Luther Weeks | CTVotersCount.org

Better Access To Voting Within Reach In CT (Annotated)

Courant Editorial, Sunday November 20th: Better Access To Voting Within Reach In CT

We have long had concerns with extending mail-in voting, aka no excuse absentee voting. We also support in-person early voting, if we are willing to pay for it. We have a new Courant Editorial joining Denise Merrill in a renewed push for early voting, defeated two years ago by the voters of Connecticut, consistent with our warnings but not our prediction.

Connecticut is one of only a handful of states that does not allow in-person voting before Election Day and requires those casting absentee ballots to provide an excuse — two unnecessary and antiquated barriers to participation in the political process. [Unnecessary only for those who lack concern for election integrity, turnout, and costs]

Courant Editorial, Sunday November 20th: Better Access To Voting Within Reach In CT <read>

Connecticut is one of only a handful of states that does not allow in-person voting before Election Day and requires those casting absentee ballots to provide an excuse — two unnecessary and antiquated barriers to participation in the political process. [Unnecessary only for those who lack concern for election integrity, turnout, and costs]

But Secretary of the State Denise Merrill has a smart, two-pronged plan that would make it easier to cast a ballot and give more people access to the workings of democracy.

A record number of Connecticut residents were registered to vote in this year’s presidential election, but only about three-quarters of them actually cast a ballot. Procrastination, apathy and disgust certainly kept many people at home. For others, though, there can be no doubt that the inconvenience of voting was the primary factor. [Note that we also enhanced our motor-voter system and thus registered many with no intention to vote, so that could also account for some of the difference, as we predicted.]

Consider a person who commutes to work in New York City every day. She had to get on the train in West Haven at 6:47 a.m. and wouldn’t get back until after 8 p.m. Perhaps she tried to vote at 6 a.m. when the polls opened, but the line was long, and she had a train to catch. So she didn’t vote. [Checking the Metro-North schedule, she is actually eligible to vote absentee if she left town on the 5:51am or could arrive at her polling place to vote at 6:00am, then she would likely still make the 6:47am or catch the next trains at 6:53am or 7:13am, actually the 6:53am would get her in to Grand Central 10 minutes earlier than the 6:47am! In any case, she could vote with just a little effort.]

If Connecticut allowed early voting, she would have had more days to vote and lines would have been shorter [Not necessarily, since early voting might itself have very long lines, or to pay for early voting towns could scrimp on both staffing election day and early voting. Some states with early voting have long lines.], or she could have rearranged her schedule [Yes, she could rearrange her schedule with no change in CT law]. Or she could have cast an absentee ballot, if Connecticut didn’t have such strict laws regarding who can take advantage of that simple solution. [Or as we said left on an earlier or later train.]

Ms. Merrill’s plan addresses both situations by recommending a simple change to the absentee ballot law and a constitutional amendment to allow early voting. [Depending on if the “simple” change allows regional voting. See the Courant’s version of early voting below.]

The legislature should make both of those options happen in the coming session. [Which they cannot because the voters must approve Constitutional Amendments.]

Ms. Merrill proposes amending the state constitution to explicitly allow in-person early voting for two to five days within two weeks before the election and to allow anyone to vote absentee without having to meet specific conditions. [That might pass. Last time, the Constitutional Amendment gave the General Assembly a blank check to do anything with early voting.] To get on the ballot, it would have to be approved by 75 percent of the legislature during the coming session. Those simple changes would clear away the most onerous legal barriers. [75% would be an almost impossible hurdle. The previous amendment took the path of a majority of two General Assembly’s to pass. So, by our understanding the next time such an amendment could be on the ballot is 2020.]

The second prong is to simply amend the law that describes who is eligible to vote absentee. Under current law, one of the acceptable “excuses” for voting absentee is that the voter is out of town all day. Ms. Merrill’s proposal would remove seven words — “during all of the hours of voting” — from the law, thereby making the hypothetical commuter eligible to vote absentee. Another smart, and simple, change. [Hard to justify given the debate on the previous amendment that a Constitutional change was necessary for unlimited absentee voting.]

The drawbacks are few. There could be increased costs to towns to keep polls open and staffed for those extra days, but ensuring everyone can exercise their most fundamental American right must be the top priority, if not the basic responsibility, of every municipality. The few dollars it might cost are not worth quibbling over. [Maybe not, yet there are not that many polling places with long lines in Connecticut. That problem can be solved with one or two additional individuals manning check-in lines at polling places that had lines this year. Adding the equivalent one-half person for each polling place would cost about $80,000. Staffing a polling place with only one line in 169 municipalities for one day would cost about $270,000, just for the polling place staff. Lines and the requirement for more checkers would occur once every four years, while early voting would presumably be required for every election, primary, and referendum.]

