Legislature 2014 | CTVotersCount.org

Not everything you want, is a solution to every problem

In Wednesday’s print edition of the Courant, one in a series of editorials setting an agenda for the State, Agenda Toward A More Open Government. There is much to like and agree with in the editorial: Stronger investigative subpoena for state prosecutors; closing the cash spigot for campaign finance; and strengthening the watchdog agencies.

While we are skeptical of the benefits of open primaries, their potential, and ultimately the value of “more moderate nominees”, we are particularly in disagreement with one section, Do-Over for Early Voting.

Its been said that when you only have a hammer, you see that as a cure to every problem.

In Wednesday’s print edition of the Hartford Courant, one in a series of editorials setting an agenda for the State, Agenda Toward A More Open Government,<read>. There is much to like and agree with in the editorial: Stronger investigative subpoena for state prosecutors; closing the cash spigot for campaign finance; and strengthening the watchdog agencies.

It’s a shame that voters turned down a ballot question that would have removed rigid language in the state constitution that restricts voting to just one day and the voter to one polling place. Lawmakers should put the question on the ballot again.

The measure would have permitted the General Assembly to authorize early voting, no-excuse absentee voting and voting by mail — reforms that make voting more convenient for busy people and increase turnout.

Thirty-four states have early voting, which means the polls are open longer hours or for days before Election Day. Any of these reforms would have been an antidote to the kind of official incompetence that shortened voting hours in Hartford on Nov. 4.

As we have covered in several posts before the election, <here here here here> we have several concerns with no-excuse absentee/mail-in voting. While we support in-person early voting, we doubt that the Connecticut Legislature is ready to pay for the expenses and call for the reorganization necessary to support in-person early voting.

With regards to this specific editorial, we point out that:

We do not get a link between the problems in Hartford in 2014 and an obvious cure in early voting or no-excuse absentee/mail-in voting. One view is that absentee check-off and list printing was too much work to get done in time for election day opening – increasing early voting would only add to that. Another view is that it was some combination of incompetence and arrogance that caused the problems – more early voting would not solve such problems.

Its been said that when you only have a hammer, you see that as a cure to every problem.

In the past it was argued that the problems of Hurricane Sandy would have been solved by early voting – that also is hard to understand unless voters appropriately predict a storm and voted early, while officials were able to expand early voting to cover an unanticipated volume. Or conversely the storm hit during early voting and the post-office managed to still get the votes in, while officials were able to increase capacity on election day to make up for unexpected lower early voting.

Also early voting in none of its forms increases turnout, in actually DECREASES turnout. Once again, we have covered this in several posts over the years <e.g. here>. As we pointed out last time, the Courant does not listen to computer science and security professionals when it comes to connecting our voting machines to the Internet. Here they should be listening to political scientists who show that early voting decreases turnout.

Connecticut not alone in election adminstration challenges

Since the election on November 4th we have had all sorts of complaints about Connecticut election administration. Claims that we are the slowest, with the most clueless election officials. And all sorts of cures proposed including more mail-in votes, electronic calculation of results, and reorganization of election administration.

We agree with that their are many problems. We agree with the general outlines of some of the cures. Yet, we caution against knee-jerk reaction, and change without planning and analysis.

We suggest looking at the best practices from other states. Yet, we can also learn from the mistakes and foibles of other states. Often those employing some of those very cures proposed for Connecticut.

We agree with that their are many problems. We agree with the general outlines of some of the cures. Yet, we caution against knee-jerk reaction, and change without planning and analysis.

Lets look at the recent news:

11/17 NJ not so quick in reporting results Using equipment from the same vendor as Connecticut, NJ has problems, delays, and investigations of slow accumulation/reporting of results electronically. Then again, some other states below reported fast, with much less accuracy than Connecticut or New Jersey.

1/25 Mail voting: Not so fast, not so easy, not so simple Take Oregon and their all-mail voting, please. A highly charged ballot question is yet to be decided. In fact they have just counted enough votes to realize they need a recount. Here is the issue, some 13,000 votes were not counted because of possible signature mismatches. So advocates contacted voters after the election to see if they actually voted and requested they come in and sign their ballot or show their signature changed.. We have some of our own issues with all this:

Just how good is their signature matching? Has anyone evaluated their methods. What are the odds they missed more questionable signatures? How many of those 13,000 should not have been questioned?
Does the result depend on which side got more voters to come in and sign (demographics can indicate how a voter might have tended to vote)
And we complain that some results in Connecticut were not available until Nov 5th?
PS: This problem will never happen in Connecticut as we never match signatures. (See no evil…)

11/25 MN lowest turn out since 1986 Many claim, anecdotally and incorrectly, that no-excuse absentee voting is a panacea for increasing turnout. Apparently, anecdotally, it has not helped Minnesota all that much.

