Year: 2019

We Must Do Better: Connecticut’s 2018 Post Election Audit

Citizens Audit Report:
We Must Do Better:
Independent Observation and Analysis of Connecticut’s 2018 Post Election Audit

From the Press Release:

Post-election vote audits of the November 2018 elections failed to meet basic audit standards. Audit should provide voters with justified confidence in elections. Instead, these audits reduce our confidence in election officials, concludes the non-partisan Connecticut Citizen Election Audit. Five percent of the State’s election districts were randomly chosen to be audited, as required by state law.

Among the Citizen Audit’s concerns:

  • The audits were not conducted and reported as required by law. The Secretary of the State’s Office continues to fail to take responsibility for that failure by local officials.
  • 39% of official audit reports submitted by town registrars were incomplete.
  • Human error was still considered an acceptable explanation of differences between machine and manual counts. This defeats the purpose of the audits.
  • Weaknesses in ballot chain-of-custody and security procedures.
  • Continued use of flawed electronic audit procedures that are not publicly verifiable.

The Citizen Audit was pleased with the following developments:

  • Fewer instances of write-in ballots not properly stored in separate envelopes.
  • Fewer instances of write-in ballots read into scanners multiple times on election night.
  • Electronic Audit equipment had few if any problems reading creased, folded, or mutilated ballots.

“We are frustrated with so little improvement after 20 statewide audits over 11 years,” Luther Weeks, Executive Director of the Citizen Audit said. “Citizens deserve better. If the Secretary of the State’s     Office acts to fix these problems and pursues publicly verifiable electronic audits, progress can be achieved in the near term.”

<Press Release .pdf> <Full Report pdf> <Detail data/municipal reports>

Citizens Audit Report:
We Must Do Better:
Independent Observation and Analysis of Connecticut’s 2018 Post Election Audit

From the Press Release:

Post-election vote audits of the November 2018 elections failed to meet basic audit standards. Audit should provide voters with justified confidence in elections. Instead, these audits reduce our confidence in election officials, concludes the non-partisan Connecticut Citizen Election Audit. Five percent of the State’s election districts were randomly chosen to be audited, as required by state law.

Among the Citizen Audit’s concerns:

  • The audits were not conducted and reported as required by law. The Secretary of the State’s Office continues to fail to take responsibility for that failure by local officials.
  • 39% of official audit reports submitted by town registrars were incomplete.
  • Human error was still considered an acceptable explanation of differences between machine and manual counts. This defeats the purpose of the audits.
  • Weaknesses in ballot chain-of-custody and security procedures.
  • Continued use of flawed electronic audit procedures that are not publicly verifiable.

The Citizen Audit was pleased with the following developments:

  • Fewer instances of write-in ballots not properly stored in separate envelopes.
  • Fewer instances of write-in ballots read into scanners multiple times on election night.
  • Electronic Audit equipment had few if any problems reading creased, folded, or mutilated ballots.

“We are frustrated with so little improvement after 20 statewide audits over 11 years,” Luther Weeks, Executive Director of the Citizen Audit said. “Citizens deserve better. If the Secretary of the State’s     Office acts to fix these problems and pursues publicly verifiable electronic audits, progress can be achieved in the near term.”

<Press Release .pdf> <Full Report pdf> <Detail data/municipal reports>

Five pieces of testimony on six bills

On Friday the GAE Committee held testimony on a raft if bills. This is just the first hearing, and first wave this year.

There is a risky trend in the last couple of years that bills are sketchy drafts at hearing stage. So there is no detailed text to comment on and correct details and improve. This means that advocates on all sides have little chance to help the General Assembly avoid errors. So, I find myself testifying more about potential improvements at a high level, while trying to anticipate important details to advise on. And I find others providing short general testimony in favor or against rather than detailed suggestions or critiques.

The bills, and links to my testimony:

On Friday the GAE Committee held testimony on a raft if bills. This is just the first hearing, and first wave this year.