Ms. Merrill’s proposed constitutional amendment also would allow early voting to be done regionally — for example, the city of Hartford could allow early voting only at city hall instead of staffing all of the individual polling places across the city for five days. It might be more difficult for someone in the city to make it to city hall than to their own polling location, but given enough time to vote, along with easy no-excuse absentee voting, residents will have more opportunity to cast a ballot. [The Constitutional Amendment gets longer here, and voting in a region, not just one city gets complex, unless the entire election function is regionalized (which we do support).]

Some politicians might be inclined to consider whether early voting would benefit one party over the other by expanding access to specific demographic groups, such as commuters or urban residents. But there isn’t strong evidence that early voting has any such effect, and in any event, it’s far better for politicians to try to convince voters that their platform is the right one than to try to win an election by excluding, or including, certain demographic groups. [And turnout could be increased by better and more candidates. We could enhance turnout and interest by leveling the playing field for third-party and petitioning candidates – a move unlikely to please either major party.]

There is one, and only one, good reason to allow people to vote before Elenntion Day: because it allows, and encourages, more people to vote. [Actually it does not. Studies have shown that Early Voting actually decreases turnout.]

Reminder: We would support in-person Early Voting, if we are willing to pay for it. i.e. provide for a complete voting experience along with integrity of the process, especially providing effective protection from ballot skullduggery.

**********Update:
An example of the problem of long lines. It will not be fixed by early voting. It will be fixed by competence: New Haven Independent: Probe Sought of [New Haven] Election Mess <read>

An Electoral House of Cards – When votes are not publicly verifiable

An Alternet interview of Jonathan Simon: Something Stinks When Exit Polls and Official Counts Don’t Match – A discussion with an exit poll expert reveals an electoral house of cards.

When their were claims that exit polls did not match in the Democratic Primary, I said that neither side made the case saying, “I stand with Carl Sagan who said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Now a very thoughtful interview with Jonathan Simon who outlines the case that we should be concerned about the exit polls and concerned just as much that we cannot verify our elections

An Alternet interview of Jonathan Simon: Something Stinks When Exit Polls and Official Counts Don’t Match – A discussion with an exit poll expert reveals an electoral house of cards. <read>

Now a very thoughtful interview with Jonathan Simon who outlines the case that we should be concerned about the exit polls and concerned just as much that we cannot verify our elections:

We try as carefully as we can. I’ve been doing this pretty steadily now for the last 15 years along with some of my colleagues, and I would be the first to acknowledge that there is a lot of smoke there and there’s a lot of probative value to this work, but that bringing it forth as ironclad proof is very problematic. So we’re stuck at a place where I pivoted to is looking at the risk involved in having a computerized, privatized, unobservable vote counting system and just taking on faith that that system is not being manipulated when there is such a obvious vulnerability (on which the experts strongly agree) of the system to malfeasance and manipulation. That is where I’ve tended to go, is to look at that risk rather than screaming fraud from the rooftops and claiming proof…

Simon goes on to refute many of the reasons raised to be skeptical of exit poll data, yet also acknowledging that without evidence, the polls could be consistently wrong. Yet, errors strongly trend in the same direction.

In this past Tuesday, again we saw a very consistent pattern of exit polls that were more in favor of Hillary Clinton, more in favor of Democratic senatorial candidates and then vote counts were shifted from the exit polls to the right towards Donald Trump, towards the Republican senate candidates. Those are the figures that I pulled down and did a very basic analysis of. You have a column of numbers of state by state showing the degree of that shift and we’ll eventually do that for the national vote for the House of Representatives as well…

What it means to me is that neither system is self validating. Neither system can be trusted. If you look at accounting, you do double entry accounting. I’m not an accountant so my terminology may be off, but you basically audit by checking one column of numbers against another column of numbers. If they disagree, you know something is wrong somewhere. There is some arithmetical mistake, some failure of entry, possibly fraud … you don’t know. You just know that if two things that are pretty much supposed to agree had disagreed, there’s a problem somewhere. I can rule out mathematically and scientifically, by this time, errors due to random chance. Errors due to random chance, sampling errors, what we call margin of error issues, would not be expressing themselves so consistently in one direction. They’d be going in both directions and they’d be much smaller…

If you want to sleep well at night, which I also prefer to denial, and you want to say to yourself, Yeah, it must have been people just lying to the exit pollsters and I’m not going to worry about it, that’s fine. What you’re missing at that point is the fact that if you challenge me to say, How do you know these exit polls are valid? I would turn right around and challenge you and say, How do you know the vote counts are valid?

The fact is, and this is cold hard fact, neither of us can prove our case. That is the problem. We have an unobservable system that cannot answer the challenge that it might be subject to manipulation. It can’t demonstrate that it is not rigged. Exit polls are just a tool that we use to look at it and say, Well folks, there might be something to dig deeper into here. The problem is virtually never is anyone allowed to dig deeper. We have optical scanner equipment all over this country right now that have the voter marked ballots that drop through the optical-scan reader device and sit in their cabinet below. Those voter marked ballots need to be saved 22 months in theory, although they’ve been destroyed early, in fact, in many cases, especially if when there was an investigation going on in Ohio…They are corporate property. They are off limits to public inspection. It might as well, in the 99.9% of cases, be a paperless touchscreen that has no record whatsoever.