11/25 The Maine question: Will 21 mystery ballots change looser into winner? Connecticut has problems with ballot counts not matching check-in list counts, and a greater problem with some officials not checking that those numbers match. At least in Maine there is a recognition that this might be a problem, especially if extra ballots are found after the initial count.

1/26 Electronic result totals not alwasy even close to accurate Here we go again with that electronic tallying of votes. They only missed about one-third of the votes. Fortunately, a news outlet found the error. They say the problem has been fixed, yet sounds more like the error has been corrected in the results of this one election. They are not counting accurately in Kansas any more.

Op-Ed: End Exemptions To Post-Election Audits

[I]t doesn’t make sense that the Connecticut’s post-election audit law exempts all votes on questions, election day registration, originally hand-counted ballots and absentee ballots from our post-election audit. Election integrity and public confidence demand that all ballots be subject to random selection for audit. Exempt ballots already determine many elections, while the number and percentage of exempt ballots is growing.

Op-Ed for Connecticut Citizen Election Audit published today at CTNewsJunkie

Op-Ed for Connecticut Citizen Election Audit published today at CTNewsJunkie: <read>

OP-ED | End Exemptions To Post-Election Audits

by Luther Weeks | Oct 15, 2014

When auditing town expense accounts, would it make sense to exempt some departments? When inspecting trucks, would it make sense to exempt school buses? When inspecting restaurants, would it make sense to exempt diners? Any exemption is an opening for errors to go undetected and an opportunity for fraud.

Equally it doesn’t make sense that the Connecticut’s post-election audit law exempts all votes on questions, election day registration, originally hand-counted ballots and absentee ballots from our post-election audit. Election integrity and public confidence demand that all ballots be subject to random selection for audit. Exempt ballots already determine many elections, while the number and percentage of exempt ballots is growing.

Currently about 9 percent of ballots are absentee ballots, many elections and primaries are decided by much lower margins than 9 percent. If the State enacts early voting, following other states those numbers will almost certainly rise to over 30 percent within a few years. Compare that to the race for governor in 2010, which was officially decided by about 0.6 percent—more than triple the 2000 vote margin necessary for a recanvass. Since Connecticut recently initiated Election Day registration, we can anticipate those votes to reach 10 percent of votes in a few years, which will further add to the totals exempt from the audit.

In 2010, the audit counted over 23,000 ballots from Bridgeport for the governor’s race. We found many counting and accounting errors, especially with emergency paper ballots that were counted by hand on election night. Less known is that a handful of other towns also had similar numbers of emergency hand-counted ballots in 2010. There are hand-counted ballots in every election – all of these are currently exempt from the post-election audits.

Officials in many states hand-count votes accurately in audits, using uniform, proven and effective counting methods. In Connecticut, many municipalities use ad hoc, inadequate methods to manually count ballots. Even under the ideal planned conditions of audits, many officials argue that they cannot count ballots accurately by hand and attribute almost all differences large and small, to their own errors. Many towns manually count large numbers of ballots at the end of a demanding seventeen-hour-plus election day, when there is no expectation, planning, staff, or training to count large numbers of ballots by hand on election night. How many voters are aware that many towns now avoid scanners and hand-count all votes in some primaries? Yet, we have no audit to assess how accurate these manual-counts are.

In November 2012 officials in one town investigated a difference and determined that polling place officials mistakenly read 151 ballots into a scanner a second time. Despite checks that could have caught the error before certification, the discrepancy was not detected until the audit. In another town, a similar error was made in the central count of absentee votes. It was discovered by citizens reviewing election records and resulted in reversing the official result on a highly charged question. How common are such errors? We will never know until we stop exempting absentee ballots and questions from the audit.

The good news is that we do not have to spend more to increase confidence in our elections. Connecticut is one of twenty states with hand-count audits. Our existing audit, at 10 percent of polling places, seems among the strongest. A small state needs to audit more to achieve the same confidence as a large state. This is because the statistical confidence of an audit, just like the confidence of a poll, is more dependent on the number of units counted than on the percent of the votes or voters in the election. We can reduce that 10 percent, even counting fewer total ballots, and gain confidence by subjecting all ballots to audit, while using efficient, proven counting methods.

Luther Weeks is executive director of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit.

Warning #2: Defying Common Sense, early voting DECREASES turnout

Voters considering the Constitutional Amendment on the ballot this November and legislators considering what to do if it passes, need to pay heed to the facts and experience of early voting in other state. Common sense is not always a reliable guide.