There is a risky trend in the last couple of years that bills are sketchy drafts at hearing stage. So there is no detailed text to comment on and correct details and improve. This means that advocates on all sides have little chance to help the General Assembly avoid errors. So, I find myself testifying more about potential improvements at a high level, while trying to anticipate important details to advise on. And I find others providing short general testimony in favor or against rather than detailed suggestions or critiques.

The bills, and links to my testimony: (Take a look at all the testimony today <here>.)

H.B.6045 and H.B.5818 Election Day Registration. The bills propose fixing the civil rights violation in Election Day Registration caused by the Secretary of the State’s ruling that those in line have no right to register and vote. As usual I expect heavy opposition from the registrars of voters. I also emphasize a method that can accommodate their objections by providing 48 hours to count EDR votes submitted after 8:00pm. I don’ t think they will like that, yet in the end we should not continue violating civil rights. I also point out transparency and security flaws in our election laws that should be fixed, along with suggested fixes.

H.B.5817 Checker Announcing Voter ID for Unofficial Checkers. Expensive, useless concept. Might be well intended, yet will gum up the works for voters and officials.

H.B.6047 Multi-District Polling Places. This is aimed at addressing the problems with a multi-district polling place in Stratford last November. I support the mandate for different color ballots in such polling places for each district. My testimony asks for an exception for emergency ballot copies and recommends against other more drastic solutions.

S.B.265 Cut Moderator Certification in Half. I testify that we need more training, not less. This is an example of where I use one bill to make a bigger point in hopes of educating the members of the GAE, perhaps sooner of later leading to better legislation.

S.B.479 Election Day Holiday. In general I support this bill. I ask to make a school holiday mandatory and suggest its extension to primaries.

 

Three Experts on Blockchains

Do you need a public blockchain? The answer is almost certainly no. A blockchain probably doesn’t solve the security problems you think it solves. The security problems it solves are probably not the ones you have. …A false trust in blockchain can itself be a security risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. I have looked at many blockchain applications, and all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain—of course, then they wouldn’t have the cool name.

There are two bills submitted to the General Assembly this year to research Blockchain technology. One to solve a sketchily defined, possible problem with our voter registration system, and another to use Blockchain technology for online voting. We will have more to say about the bills and those specific problems later, but let us start with three experts opinions of Blockchain technology itself.

Bruce Schneier article at Wired  There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology  <read>

Bruce Schneier is a highly respected security expert from Harvard University often a guest on the PBS Newshour. Private Blockchains are the type used in West Virginia in prototyping a system for electronic voting – a system hidden from public scrutiny and testing, Probably what would be considered for both of those systems in Connecticut. Schneier says:

Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. … In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype…

A public Blockchain is what most cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use, Schneier says:

Do you need a public blockchain? The answer is almost certainly no. A blockchain probably doesn’t solve the security problems you think it solves. The security problems it solves are probably not the ones you have. (Manipulating audit data is probably not your major security risk.) A false trust in blockchain can itself be a security risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. I have looked at many blockchain applications, and all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain—of course, then they wouldn’t have the cool name.

Vinton Cerf is one of the Fathers of the Internet. Schneier quotes him in a simple summary of Cerf’s views of Blockchains:

Bill Black On The Real News  Cryptocurrency Firms Regularly Lose Codes and Money <watch> Less technical but clearly undermines the claim that even for cryptocurrency, Blockchains do not solve every problem and are over hyped.

****Update 4/29/2019 Moody’s agrees with Schneier:  Bond Rating Agency Moody’s Warns on Risks of Private Blockchains <read>

 

 

Deadlocked Committee on Contested Elections passes ball to whole House

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.

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  <read> 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.

Our context is the work of Edward B. Foley, recapped in his book Ballot Battles which covers how close elections have been decided in this country starting before the Constitution. Sadly the tradition is that, with only two exceptions, whenever a close election is turned over to a body to decide, the decision is the same as you would expect had the decisions been made politically. That is the case here. This does not mean that all decisions are wrong. It is likely that about 50% are correct. In this case, it is possible that all four representatives reached their conclusions without bias. The Committee members and ultimately all members of the House will be left with the political judgment of the voters on this matter.