The bottom line is that Democracy requires citizen engagement and action:

[Around election time concern] passes briefly in front of the public eye. There’s a lot of stirring about it and then it dies out and it’s basically left to us hardcore election integrity advocates. This is catastrophic. This is tragic. What we’re left with is a system that was accepted more or less without real proof.

If that’s what democracy is worth to us, then we deserve what we get. Democracy requires support. It requires citizen support. It requires an investment of care and an investment of vigilance and an investment of participation more than deciding, Yeah, I’m going to vote or I’m not going to vote. It requires the fulfillment of a duty to be part of the public that counts and observe the counting of the votes so we don’t have the ludicrous situation where we hand our ballots to a magician who takes them behind a curtain, you hear them shred the ballots, comes out and tells you so-and-so won. This is what we’ve got now and it’s what we’ve accepted. We spend more money in two weeks in Iraq then would cost us for 30 years to hand-count our elections. This is surrealistic, this is absurd, but it’s the very strong inertial reality. Getting the energy up to change that reality, especially when that reality has worked well by definition for everybody who is sitting in office. They’re the people with the least incentive to look under the hood and say, Hey, we need to change this. It’s what put them in office.

It is an outstanding interview. I highly recommend reading in its entirety.

Be Careful What You Ask For: NPV Compact Has Unintended Consequences

Once again, we have an election where it is alleged that the losing candidate won the popular vote. Understandably we have calls from her supporters to abolish the Electoral College by means of the National Popular Vote Compact.

Once again, we must articulate to our friends why this is a bad idea. Once again, we point out to most of those that support the Electoral College that they support it primarily for the wrong reasons.

We have a broken, risky, unequal election system. Cobbling a well-intended compact on top of it makes it more risky, more vulnerable, and the results even less credible:

*****Update 11/16/2016 Pleased to be republished at the CTMirror.

We have a broken, risky, unequal election system. Cobbling a well-intended compact on top of it makes it more risky, more vulnerable, and the results even less credible:

Our current system is subject to multiple risks from officials, other insiders, domestic partisans, independent hackers, and foreign powers. The Compact does not change any of that. It makes the system more risky to manipulation in every state. Currently the risk is limited to the so-called swing states.
Our current system is not audited at all in half the states and insufficiently audited in the majority the states that have audits. The public should have little confidence in the accuracy of vote totals in each state and in the unofficial and official national totals. We should have little confidence in the purported popular vote winner, and even less if the compact is enabled.
The compact is flawed in that there is no official national popular vote number until after the Electoral College is required to vote. The Compact does not and cannot change that. Its supporters attempt to refute that fact with obfuscation.
Voters are unequal between states. The Compact will not fix that. It will aggravate that. Different voters are enfranchised and disenfranchised by differing state laws for eligibility. Voting is easier or more difficult by differing ease of registration and voting across the states. Frequently there are obvious attempts to make it easier or more difficult for certain classes of voters to vote. The Compact will increase those trends.
Contrary to the Compact’s proponents contentions there is no national recount possible. Only half the states have some form of recount available. Those recounts are based on state margins, not on the alleged national popular vote number. The Compact does not change that. It could not, since the Compact will be triggered and apply to states representing barely more than half the votes. It would also require the establishment of a national body to declare and manage a recount. Once again, proponents claim through obfuscation that a recount would be possible.
Let us not forget that we do not have voter verified paper records for a significant percentage of votes, so those votes are not actually auditable or recountable.

I would favor a national popular vote amendment to the U.S. Constitution, if and only if, it provided for a uniform franchise, required sufficient voting systems, sufficient audits and recounts nationwide. And sufficient laws that were enforceable and enforced to provide a trustworthy and trusted national popular vote number. Those ifs are a large leap for our democracy, yet are reasonable, economical, realistic requirements to achieve trustworthy democracy.

For more, here is my most recent testimony to the Connecticut Legislature: <read>

And all of our posts related to the national popular vote: <NPV posts>

*****Update 11/16/2016 Pleased to be republished at the CTMirror <read>

The System That Won’t Prove It Is Accurate

Jonathan Simon says it so well at Truthout: Between Trump and a Hard Place: The Truth About “Rigged” Elections

It should be rather obvious that the unidentified insiders charged with the programming, and anyone working through them, enjoy an even greater level of access to the counting process than do foreign hackers targeting our systems from the outside. It should be obvious that this is a colossally stupid risk for our nation to take. And it should be obvious that there is something wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee wrong when those upon whom the public relies for information refuse to seriously address and come clean about that risk…Only a public, observable counting process (i.e., hand-counted paper ballots or uniform public audits with gleaming teeth) can rebuild our shattered faith in the fidelity of our electoral process.