Did you know early voting of all types (polling place, no-excuse absentee, and mail-in) actually reduces turn-out?

We have said it before, based on the best studies available. Early voting DECREASES turn-out. The only exception is that early voting coupled with election day registration does not decrease the turn-out generated by election day registration. (But in Connecticut we have a more time consuming, more effort election day registration than those states that have found it increases turn-out. Our bet is that election day registration done our way will have little impact on turn-out. We also warn that measuring its effect will be quite a challenge)

Unfortunately advocates and legislators rely on common sense, rather than the best research, e.g.: <read>

Rep. Livvy Floren of Greenwich, a former member of the Government Administration and Elections Committee who worked on the bill, was one of the two Republicans to vote for the proposal.

“I’m in favor of anything that increases voter participation,” she said. Floren said she received no pressure from her party to vote the other way.

Warning #1: Your absentee or mail-in vote might not count

Did you know that when you vote absentee or mail-in, you might be disenfranchised at a much higher rate than if you voted at the polls?

There are three major reasons that we are aware of:

Your ballot might not be received in time to be counted. It might be delayed or actually lost in the mail. In Connecticut such votes must be received by 8:00pm to be counted.
You might have made a mistake in the somewhat complicated process of placing your ballot inside outer and inner envelopes, or forgetting to properly fill out the envelopes. The law requires that ballots with certain errors be rejected.
You might have overvoted i.e. voted for more candidates than allowed. This can happen when you make an inadvertent mark in a bubble or if you miscount the number of votes in a vote for multiple race. Such errors are caught for you when you vote in a polling, where the error is explained and you are offered a chance to vote again on a new ballot.

Here is a recent article on a study covering some of those problems, in California where mail-in voting is an increasing factor in elections California: Mail-in-ballot rejections analyzed in study | <read>

Voting by mail surpassed 50 percent of votes cast in a general election in California for the first time in 2012. A new study shows that nearly 69,000 mailed ballots, or about 1 percent, were not counted, and why they were rejected. The top three reasons mail-in ballots were rejected: not arriving on time, not being signed or because signatures could not be verified…

Romero said. “People have taken the time to study the issues, fill out the ballot and mail or deliver it. They trust it is going to be counted.”

Legislative Wrap-Up: One recommended bill passes – Electronic Check-in

It is often tricky to navigate the course of bills stuffed into other bills. At this point, as far as we can tell none of the bills we supported or opposed passed individually. We have scanned the 314 page ‘implementer bill’ checking each section and found only one bill that passed, one that we recommended – Electronic Check-in.

Every year many good bills passed by Committees never pass the General Assembly, the majority are never even brought up for debate. This year is an exception, only in that even less bills were debated than is normal for a ‘short session’. On the other hand we can usually celebrate several well-intended, but risky election bills that do not pass. Often risky bills are intentionally not debated, so that Senators and Representatives do not have to go on record for or against. Either way we celebrate when sanity prevails or insanity goes the way we find best for democracy.

It is often tricky to navigate the course of bills stuffed into other bills. At this point, as far as we can tell none of the bills we supported or opposed <here>, <here>, and <here> passed individually. We have scanned the 314 page ‘implementer bill‘ checking each section and found only one bill (Starting with Sec 23 on page 21) that passed, one that we recommended. As we said earlier:

Electronic Check-In

This bill allows for electronic check-in of voters. Once again this is a concept that we support, yet testified against the original which had many problems that went well beyond electronic check-in <testimony>

We are pleased to report that our objections have been addressed in a substitute bill approved by the Committee. So, we can fully support it going forward. <written testimony>

Common Sense: The good, bad, and ugly secret ballot

We often take for granted the idea of the secret ballot. One alternative to the secret vote is the public vote. Sometimes we would prefer a public vote, sometimes it is necessary,

Note: This is then ninth post in an occasional series on Common Sense Election Integrity, summarizing, updating, and expanding on many previous posts covering election integrity, focused on Connecticut. <next> <previous>

We often take for granted the idea of the secret ballot. We see elections in other countries with people putting a folded ballot into a ballot box. We go into a voting booth and want our privacy. Some want to conceal their vote from relatives, friends, employers, fellow union members, or church members. Yet there are alternatives and sometimes we want them, sometimes they are necessary.

Researching the history of the secret ballot, in The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, a couple of years ago, I was surprised to learn:

It was implemented in the U.S. generally after the Civil War
It was implemented for partisan reasons – to suppress the black vote, under the assumption it would hamper the illiterate from voting.
There is also the tradition of the New England Town Meeting with voters standing or raising their hands to vote.

