in their votes.

There has been quite a stir in New York about the setup of their new optical scan voting systems. It may disenfranchise voters by not adequately warning them about overvotes. Here is one story from DNA Manhattan Local news: New Voting Machines Spur Concerns About Confusion and Fraud <read>

Questions about the confusing nature of New York’s new voting machines are at the heart of a lawsuit filed Monday.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which filed the lawsuit about the new machines, says the new machines could confuse voters and thousands of ballots could be thrown out as a result.

That’s where the green button issue comes in. If a voter accidentally “over-votes” — meaning to mark more than one candidate for a particular office — the new machines give voters the option to press green to cast their vote, or red to get their ballot back.

However, the machine doesn’t explain that over-votes aren’t counted, so if you press green, your vote will be tossed, Brennan Center lawyers say.

They say the confusing choices could be fixed easily if the voting machines were reprogrammed.

In the meantime, voting rights advocates are educating people to go against their natural inclination and choose red if they over-vote, said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, which co-hosted Monday’s demonstration of the new machines with Westsiders for Public Participation.

We fully agree with the concerns raised, yet we point out that every form or mail-in voting including absentee voting, and no-excuse absentee voting has the same problem only worse. With mail-in voting the voter has no green button, no red button, no notice, no chance whatsoever to be warned of overvoting – just one of the ways that mail-in voters are unknowingly disenfranchised.

Update: 08/22/2010 New York Times weighs in on scanners and overvotes <read>

Unsafe at any cost – Internet voting

High tech solutions to military and overseas voting seem like the equivalent of a star wars sledgehammer to hit a small nail.

Update: Rescorla adds a post explaining why pilots are of questionable value <read>

As I mentioned earlier, the DC BOEE Internet ballot return project is just the latest in a series of pilots and attempted Internet voting pilots. Superficially, this sounds like a good idea: there’s debate about whether Internet voting is a good idea, so let’s only natural that we’d try it out and see how it works. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to tell us anything very useful; while we have extremely strong theoretical reasons for believing that Internet voting is insecure, those reasons don’t indicate that every single election is going to fail.

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Based on the MOVE Act, many states and jurisdictions are experimenting with various forms of email, fax, and Internet voting. Washington, D.C. for example is setting up a pilot program. Eric Rescorla comments on the D.C. pilot at Educated Guesswork <read>

UOCAVA voters are often in remote locations with poor mail access, so traditional Vote By Mail doesn’t work very well, making it an apparently attractive use case for technological fixes. That’s why there have been (at least) two previous efforts to apply Internet voting technology to UOCAVA voters…

Rescorla covers various attacks: Attacks on the Server, Software Attacks on the End-User Client, and Attacks on the End-User. He concludes:

As far as I can tell, a system of this type offers significantly worse security properties than in-person voting (whether opscan or DRE), since it has all the security flaws of both plus a much larger attack surface area. [Note that the intermediate opscan step offers only marginal security benefit because it’s based on electronic records which are untrustworthy.] It also offers inferior security properties to traditional vote by mail. The primary benefit is reducing voter latency, but clearly that comes at substantial risk.

We would add than most technical solutions assume that service members who have poor mail service would have internet service along with access to equipment like printers, scanners and faxes.

Some “solutions” provide a higher level of security using kiosks, eliminating the risks of end-user equipment – imagine the cost and challenges in purchasing, installing, maintaining and securing kiosks around the world in ways that would make them more convenient than express mail. To paraphrase a statement that has been in the news lately: High tech solutions to military and overseas voting seem like the equivalent of a star wars sledgehammer to hit a small nail.