I chose the post title deliberately. “The System” is not computers or pollworkers, but the whole voting system created by people we have put in charge. That system could be changed moderately to provide proof of its accuracy. It is that the system of people won’t recognize and address the problem.

Jonathan Simon says it so well at Truthout: Between Trump and a Hard Place: The Truth About “Rigged” Elections <read>

The truth Trump is inadvertently pointing to is not that elections in the United States are rigged, but that our privatized, electronic vote counting system is unobservable and incapable of proving that it is not rigged. This is a true crisis for American democracy…

Lost, though, in the bipartisan condemnation of Trump and passionate renditions of America the Beautiful is an undeniable reality. Our computerized, unobservable vote counting system actually cannot prove or demonstrate that it is fraud-free. It simply cannot answer a challenge to its fidelity from Trump or anyone else, whether the challenge is justified or baseless, sincere or cynical…

It is true that our electronic voting machines are vulnerable to both hacking by outsiders and rigging by insiders. And it is not true that the experts have proclaimed our voting system “sound.” In fact, the experts — from Princeton to NYU’s Brennan Center to the US Government Accountability Office — have concluded that vote counting computers in wide use across the US can easily and undetectably be programmed to miscount votes and swing elections…

Sold on speed and convenience as our democratic priority rather than integrity, our nation has privatized, outsourced, and computerized our vote counting process. It should be rather obvious that the unidentified insiders charged with the programming, and anyone working through them, enjoy an even greater level of access to the counting process than do foreign hackers targeting our systems from the outside. It should be obvious that this is a colossally stupid risk for our nation to take. And it should be obvious that there is something wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee wrong when those upon whom the public relies for information refuse to seriously address and come clean about that risk…

Instead of chanting mantras about the security and fidelity of our elections, we need to respond to the truth that has been revealed by fast-tracking transparency reforms embodied in such proposed legislation as the Electoral Integrity Act, which now has more than 70 sponsors in Congress.

If vote counting continues to be unobservable, with the process outsourced to a few corporations, mere assurances will not be enough to restore trust in our elections. Only a public, observable counting process (i.e., hand-counted paper ballots or uniform public audits with gleaming teeth) can rebuild our shattered faith in the fidelity of our electoral process.

New Haven Set To Repeat 2014 Disaster

! W A R N I N G !

Do not wait till the last minute. Do not wait to the last hour. Get there early if you want to use Election Day Registration!

NOTE: This is also a tale of how elections work in a state with a Secretary of the State with limited powers over underpaid, and occasionally resistant/obstinate local registrars. (The same registrars who are often cited by state officials as the reason we will have no problems in our elections this year. Read here how they handle their joint responsibility.)

! W A R N I N G !

Do not wait till the last minute. Do not wait to the last hour. Get there early if you want to use Election Day Registration!

We have been saying this for years. Election Day Registration is heading for a Civil Rights Violation. The reason is the Secretary of the State’s procedures which say officials must have your registration complete by 8:00pm or you will be turned away.

It happened in 2014 in New Haven, 100 were turned away. But nobody sued. It looks like it is going to happen again, unless somebody takes bold action. Even then it can happen. If they are moderately busy and a bunch of people arrive close to 8:00pm, some will be turned away.

Here is the story from the New Haven Register Election Fiasco Repeat Looms <read>

The Secretary of the State’s office rushed down to New Haven to try to prevent a repeat Election Day disaster involving last-minute registration.

An election staffer from the office huddled with the city’s Democratic and Republican registrars Thursday to try to bring them up to speed on how to conduct Election Day Registration (EDR).

The secretary of the state’s office is concerned for three reasons, according to spokesman Patrick Gallahue:

• New Haven’s registrars, unlike the majority of other registrars in the state, failed to participate in three EDR training sessions.

• The office appeared not to have enough ballots in place and staffers ready to handle the expected crush of people seeking to vote.

• This is the first presidential election in which Connecticut will have EDR, and big crowds of last-mintue voters are anticipated in college communities.
Compounding fears is the fact that New Haven failed in handling EDR in 2014, the year it took effect in Connecticut.

We testified this year to the General Elections and Administrations Committee. They seemed to understand what we were saying, yet did nothing (at least they did not go along with the Registrars request and cut-off EDR at 7:00pm) <testimony>

Here is the first time, we predicted this, long before the debacle in New Haven, back in May 2012 <read> and two months earlier in testimony <read>

I recommend against this proposal for Election Day Registration. It lacks sufficient detail to protect the rights of EDR voters, the rights of all voters, and the integrity of elections. The structure that is proposed, by its nature portends chaos in future critical and high interest elections…

Another Annotation: Don’t stop being concerned about election integrity.

Lately the news is filled with Donald Trump saying the election is rigged and with election officials and others saying that is impossible. We continue to disagree with both. As we have said:

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary.