This year we have fought hard to protect the secret vote in Connecticut, yet not for partisan reasons. It has several benefits:

It keeps votes from being bought, sold, or intimidated – prior to the Civil War votes were regularly bought and voters under peer and other pressures to vote in particular ways.
It helps the losers accept the election result as the actual will of the people.

One alternative to the secret vote is the public vote. Sometimes we would prefer a public vote, sometimes it is necessary:

Our representatives in the Legislature, Congress, and most public bodies vote in public. Not so long ago, committees in Congress voted in secret. Members could tell both sides of the public and lobbyists that they agreed with them and it was ‘others’ who voted the wrong way, blocked, fixed, or promoted legislation. Without a public vote we would have no idea how our elected officials actually voted. No way to hold them individually to account.
Where votes are proportional, they need to be recorded and verified by ownership. Examples include stockholder votes or condo associations where some votes are based on ownership proportions.
A public vote is much easier to verify. After every close election we hear charges by the losing side or their supporters than a particular vote was incorrectly counted – by a candidate or party in Connecticut – or a government official unhappy with the declared winner in another country. Sometimes those charges may be true. In every case it reduces the trust in the process and in democracy.
On the other hand, a public vote can also lead to charges of payments or intimidation deciding the election.

The Connecticut Constitution gives us the right to the secret vote. In considering the Constitutional Amendment this year, we note that it represents a third alternative: A semi-secret vote, if anything a worse alternative than either a secret vote or a public vote with the disadvantages of each. It would allow a special, very vulnerable class of voters, deployed military, to waive their right that their vote be secret – a right we claim is not theirs, but every voters’ right that everyone’s vote be secret. It would have none of the advantages of a public vote, since nobody knows if the soldiers votes are known, only perhaps, a few insiders may know. There would be no public verification, even for the soldier.

One final example. Last year we had a petition circulated in our condo complex to ask the Board to rescind a vote to remove part of a border fence. It became very hot issue. Over two-thirds of the residents signed the petition. The contingent in favor of removing the fence charged that many people were intimidated in signing the petition, others mislead, and others did not know what they were signing. There probably were some cases where each of those concerns were justified. We have had similar changes in every public vote. There are two issues: 1) What would be the actual free choice of the majority? 2) How can the losers accept the result? The answer is to actually conduct a secret vote – yet it must be in a way that everyone trusts the process.

Fixing the Transcript for DemocracyNow: “Fixing” the Electoral College

In a segment last week DemocracyNow editorialized on, interviewed New Yorkers, and representatives of FairVote, on the occasion of New York joining the National Popular Vote Compact/Agreement: Fixing the Electoral College: New York Joins Pact to Elect President by Popular Vote

Unfortunately, their transcript needs at least as much fixing as our current election system. As CTVotersCount readers know, we oppose the Compact because it would make a risky system, much riskier, without providing the claimed benefits. We understand the attraction to many, like nuclear power, fracking, GMOs, and Touch Screen Voting, the national popular vote would seem to be beneficial, yet like those other ideas it has largely unrecognized and unappreciated consequences. For details and background, refer to our recent testimony to the Connecticut Legislature or review our index of past NPV posts..

As a service to our readers, we here provide some annotations to the DemocracyNow transcript, showing where we disagree with the interviewees, and some of the biased comments of the reporters.

I am a fan of DemocracyNow. Yet, like all media they are not exempt from their own biases and blinders. In a segment last week they editorialized on, interviewed New Yorkers, and representatives of FairVote, on the occasion of New York joining the National Popular Vote Compact/Agreement: Fixing the Electoral College: New York Joins Pact to Elect President by Popular Vote <read>

As a service to our readers, we here provide some annotations to the DemocracyNow transcript, showing where we disagree with the interviewees, and some of the biased comments of the reporters. Our comments are in {maroon, with curly brackets and italics} .

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: New York has become the latest state to join an agreement that would transform the way we elect the president of the United States. Under the compact for a national popular vote, states across the country have pledged to award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. If enough states sign on, it would guarantee the presidency goes to the candidate who wins the most votes across the country.{Not so. Gamesmanship like FL 2000 could easily cause the system to fail. Also there is no official popular vote number to use to determine the winner under the Compact} It would prevent scenarios like what happened in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but still lost the election to George W. Bush. {Al Gore also apparently won FL by the newspaper recount of all votes in the state, demonstrating under a fair count, Gore would have won FL under the Electoral College in 2000}

AMY GOODMAN: The compact will kick in only when enough states have signed on to reach a threshold of 270 electoral votes. This week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo brought the campaign a step closer, adding New York’s 29 electoral votes to those already pledged by nine other states, including California, Illinois, Massachusetts and by Washington, D.C. In a statement, Governor Cuomo said, quote, “By aligning the Electoral College with the voice of the nation’s voters, we are ensuring the equality of votes {Yes, votes, if counted accurately would be equal, but that is misleading since citizens would not be equal, since there is not an equal national franchise and different levels of ease of voting and suppression across states} and encouraging candidates to appeal to voters in all states, instead of disproportionately focusing on early contests {sorry Gov, the Compact has nothing to do with primaries} and swing [states].” New York State Senator Joseph Griffo, a Republican, sponsored the bill.