I have attended all of the Committee meetings and found the whole process fascinating. You  might and might not. The videos are at CT-N: <Vidoes>

All the testimony is in the meetings on January 24th and 25th. There is a bombshell at the end of the meeting on the 24th, yet to appreciate it, you need to watch from the beginning. The debate between the members on the conclusions takes most of the meeting on February 1st.

VotING fraud via Absentee, this time in Stamford

When Connecticut passed public financing of elections a major part of the justification was a history of campaign finance scandals. Avoiding expanded mail-in voting can be justified by the similar pattern of AB abuse. We do favor a form of early voting for Connecticut we call in-person absentee voting – in-person at the municipal clerk’s office, where officials can be expected to easily detect a single person attempting to vote 14 times under different names!

From the Stamford Advocate: Former Stamford Dem Party boss charged with falsifying absentee ballots <read>

STAMFORD — John Mallozzi, the city’s former Democratic Party chief, was arrested Wednesday on charges of absentee ballot fraud in the 2015 municipal election. He allegedly forged ballots for relatives, Spanish-speaking residents and Albanian-Americans new to the election system, according to the State’s Attorney’s Office.

Mallozzi was charged with 14 counts each of filing false statements and second-degree forgery. He turned himself in to Stamford police on the charges, both Class D felonies punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a fine of up to $5,000 per count…

Hoti told investigators that on Election Day 2015 he was rejected at his District 8 polling place in the Cove by a monitor who told him the record showed he’d already voted by absentee ballot. Hoti said he had not. The monitor allowed Hoti to vote after Hoti filled out a form attesting that he did not vote by absentee…

On Jan. 10 a state forensic science analyst determined that signatures on 14 absentee ballots “share common authorship” with the handwriting samples provided by Mallozzi, according to the affidavit. None of the 14 voters whose names were on the ballots had requested them, the affidavit states.

Allegations, convictions, and enforcement penalties for AB fraud are regular occurrences in Connecticut. There are likely many more that are not discovered. Just lucky that one of these voters attempted to vote legally and through diligence of the election officials the fraud was discovered. If that one voter had not attempted to vote, if may never have been discovered and continued in subsequent elections.

Editorial

This is why we oppose expanded mail-in voting, such as no-excuse absentee voting. If might be safe in other states, yet Connecticut has an ongoing record of absentee votING fraud (as opposed to votER fraud) by insiders or candidate and party officials. This year and last we have cases in Hartford and Bridgeport as well.

When Connecticut passed public financing of elections a major part of the justification was a history of campaign finance scandals. Avoiding expanded mail-in voting can be justified by the similar pattern of AB abuse. We do favor a form of early voting for Connecticut we call in-person absentee voting – in-person at the municipal clerk’s office, where officials can be expected to easily detect a single person attempting to vote 14 times under different names!  See our testimony last year <read>

Rhode Island Risk Limiting Audit in Time Magazine

Not exactly person of the year or prisoner of the month, I did have my picture in Time Magazine! The occasion was the Rhode Island Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) where I participated last week.

Rhode Island wants to make sure their elections are protected from all sorts of problems, after a programming error in 2017 almost caused an incorrect result to be certified. The article contains some very good summaries of what what we and the Rhode Island Board of Elections were up to.

“Democracy and elections are only as good as whether people trust them or not,” [Secretary of State Nellie] Gorbea said. “Confidence in our democracy is critical to every other public policy issue.”…

 

Not exactly person of the year or prisoner of the month I did have my picture in Time Magazine! The occasion was the Rhode Island Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) where I participated last week.