So, lets annotate a recent Op-Ed in the Hartford Courant: Nothing Rigged About American Elections

Lately the news is filled with Donald Trump saying the election is rigged and with election officials and others saying that is impossible. We continue to disagree with both. As we have said: (And we and others have said again, again, and again more this year,)

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary. A report from the Institute for Critical Infrastructure technology says it all: “Hacking Elections is Easy!” The report discusses how our election infrastructure, from voting machines to registration and reporting systems, are all at risk.

In Connecticut, like most states, a disruption in our centralized voter registration system on Election Day or its compromise before voter lists are printed, would disrupt an election. In many municipalities, voted ballots are easily accessible to multiple single individuals, “protected” only by all but useless tamper-evident seals. Partisans run our elections from top to bottom. Most are of high integrity, yet there is high motivation for manipulation.

We can do much better in the long run, if the actual risks are not forgotten after November.

So, lets annotate a recent Op-Ed in the Hartford Courant

Nothing Rigged About American Elections

By SCOTT BATES

Amid the rubble of war, a woman stood against a cold and bitter wind. I asked her why she stood patiently waiting in a line with hundreds of her neighbors. “I have waited 90 years to cast my vote,” she said with a smile. “I can wait just a little longer.”

In the autumn of 2001, I had the privilege to be with this woman and thousands of others for the first parliamentary elections in war torn Kosovo. For decades, the people of this east European land were ruled by kings and dictators, and occupied by Nazis and Communists. But at the dawn of a new century, with American help, they emerged from the shadow of genocidal war and put their faith in a future decided by free and fair elections.

In the past quarter century, I have worked alongside people in more than a dozen countries on four continents to help advance the democratic process by holding free and fair elections. Here at home, I

worked on a team that called on the U.S. Justice Department to push back against voter intimidation against African-Americans in east Texas. As a member of the National Association of Secretaries of State,

I stood with Republican and Democratic election officials to ensure that the integrity of our electoral system is respected and protected.

[There are, of course, deserved respect and blind faith. One can work for either or both.]

That’s why I’ve taken claims that our election system is “rigged” very seriously. Once faith in the integrity of the electoral system is undermined, the legitimacy of government is called into question. Democracy itself cannot long endure in such an environment.
[If faith in the integrity of the electoral system is undermined, then we should use facts and reason to determine if faith is justified, or if the system needs attention.]

Fortunately, there are some internationally accepted guidelines that help us determine if an electoral system is rigged.

First, there needs to be a legal framework that specifies the time, place and manner of holding elections. We’ve got that—it’s in the Constitution along with 50 state constitutions and related local regulations.

Second, there should be universal and equal suffrage and nondiscrimination when it comes to who canvote. This has not always been the case in the United States. It could be said that elections in which African-Americans and women were denied the vote in the past were rigged, but fortunately that is no longer the case.

[Unfortunately, our 50-state system is not uniform and in many states barriers are in-place to make it easier or more difficult for particular classes of citizens to vote.]

Third, electoral management bodies should be formed that can hold and monitor the conduct of elections. In the United States, each of the 50 states separately controls conduct of the electoral processthrough their respective offices of the secretary of state. Today, the majority of these officers are, infact, Republicans. All of these offices are staffed with career professionals. At the local level, tens of thousands of municipalities across the United States have town or city clerks or registrars of voters who administer elections and count ballots.

[This are not necessarily an exhaustive list of requirements. Also often the devil is in the details. There is no guarantee that each one of these individuals is honest and unbiased. We all remember Ken Blackwell and Katherine Harris. We note that Government finances are under the control of individuals in every state, county and town, yet that does not guarantee the money is all accounted for.] [PS: Those officials do not, in general, count the ballots. It is left to pollworkers and the vast majority of ballots are not counted by people but by machines that those people do not fully understand or control.]

Fourth, provision should be made for election observers to be present during the casting of ballots, as well as being present during tabulation of the ballots. These duties are carried out by hundreds of

thousands of our fellow Americans at polling sites across the country. Thank them when you see them this Nov. 8.

[I am one of them and appreciate thanks. Here in Connecticut no observers are allowed – yet with machine counting there is not much to observers and when votes are counted by hand, observers are allowed to watch from quite a distance.]

Working in places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, I have seen men and women put their lives on the line to organize and participate in elections. They did it because they believed democracy offered them a way forward. They saw it as a flawed system, but one with more hope than the one from which they emerged.

[Many of them would be happy to be here. But the question is, do we have a flawed system and hope for improvement or unjustified blind faith?]

Those who denigrate our democracy with groundless claims not

only insult the thousands of officials and hundreds of thousands of poll workers who make the system work, they risk undermining the faith that millions across the globe have placed in democracy as the best system to advance equality of opportunity and protect the rights of the individual and the dignity of all.

[When one disagrees with our foreign policy, one is accused of insulting the troops and veterans. Here questioning our election system is diffused as insulting pollworkers. If one is to have faith in Democracy, it must be fully realized and open to improvement and questioning.]