STATE SEN. JOSEPH Gur RIFFO: Potential presidential candidates concentrate more than two-thirds of their advertising budget and two-thirds of their campaign stops in just five states. Almost 100 percent of their message is seen in approximately 16 battleground states. New York has 19.5 million people, but we’re routinely ignored by campaigns. I want to empower people. I want to make New York state relevant in a national campaign again. I want democracy that creates excitement in people, not apathy. Joining the National Popular Vote compact creates that opportunity. It leverages the combined power of the states in a compact to say, “No longer can you take us for granted. No longer can you effectively disenfranchise million of Americans by ignoring us {Do your really feel disenfranchised Gov? Did you vote for President last time? Did you tell New Yorkers not to waste their time?}. No longer can you assume that you have our vote.”
{Readers, think for yourselves:

How many votes would have changed if Obama and Romney had visited Connecticut and spoke to a few thousand voters each, giving the same talking points as they did in other states, and you watched them on Local news, in addition to National news?

Do voters want more 30sec ads to help them decide who to vote for?

Have you ever visited a swing state or early primary state? The voters there would tell you they do not want more ads and phone calls to help them choose a candidate.

Ask yourself who benefits by this? Most of the money would go to media moguls, not in your state.}

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the campaign for a national popular vote, we’re joined now by Hendrik Hertzberg, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has been writing in support of the national popular vote since 2006, serves on the board of the electoral reform organization FairVote. {Another ”journalist” who shows his bias serving on a board advocating for the NPV.}

Rick, welcome to Democracy Now!Talk about the significance of New York joining on, but also what the national popular vote is.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Well, it’s an important step psychologically, because now the threshold, instead of being 50 percent of the way to the threshold, we’re 61 percent of the way. So every little bit—every little bit helps. And, of course, New York is the media capital. Things don’t really happen in the brain of the media until they happen in New York. {Wow quite a statement, for someone advocating for a group that contends that New Yorkers are left out. Maybe that is why so many New York Republicans voted for the bill, considering it is the center of the media businesses which would be the chief beneficiaries, if the Compact’s advocates are correct in their assumptions of how campaigns would change.} So even though California, New Jersey, state of Washington—even though all these other states have already signed on, it’s only now starting to raise to the level of some sort of public attention. And most people don’t even know this is going on, and that includes people who are extremely well informed—don’t even—have never even heard of this, don’t realize that we’re halfway—more than halfway to solving one of the central problems of our Constitution, which is the—this Electoral College setup. {And unfortunately, the public does not understand the unanticipated consequences, with one-sided media coverage in favor of the Compact.} And the problem with the setup is not the Electoral College itself. The problem is the winner-take-all by state. That’s what creates all the anomalies. {Does anyone here see problems with voting rights inequality? Voter suppression? Campaign spending? Citizen’s United? The Media complex? Apparently not today.}

And what the National Popular Vote plan does is, by a whole bunch of states getting together to award their electors to whoever wins in all 50 states, as soon as that happens, well, then it doesn’t matter what state you live in: {Once again there is no equal franchise, state to state}. Your vote is just as much equal to go after, to campaign for. It means that, for instance, in New York, where it’s pointless to do—to do doorbell ringing, to have a coffee collection, invite your neighbors in—what difference does it make? Everybody knows which way New York is going. {Usually so in most states, but their votes count and contribute their fair share in determining the winner} But if every vote, if a vote in New York is worth the same as a vote in Ohio or Pennsylvania, you get a—that really is transformational. Even more than preventing a wrong winner is that you get grassroots politics happening in every corner of the country. {And you then get incentive for suppression and manipulation everywhere too.} And if you’re worried about political corruption, if you’re worried about campaign finance, for example, what this would do is, all those billions raised for campaigns, instead of being funneled into a handful of states, they would have to be spread out across the whole country, so their relative impact would be much less. This is an extraordinary reform. {That is an extraordinary claim, that by providing more opportunity for more money to make more of a difference, you are reducing the influence of that money? How many of the advocates for the Compact agree that Citizens United is bad for Democracy? I suspect the vast majority, yet increased influence of money is twisted to be a benefit when it comes to the Compact.}