Russia Wants to Undermine Trust in Elections. Here’s How Rhode Island Is Fighting Back <read>

Contrary to the headline, Rhode Island wants to make sure their elections are protected from all sorts of problems, after a programming error in 2017 almost caused an incorrect result to be certified.

The article contains some very good summaries of what what we and the Rhode Island Board of Elections were up to:

“Democracy and elections are only as good as whether people trust them or not,” [Secretary of State Nellie] Gorbea said. “Confidence in our democracy is critical to every other public policy issue.”…

Amid this uncertainty, Rhode Island is pioneering a means of protecting its election results through a procedure called a “risk-limiting audit.” This method, which election experts consider the gold-standard of post-election checks, is essentially an efficient review of ballots that provides strong statistical evidence that the reported vote tallies in an election are correct…

In addition to public officials and election staffers, the “protectors of democracy” in Providence included a substantial number of volunteers offering their time and expertise for free, simply because they were passionate about securing their fellow citizens’ votes. Teams from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and MIT developed the software that selected votes for the pilot, which will be open source so other states can use it in the future. The leader of a Connecticut citizens’ group[, Luther Weeks, Executive Director of Connecticut Citizen Election Audit] provided input on one ballot-counting method, and a woman who independently advocates for audits organized observers to gather timing data throughout the event. Many in the group greeted each other like summer camp friends after a winter away, eager to catch up on issues they’d seen in other elections and share tips on the newest democracy-defending tactics…

at the Board of Elections warehouse in Providence, where 22 election staffers overseen by Deputy Director of Elections Miguel Nunez and Warehouse and Logistics Manager Steve Taylor retrieved and manually counted ballots for three different kinds of risk-limiting audits to see which method worked best for their state…

I was there to learn and also to lead the demonstration of two methods of performing the batch comparison audit. In the end both methods demonstrated that the two voting machines we audited were accurate last November 6th and with good methods and the dedicated officials present we were also accurate.

At the end of Rhode Island’s pilot, the batch-level comparison and ballot-level comparison audits were both successful, meaning they provided strong statistical evidence confirming the reported election results. The ballot-polling audit fell very slightly outside the accepted risk, which in a real audit would trigger another round using a slightly larger sample. But in this pilot, the goal was simply to test the methods, not to meet a particular level of evidence.

It was an to participate in the months of planning and three days of execution.

Tedious three and a half hours and then a bombshell

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.

The Committee on Contested Elections had its 1st day of testimony yesterday.  Two registrars, a moderator, and a deputy registrar and then a bombshell.

This article almost captures it, but not quite: Committee hears testimony of Stratford ballot bungle<read>

The clerk who gave the man who raised the red flag the incorrect ballot—and likely handed out the others too—was a 16-year-old high school student, too young to vote herself. State law sets 16 as the minimum age to serve as an election official.

Starratt, the moderator at Bunnell on Election Day, said the teen handed out the wrong ballots. The girl was not subpoenaed to testify.
Ballot clerk Peter Rusatsky, 61, testified Friday he saw the girl “on the verge of tears” that afternoon…

Starratt, who has been a moderator since 2000, said he gave specific directions to all the clerks in a group meeting before polls opened on the morning of Election Day…

Rusatsky testified that he was the first to arrive at the polling place that morning and he received no training of any kind on Election Day or before.

“I didn’t even understand there were two separate districts,” he said. “I was just told what my job was. That’s what I did. There was zero—no instruction—to the ballot clerks to check any numbers in the corner of that ballot.

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.

CT-N has the <video>

Election Committee Does Not Understand Election Administration

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.)…

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.)
  • They were to subpoena the moderator’s log notes, from the moderator. (Those notes are in the moderator’s return, filed with the town clerk.)
  • They just seemed confused about the whole election process. They said there was no need for testimony from the Secretary of the State’s Office. They did briefly consult a General Assembly Attorney who read a few lines from the law. They could have used some help from the Secretary’s office or even from any of the several hundred certified moderators in the state who would know all the answers they did not have.