By any measure, America’s electoral system is a wonder to behold, for on this Election Day, one of the most diverse populations on the planet will show the world—once again—that free people can govern themselves.
[Apparently not as Obama said four years ago “We can fix this.”]

Scott Bates of Stonington is an adjunct senior fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., the former Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia and has worked on U.S.-funded democracy assistance missions in over a dozen countries.

[Yes Virginia, which until recently used widely viewed as the most notorious voting system system in use, the WinVote. <read>. The WinVote probably did happen after Bate’s service as Secretary of State in the mid 90’s <bio>]

Maryland My Maryland: The only problem is the $275,000 “audit” won’t work.

In 2007 the Maryland Legislature mandated a switch to optical scan paper ballots. Just this year they have been implemented. Unfortunately, instead of an audit of the paper they opted for an entirely electronic audit of electronic scanned records, at a cost of about double per citizen than that of Connecticut’s manual paper audit.

I assisted in writing and editing an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun and testimony before the Board of Elections.

The terms “feel good ‘audit'”, “sham ‘audit'” etc. come to mind. We prefer to call it a “Back Box ‘Audit'” .

I assisted in writing and editing an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun and testimony before the Board of Elections:

Op-Ed, Baltimore Sun: Maryland Voting Audit Falls Short <read>

Testimony delivered by Poorvi L. Vora <read>

The terms “feel good ‘audit'”, “sham ‘audit'” etc. come to mind. We prefer to call it a “Back Box ‘Audit'” emphasizing it is similar to “Black Box Voting” where the election results are all in the hands of a non-transparent voting machine or person behind a curtain. Having paper and not using it is hardly different.

From the Op-Ed:

At the Board of Public Works Oct. 19th meeting, members passed without discussion a proposal by the State Board of Elections to pay Clear Ballot Group Inc. $275,000 for an “independent and automated solution to verify [the] accuracy” of the state’s election results.

Seems reasonable, right? Especially now that the term “rigged” frequently precedes “election” in this year’s campaign rhetoric. The only problem is it won’t work.

We have some experience to back this judgment: Between us, we have helped audit about 20 contests in several states and designed auditable voting systems. Methods developed by one of us are in laws in two states.

It’s great that Maryland voters get to vote on paper ballots this year; paper ballots that voters can check are the best evidence of “the will of the people.” Maryland’s ballots will be scanned and then counted electronically. As required by hard-won state legislation passed in 2007, the paper ballots will be stored securely as durable evidence of what voters wanted.

The next step in ensuring that the electronic count shows who really won is to manually review some of the paper ballots through an audit. But the recently proposed post-election “audit” falls short; it will not look at the marked paper ballots. Instead, Clear Ballots’ “ClearAudit” software assumes the state’s voting system scanned every ballot perfectly, and uses that information in its review. But no system is perfect; mistakes happen, equipment malfunctions. And some people want to make it look like the rightful winner lost.

There’s no good reason not to use the actual ballots in the audit. Other states review the paper ballots to ensure that any tabulation errors didn’t change the outcome of an election. And modern audits can be highly efficient; they review only a small random sample of ballots.

It is good that the board plans to review all votes, races and counties. The proposed auditing technology can detect many types of errors. But relying on the scans — which are as vulnerable as any other computer data — limits the kinds of problems the reviews can detect. The scans aren’t like photographs; they can differ due to machine error, tampering or human error (for instance leaving out a batch of ballots or scanning the same batch twice).

A robust statistical audit of the electronic results against the paper ballots can produce strong evidence that election outcomes are correct; it can also correct incorrect outcomes. In this contentious election, it is extremely important to Maryland and the nation to audit election results against the actual paper ballots. It is not too late to plan and conduct a real audit. We would be happy to help.

Secret Ballot and Constitution under assault in Connecticut by AP and Secretary of the State’s Office

One AP story, two different versions in the Connecticut Post and the Hartford Courant.

As we said in our comment on the Connecticut Post article:

Connecticut has this other thing called the Constitution. It is even available at the Secretary’s website. It says: “The right of secret voting shall be preserved.”, which would likely be interpreted as not taking a picture of your ballot such that you could prove how it was voted. Otherwise votes could easily be bought, sold or intimidated. http://www.ct.gov/sots/cwp/view.asp?q=392288

One AP story, two different versions in the Connecticut Post and the Hartford Courant:

CTPost: Ballot selfies: A look at where they are allowed or not <read>

CONNECTICUT: No law bans ballot selfies, according to Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for Secretary of State Denise Merrill. But election moderators have discretion to prohibit activity “that threatens the orderly process of voting or the privacy of another voter’s ballot.”

Courant: If you elect to take ‘ballot selfie,’ check state law first <read>

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring issued a formal opinion last month that nothing in Virginia law prohibits voters from taking pictures of themselves, fellow voters or their ballot within the polling place.
Ballot selfies are also legal in Connecticut.