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, what allows a group of states to be able to come together and reach a compact like this? Wouldn’t a constitutional amendment be needed for this? Explain the legality of it.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Well, this is based on two things in the Constitution. One is what you just mentioned, interstate compacts. There are hundreds of them. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, maybe not the best example lately, but that is an example of an interstate compact. It’s in the Constitution. The other part is that the only thing in the Constitution about electing the president is basically a one-liner that says each state shall appoint a number of electors in such manner as the Legislature thereof may determine. That’s all it says. Everything else is left to—is left to the states to figure out. And the winner-take-all notion, that’s a—that’s something that came in 20, 30 years after the Constitution was written. And it’s because a party that controls the state Legislature isn’t going to say, if given the choice between keeping all those electors for themselves or giving, you know, some portion of them to the opposition, of course they’re going to do it this way. {I am not a Constitutional lawyer. I am not a lawyer. Yet, I would agree the Compact is likely Constitutional, yet it may well be challenged to the Supreme Court. And based on the precedents of past elections, and the rules of the Electoral College, it is quite likely that the Supreme Court would be “forced” to choose the President under those challenges. See our testimony for a discussion of the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act and the Compact’s likely effects.}

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democratic New York State Senator Michael Gianaris, who is among those who oppose joining the compact for a national popular vote.

STATE SEN. MICHAEL GIANARIS: The current system allots Electoral College votes based on a state’s population, whereas a system such as the National Popular Vote will do so based on voter turnout in a presidential election, which means states that have a high number of unregistered residents would not be counted as much, or states that have low voter turnout would not be counted as much as they are under the current system. There’s also a myriad of other issues related to those that have wealth being able to saturate a big city media market to affect the outcome more than they currently do, which is already too much, as well as the possibility for some states that are unhappy with the results, potentially between Election Day and the Electoral College vote, changing their state laws to pull back out of a compact like this, which would throw the whole system into chaos. {We generally oppose the Compact for other reasons, the increased risks to the system. We do not reject these arguments out of hand. Unfortunately, the strongest arguments against the Compact are not getting a fair hearing}

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Democratic New York State Senator Michael Gianaris. Now, interesting, he’s Democrat, and the person we played for the national popular vote was a Republican. But can you answer his points? {Interesting because, in our opinion in general, Democrats are for it for the wrong reasons, and Republicans are against it for the wrong reasons. Both think their party would benefit from their positions.}

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: He’s wrong on every single one of them. You cannot withdraw from the state—interstate compact for 90 days before an election. That’s part of the deal. That’s part of the contract that you make.

The notion that—as far as turnout is concerned, right now there’s a sort of a five-to-10-point difference in the turnout between battleground states and spectator states. So when you have a nationwide vote, you’re going to see—yes, you’re going to see turnout increase, but don’t say it like it’s a bad thing.

He mentions that the Electoral College is based on—is not based on how many people vote; it’s based on population. And that’s one of—that’s sort of the original sin of the Electoral College, because the reason it’s based on population is so that the three-fifths of the slaves could be counted to give the slave owners more representation. It imports—the Electoral College mechanism imports that right—which is in the Senate and the House, right into this choice of the presidency. Now, that part of it’s gone now, but that is the original sin. {There are a lot of things in our history which are regrettable, but tying the Electoral College to slavery, is close to playing the Hitler card on other issues. Should opponents bring up disappointing or criminal Senators, Governors, and Mayors that were elected by popular vote?}

And of course it makes more sense for the president to be chosen by voters, one-by-one voters, rather than by states with a fixed number of votes. Even if only three people vote in a state and it’s got 10 electoral votes, they’ll still go to that candidate. All the National Popular Vote plan does, really, is elect the president the way we elect a dog catcher or a governor or a senator or representative. It’s not that complicated. {Unfortunately, it is much more complicated. Study our testimony on the 12^th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act, along with the effect of the Compact.}

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But my question is, given the fact that you would only need the states who equal a number of 270 votes to join the compact, and they would therefore then be decisive in terms of who would get elected if the—who wins the popular vote, but isn’t it possible just as well for the compact to be broken years down the line? In other words, for new legislatures to come in and decide to leave?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Sure, that would be possible, yeah. And actually, that’s one of the advantages to this maybe over a constitutional amendment. We can try it. We can try it, see if—try electing a president democratically, see if we like it. If we like it, we can keep it. If we don’t like it, we don’t have to keep it. That’s actually a plus, not a minus.