We were not enamored with other aspects of the process:

  • They started by agreeing that they would mostly focus on the facts of what happened. They need to assess those facts and not rely on media reports etc., yet the likely outcome will be confirming that those 76 voters were disenfranchised. But there is a lot more to consider;
  • The arguments of the two sides seem important to us. The Committee seemed almost as an after thought to let the lawyers for both sides have 10 minutes each to speak.
  • To us, precedent and the arguments of both sides seem to be the crucial information. I would call for additional experts and witnesses on the law and precedent, perhaps chosen by those same lawyers.
  • It might be nice to hear from some of those voters as well.

You can read more about it from the CTPost: Committee will quiz Stratford election witnesses <read>

You can also watch the meeting at CT-N <video>

 

Basics: Why we need to have paper ballots and must effectively audit our elections

[The vendors] control the code in devices they sell. That means that technology we buy for one purpose can be reprogrammed without our consent or even our knowledge.

A quote in a book excerpt caught our eye: For Tech Firms, Power Lies in the Coding <read>
— you may well own these things in the future, but if today’s system is anything to go by, you’ll very rarely control the code inside them. Tech firms have control over the initial design of their products, determining their “formal and technical” properties as well as their “range of possibilities of utilisation.” And they’ll obviously retain control over platforms— like social media applications — that remain under their direct ownership. But they’ll also control the code in devices they sell. That means that technology we buy for one purpose can be reprogrammed without our consent or even our knowledge.
This is the heart of the need for Evidence Based Elections. Elections that are Software Independent, that can be verified independent of the technology. Elections that are Publicly Verifiable, that can be verified independent of the election officials by multiple members of the public, candidates, and parties.

Beware the costly solution that does not solve the problem

WhoWhatWhy: Will Georgia Double Down on Non-Transparent, Vulnerable Election Machines? 

Georgia’s newly elected secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger (R), hopes to replace them not with hand-marked paper ballots and scanners (as virtually all independent cybersecurity election experts recommend), but rather with touchscreen ballot-marking devices,..In addition to security concerns, all touchscreen systems tend to cause long lines…The ExpressVote system also would cost taxpayers more than three times as much as hand-marked paper ballots and scanners:? an estimated $100 million as opposed to $30 million.

A system only greedy vendors and fraudsters would love.

******Update: Verified Voting Statement to Georgia

As we have been warning, paper records from DRE (touch Screen) voting machines are not the equivalent of hand-marked paper ballots.

WhoWhatWhy: Will Georgia Double Down on Non-Transparent, Vulnerable Election Machines? <read>

The good news is that Georgia, which was the first state in the country to deploy paperless machines statewide, has finally decided to replace these machines. But Georgia’s newly elected secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger (R), hopes to replace them not with hand-marked paper ballots and scanners (as virtually all independent cybersecurity election experts recommend), but rather with touchscreen ballot-marking devices, a prime example of which is the ExpressVote system from Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S). The ExpressVote is the specific system that Governor-elect Brian Kemp (R) began promoting last year. ES&S is Georgia’s current vendor.

Like other touchscreen barcode balloting systems, the ExpressVote generates computer-marked paper printouts (Kemp and many others misleadingly call them “paper ballots”) with barcodes that are then counted on scanners. Although these paper printouts include human-readable text purporting to summarize the voter’s selections, the barcode, which humans can’t read, is the only part of the printout actually counted by the scanner. According to computer science professor Richard DeMillo of the Georgia Institute of Technology, the barcode constitutes a new potential target for malevolent actors, as it can be manipulated to instruct the scanner to flip or otherwise alter votes…

In addition to security concerns, all touchscreen systems tend to cause long lines because they limit the number of people who can vote at once to the number of touchscreens at the polling place…

The ExpressVote system also would cost taxpayers more than three times as much as hand-marked paper ballots and scanners:? an estimated $100 million as opposed to $30 million.

A system only greedy vendors and fraudsters would love.

******Update: Verified Voting Statement to Georgia <read>