As we said in our comment on the Connecticut Post article:

Connecticut has this other thing called the Constitution. It is even available at the Secretary’s website. It says: “The right of secret voting shall be preserved.”, which would likely be interpreted as not taking a picture of your ballot such that you could prove how it was voted. Otherwise votes could easily be bought, sold or intimidated. http://www.ct.gov/sots/cwp/view.asp?q=392288

UPDATED: Not a hack, breathe easy! PS: 1000’s of registrations changed

Obviously it was only incompetence and likely fraud, unless officials are mistaken. Indiana official: Altered voter registrations raise concerns

******Update: Clarified? It could also be a witch hunt

Obviously it was only incompetence and likely fraud, unless officials are mistaken. Indiana official: Altered voter registrations raise concerns <read>

Thousands of voter registrations were altered, raising concerns about possible fraud, says Indiana’s chief elections official, whose office warned voters to check whether their information is correct online and encouraged voting early to avoid problems on Election Day.

Secretary of State Connie Lawson said in a statement Tuesday that Indiana’s online voter registration database had not been hacked but records were changed on paper forms, online and at Bureau of Motor Vehicles offices.

“At this time, my office is not sure why these records were changed, but we have evaluated the Statewide Voter Registration System and have found no indication it has been compromised,” said Lawson, a Republican…

The Indiana voter registration problem surfaced when voters contacted the secretary of state’s office after discovering through the online system voters can use to check their registration status that their dates of birth or first names were incorrect, the office said. That prompted the office to run a report in the statewide system and it found that thousands of registrations had been altered. The office declined to provide a more precise number.

******Update: Clarified? It could also be a witch hunt: <read>

Could the election be hacked? Checking a “Fact Checker”

USAToday article: Could the U.S. election be hacked? <read>

We add some annotations: [Bottom-line there is a conspiracy in plan view. A thinly disguised attempt to assure us that elections are not vulnerable and that any attempt to say otherwise is an attack on every pollworker.]

USAToday article: Could the U.S. election be hacked? <read>

Fact-checking the presidential debate: Fibs and fiction [Actually the have left that to us.]

Factcheck.org’s Lori Robertson takes a look at the claims made during the second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Find out where fact-checkers found that candidates stretched the truth.

SAN FRANCISCO — The impact of Russian hacking on the upcoming presidential election was a topic in Sunday night’s debate, raising the question: Is the U.S. election hackable? Experts say at the national level, no. But there could be individual incidents that undermine faith in the system. [We disagree. Election systems are very vulnerable based on the California Top To Bottom Review and the Ohio EVEREST report. Nobody should be considered an expert who ignores those reports. Actually so called “experts” denying the risks are thinly disguised attempts to create blind faith in the system.]

There’s almost no danger the U.S. presidential election could be affected by hackers. It’s simply too decentralized and for the most part too offline to be threatened, according to the head of the FBI and several security experts. [Decentralization means it would indeed be a challenge to hack every polling place and central count location in the country, yet that is a strawman argument, it is not necessary. Only hacking a few jurisdictions in a small number of swing states is all it would take. See Ohio 2004 and Florida 2000. Offline is a good practice, yet that is insufficient for two reasons: First, insiders can do all manner of hacks with our without connectivity. Motivated governments can and do find ways to hack systems without connectivity, see STUXNET.]

“National elections are conducted at the local level by local officials on equipment that they obtained locally,” so there’s no single point of vulnerability to tampering here, said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for elections accuracy. [Most voting equipment is obtained from two our three vendors nationwide. Most officials have blind trust in their entire staffs, that is a formula allowing one or several individuals to hack a jurisdiction. Security of election equipment and voted ballots varies. In many jurisdictions and whole states, such as Connecticut and New Jersey, machine and ballot security is very weak.]

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last month, FBI Director James Comey said that while concern has been rightly focused on the integrity of state voter registration systems, the actual voting process remains “very, very hard to hack into because it is so clunky and dispersed.’’ [We should be concerned with voter registration systems. We should equally be concerned with voting systems and the systems which are used to total results for polling places, central count, jurisdiction accounting, and statewide accounting.]

“It is Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym,’’ Comey said. “These things are not connected to the Internet.’’ [This is an attempt to say we are challenging the integrity of each of the Mary and Fred’s who work in elections. [Actually it is quite a leap to believe that each every pollworker and elected official is of high integrity. Some have gone to jail for their activities. As a class we see no reason to agree that election officials that legislators, mayors, governors, and other public officials. In Connecticut we have seen many punished for violating the public trust.]

Nevertheless, Comey said federal authorities have been counseling state officials to secure their systems, especially voter registration databases, as hackers have continued to “scan’’ the systems for vulnerabilities.

High stakes rhetoric

In Sunday’s debate, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton noted U.S. intelligence officials have blamed Russia for hacking Democratic officials accounts.