AMY GOODMAN: So, so far, now—

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: And I might add, Juan, that it’s not as if the states that are compacting are then going to decide who’s president. No, the only thing that will decide who’s president is the voters in all the states that are compacting and that are not compacting. It won’t make any difference whether you live in one of them or not. {Unless, they are not counted accurately, there was no national post-election audit, no national recount, and no national popular vote number available in time for states to choose their electors. Oooops we have none of those, so we are stuck with the “trust us” non-verification system.}

AMY GOODMAN: So, now signed on: New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Rhode Island and Washington.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: What happens next?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Well, right now there’s a focus on Connecticut, where the bill is being considered. It’s kind of a one-by-one thing, state to state. {Yes, we are the next target.} Now, people may have noticed that the states that you mentioned are all blue states. And, of course, because of what happened in 2000, Republicans tend to have a—you know, they kind of—they kind of have a—react to this and think—or, suspiciously, they think maybe this is Al Gore’s revenge. {And Democrats are apparently, in general, blind to the risks, since they have been led to believe that this would have changed the outcome in FL in 2000. Yet with different voters, more voters, with a different counts, and different campaign strategies, who knows if Gore would actually have won under the NPV in 2000. Can we at least all agree that more and different voters would go to the polls under the Compact and that we have no idea what an accurate count would have been in 2000?}, in fact, there are plenty of Republicans who back this. If you believe in democracy, if you believe that the way to have an election is count the votes, see who wins, then it really doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Yes, there are these inbred prejudices. Republicans are—maybe they’re more resistant to change. Maybe they think this is somehow an end run around the Constitution, which it is not, which it definitely is not. They have a—they have more skepticism to overcome. But this isn’t like, you know, taxing the rich, where that’s a matter of principle. It’s a matter of principle the other way: If you’re for democracy, you really ought to be for this. {Yup, anyone against this is charged with being undemocratic. And the other side says proponents are against the Founding Fathers. And then back to the opposition favoring slavery…}

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Hendrik Hertzberg is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He’s been writing in support of the national popular vote since 2006. I think you said in your last piece you had written 51 pieces on this.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Fifty-two as of this morning.

AMY GOODMAN: He serves on the board of the electoral reform organization FairVote. When we come back, we’re going to England and to Norway to talk about drones and who’s running the U.S. drone operation. Stay with us.

As we have said many times, we are not in theory opposed to electing the President by national popular vote. But we need a uniform voting system, a uniform national franchise, enforceable, and enforced to avoid increasing the risks inherent in the current system.

CyberDissonence? State concern of Biblical Proportions

In Connecticut, apparently: Electricity is Critical! .., when it comes to elections, the message is “What Us Worry?”

You could say the State’s concern with Electoral attack is of Biblical proportions, i.e. criticizing utilities while not noticing the XP in our own systems.

New report from the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority highlights the risks of the power grid to cyber attack: Cyber Security and Connecticut’s Public Utilities <read>

There is a profound distance in perspective between the consume r of electricity, natural gas and water , who sees consumption as a normal, secure part of life, and the U.S. Intelligence Community , which sees threats to such consumption. The latter witnesses sophisticated, daily probes and penetrations of U.S. institutions , including not only corporate information technology networks but also regional electric distribution networks and private utilities. In the August 16, 2013 New York Times , reporter Matthew L. Wald noted that both government and private experts describe the U.S. electric grid as “the glass jaw of American industry.” Such experts fear that a successful strike by an adversary “could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of September 11.”…

Efforts to hack into public utilities are significant , and by many reports , growing both in volume and sophistication. Public utility regulators and state authorities ould be dereli t to ignore what national security personnel call ongoing “battlefield preparation”…

The stark fact is that the United States is vulnerable; probes are active, dangerous and widespread. T his national pregnability pertains directly to Connecticut. There is no option but to acknowledge this reality and resolve to resist, defend and take countermeasures to ensure operational security in our public utilities

The report mentions the NIST (National Institute of Standards) Cybersecurity Framework and concerns within Homeland security.

As the Legislature considers for the third year in a row, passing legislation that would enable Internet voting, ignoring the concerns of our Secretary of the State, Department of Defense, experts from NIST and Homeland Security. In 2012 Governor Malloy was concerned and vetoed the bill based on security concerns, yet in 2013 he signed a similar bill. Now the Legislature is considering a bill to eliminate our constitutional right to a secret vote. You could say the State’s concern with Electoral attack is of Biblical proportions, i.e. criticizing utilities while not noticing the XP in our own systems.

*****Update 04/28*******

As we were saying, CT State Computers and Municipal Computers running XP could be vulnerable. In fact, all computers running Microsoft Internet Explorer are vulnerable. For the latest bug XP computers may never be “safe(*)” again. Washington Post: Hackers targeting newly discovered flaw in Internet Explorer <read>

This is the first major security disaster for users who still run Microsoft XP, the 12-year-old operating system that Microsoft discontinued support for earlier this month. The short-term solutions do not work with the old operating system, and no patches will be released to fix it.

Many federal agencies still use XP despite repeated advance warnings from Microsoft that impending discontinuance of support would leave their computers vulnerable.

About 10 percent of government computers still run XP, including thousands of computers on classified military and diplomatic networks

* Remember all computers and browsers are vulnerable to as bugs and traps, as yet undiscovered by good guys.

If Internet voting is so safe, why is the power grid so vulnerable?

Of course the answer is that Internet voting is not safe, much more vulnerable than the power grid. But why don’t we know that?

How are grid vulnerabilities different from the vulnerabilities of electronic voting and Internet voting in particular? Lets look at a story from the LA Times highlighting vulnerabilities in the power grid

Of course the answer is that Internet voting is not safe, much more vulnerable than the power grid. But why don’t we know that? Could it be that voting is largely a Government managed function and therefor Government articulation of vulnerabilities, and public expenditures on security would be less welcome?

Today we have a story from the LA Times highlighting vulnerabilities in the power grid: Security holes in power grid have federal officials scrambling <read>

Adam Crain assumed that tapping into the computer networks used by power companies to keep electricity zipping through transmission lines would be nearly impossible in these days of heightened vigilance over cybersecurity.

When he discovered how wrong he was, his work sent Homeland Security Department officials into a scramble.

Crain, the owner of a small tech firm in Raleigh, N.C., along with a research partner, found penetrating transmission systems used by dozens of utilities to be startlingly easy.

How are grid vulnerabilities different from the vulnerabilities of electronic voting and Internet voting in particular? We can start with the article subtitle:

In Congress, the vulnerability of the power grid has emerged as among the most pressing domestic security concerns

Internet voting is hardly a concern in the Connecticut Legislature which unanimously passed Internet voting two years in a row mandating the Secretary of the State and Military Department do what the DoD, experts from Homeland Security, and the National Institute of standards say is impossible. And even here grid security is a big concern of state government.

Then again maybe they are also the same in some ways:

“There are a lot of people going through various stages of denial” about how easily terrorists could disrupt the power grid, he said. “If I could write a tool that does this, you can be sure a nation state or someone with more resources could.”…

Some members of Congress want to empower regulators to force specific security upgrades at utilities. Others are attacking whistle-blowers and the media, demanding an investigation into disclosures of how easily the country’s power grid could be shut down.

Here is a difference. Who would even attempt insuring the safety of our election system? Let alone Internet voting?

Lloyds’ appraisers have been making a lot of visits lately to power companies seeking protection against the risk of cyberattack. Their takeaway: Security at about half the companies they visit is too weak for Lloyds to offer a policy.

Power companies are actual monopolies, but so are local election departments. Some of the same issues apply:

The problem, said Scott White, a security technology scholar at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is that “you are basically dealing with these monopolies that are determining for themselves which expenditures are a priority. Security has not generally been one.”

Utilities deny they’ve ignored the problem, pointing to the billions of dollars they say they’ve spent to upgrade outdated computer systems and close security holes.

Here is a difference, something seldom seen when Internet voting is adopted and declared successful:

They are signing contracts with security firms like Booz Allen Hamilton to investigate such things as to how to keep potentially mischievous devices out of the equipment they buy, often from foreign suppliers. The security firms help clients sift through reams of confidential intelligence provided by federal agencies. They simulate cyberattacks.

“It is the equivalent of war gaming, like the military does,” said Steve Senterfit, vice president of commercial energy at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Here in Connecticut we pride ourselves in the safety of 169 autonomous elected election departments. But that also has its downsides. Like the power grid, electronic voting involves users’ computers or distributed military computers:

But critics, including many in Congress, say more needs to be done to shore up a grid increasingly exposed to attacks. They note that so-called smart grid technology, which allows operators to calibrate the flow of energy from an increasingly diverse pool of sources, has opened new security risks.

The technology relies on devices in remote locations that constantly send signals to substations to help control when juice needs to be brought on and offline. The smarter the grid becomes, though, the more entry points an attacker can exploit.

“The whole idea of a smart grid is to push equipment further and further away from the substations,” Crain said. “Some of it is even in people’s homes. It’s physically impossible to secure it all.”

Here is a difference: The grid is apparently not on the Internet, so it is actually just a little harder to compromise:

The vulnerabilities Crain exposed, for example, had been overlooked because taking advantage of them requires an attacker to have access to closed, local networks. Now, a cyberterrorist with a little knowledge and the right laptop can gain that access and cause chaos in a regional power system merely by linking up with the control panel at a secluded electric vehicle charging station.