“We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election,” she said, and alluded to her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s praise of Russian president Vladimir Putin. [Many claim that the U.S. hacked a recent Ukraine and several over the years in South America. Russia has been charged with hacking an election in Georgia. Some of these claims have stronger verification than U.S. claims without transparent evidence that any of these hacks were acts of the Russian Government. Not so long ago the U.S. was blaming hacks on China. It seems we have a new enemy of choice. Brought out also to charge that Trump, Clinton, Stein, and Sanders are somehow linked to Russia and Communism.]

Trump replied that he knew “nothing about the inner workings of Russia,” and didn’t address electoral issues.

However on the campaign trail he has said multiple times that he fears the election will be stolen. In August in Columbus, Ohio he said “I’m afraid the election’s going to be rigged. I have to be honest.”

His website features a page where supporters can sign up to be election observers, to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”

Hacking dangers [We are not the only ones concerned:]

Experts say some local systems may be vulnerable to hacking. In some jurisdictions, local rules allow the transfer of election results using WiFi rather than putting the information on a thumb drive that’s physically taken to the central tally site. Others simply use outdated machines, said Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections.

“They’re in a position where they need to buy something new, but governments don’t want to spend the money on it,” she said.

Depending on the voting machine, all it might take would be one disgruntled election official plugging in a thumb drive containing malware to falsify vote tallies, said Mike Baker, founder of Mosaic451, a computer security company that focuses on infrastructure protection, including for some state and federal election networks.

So far, 33 states and 11 county or local election agencies have approached the Department of Homeland Security for cybersecurity risk and vulnerability assessments, Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement Monday.

But time is a factor and he encouraged election agencies to ask for help now.

“There are only 29 days until election day, and it can take up to two weeks from the time we receive authorization to run the scans and identify vulnerabilities. It can then take at least an additional week for state and local election officials to mitigate any vulnerabilities on systems that we may find,” he said.

DHS may increase protections for voting systems to thwart hackers

The good news is that in the upcoming election, close to 80% of voters nationwide are in areas that will either use either paper ballots or voting machines with paper backups, both of which are considered much more secure than online only systems, said Smith.

Y2K or Pearl Harbor

The biggest question in the mind of voting security expert Joseph Kiniry is whether the 2016 election will be Y2K or Pearl Harbor.

The Y2K or millennium bug arose because programs represented the four-digit year with only the final two digits, which made 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. There were predictions of widespread computer failures and possibly catastrophic meltdowns of the world’s digital infrastructure.

Hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work dealt with the problem and on January 1, 2000 the world woke to nothing more than a hangover, to the relief of many.

“I hope this is Y2K all over again,” said Kiniry, chief scientist at Free & Fair, a public-benefit corporation that works on creating technologies to keep elections free and fair.

But he and others worry that there’s a chance, though a small one, that it could be Pearl Harbor instead.

[Unlike Y2K, we are being warned, yet there is little action to significantly improve voting equipment, procedures, and security. Maybe Y2K was a one-off where a very technical problem was described to the public, government, and business and after fifteen or so years of warnings, finally there was action in time to largely avoid the actual risks. As a Y2K programmer, I still hear complaints that we all ripped-off the system because nothing significant happened on Jan 1, 2000. Many took the wrong lesson from that successful project/challenge.]

“Imagine lines wrapping around the block at every polling place in American on election day because the databases were compromised. Or results far different from previous elections and then two weeks after everyone thinks they know the outcome of the election, we find evidence of hacking in the machines,” he said.

66.5 million people watched Sunday’s Trump-Clinton debate
Voter confidence key

While election officials worry about such possibilities, they’re loath to discuss them publicly. If voters lose confidence in the system and don’t turn out to vote in the first place, it would be a greater threat to the integrity of the election system than hackers, they believe. [Don’t let the voters know what the risks really are, but privately worry, ignore, and cover-up.]

“It’s a tough position for us to be in. We don’t want to scare voters away,” said Alexander.

The fear is that proof of even one example of vote manipulation could be amplified through social media to threaten the electorate’s trust in the entire system.

That trust is a bedrock of American democracy and if it’s lost, “that puts us in a whole different category of countries that don’t have free and fair elections,” said Melinda Jackson, chair of the political science department at San Jose State University. [I would love to see a survey of what percentage of voters and non-votes have that blind trust given the thinly disguised attempt to deny risks.]

It might not even take that, she said.

“Already we see candidates sowing the seeds of distrust by saying the election might be rigged,” she said, citing Trump’s multiple statements to that effect.

In an absolute worst case scenario, were either Trump or some other group to question the legitimacy of the elections “we might see violence, we might see protests, we might see rioting, things that we see in other countries but not here,” said Jackson. [We have plenty of protests here. Just not so much over elections and no so much covered by the media. See Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline and see where the violence comes from.]

While that’s an unlikely Doomsday scenario, she said, “it’s not impossible.”

Contributing: Kevin Johnson in Washington D.C.

Elizabeth Weise covers technology and cybersecurity for USA TODAY. Follow her at @eweise.