Category: CT

The Day: Elections Panel Finalizes Norwich Registrars’ Fines

Two recent articles of interest in The Day:

From Friday, two Norwich Registrars were fined for election day errors in judgement. No matter how one feels about the appropriateness of the fine, it is good to see the Election Enforcement Commission demonstrating seriousness.

Another from Saturday showing that a “Software error” lost record of 911 calls. This is a demonstration of the value of our laws in Connecticut requiring paper records for voting. Note that “Security” is invoked to avoid providing details and that the result might be a botched prosecution of a breach of the peace charge related to a shooting death.

Has LHS Director Challenged Brad To A Debate?

“Do I seem to be irate? You bet and it has nothing to do with the legitimacy of electronic voting, which I have also questioned.”
– Ken Hajjar, Director of Sales & Marketing, LHS

Brad Friedman, a nationally know election integrity advocate has received an e-mail allegedly from Ken Hajjar, LHS, Director of Sales and Marketing. (LHS is the New England distributor of Dieblod equipment responsible for the sale to Connecticut).

Given the foul and ranting nature of the attack I would hope the letter is a fake. I would question the wisdom of relying on the author to be involved in any way in running our elections. I’ll spare the not so nice parts of the letter, you can read the whole thing and Brad’s response here.

I used to think that all of the looney idealogues(sic) were on the right. There are just as many on the left and you are one of them. … It’s not the machines that are the cause of our problems, it’s the people…Pick a forum and I’d be happy to discuss how we run elections in New England and how difficult, if not impossible it is to game the system. Bring it on.

The author of the letter does not represent the voters of New England and should not be telling anyone how we run elections.

Unfortunately, here in Connecticut we are about to have our 1st election entirely run on Diebold equipment purchased through LHS and to add to our risks the state has contracted with Diebold to program all of our elections. So in that sense Ken Hajjar, LHS, and Diebold will be running our elections, and not letting us in on how they are programmed.

Brad has accepted the challenge. We will keep you updated.

Update: Ken Hajjar responds to Brad

Continue reading “Has LHS Director Challenged Brad To A Debate?”

Brennan Audit Report and Connecticut – a Discussion

On August 1st, The Brennan Center for Justice released: Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections. The entire report is quite readable without requiring knowledge of statistics, voting laws, or computers. I recommend it as a compurehensive introduction to the issues of auditing elections.

This post will discuss the report’s relation to and implications for Connecticut’s new election
audit law.

First, let me thank all of those involved in creating and contributing to this report. The Brennan Center, The Samuelson Law Clinic, and the members of the ‘Audit Panel’. The audit panel included several individuals from Verified Voting and staff from the Office of the Secretary of State of Connecticut. The Connecticut panelists alone were four of the entire panel of seventeen. As the report states, “Opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations … are soley of the authors and the Brennan Center”.

While we seldom agree on everything, the the staff of the Office of the Secretary of the State have always been responsive and available. The Secretary has also always been responsive and I have no doubt that she is committed to fair elections with integrity. When the Secretary changed course to specify optical scan machines in early 2006, she demonstrated the kind of flexibility and openness that will be necessary to apply the conclusions contained in this report and the reports from California to the benefit of Connecticut voters.

Perhaps the most basic findings of the report and the most challenging to recently enacted Connecticut law are:

Of the few states that currently require and conduct post-election audits, none has adopted audit models that will maximize the likelihood of finding clever and targeted software-based attacks, non-systemic programming errors, and software bugs that could change the outcome of an election…
Based upon our review of state laws and interviews with state election officials, we have concluded that the vast majority of states conducting audits are not using them in a way that will maximize their ability to improve elections in the future.(emphasis added)

Strickingly, these finding were based on an earlier version of Connecticut’s law that was proposed by the Secretary but later watered down considerably. From the Brennan report: “Connecticut, California, and Illinois check all races on the ballot during a post-election audit”.

Continue reading “Brennan Audit Report and Connecticut – a Discussion”

Likely that state’s largest election will go unaudited

The Norwich Bulletin reports concern in Plainfield because the ballot for a charter revision may reach three pages. No mention in the article that the state’s new audit law does not provide for random audits of ballot questions. Apparently huge concern in Norwich over cost of ballots, yet they have likely spent thousands on developing the charter revisions and will put it all at risk for a relatively small amount as at least that part of the election goes unaudited.

Read the full story

An hour with the Secretary of the State

Susan Bysiewicz live blogged tonight on MyLeftNutmeg. MLMBlog

I asked two questions and got two answers, both of which were disappointing in different ways.

But 1st let me say that I endevored to ask reasonable questions and make reasonable comments. There were two bloggers there that asked very confrontational, long, and sometimes insulting questions. I note that one of them registered only on July 24th, and has not blogged until today, with the name LiveFreeOrDie, I suspect someone from out of state. I note that the other, obviously from CT registered on April 17th, but has not commented until today.

Although the Secretary was to take questions on four subjects, the vast majority were on voting machines.

WHAT I LEARNED

– She started with a long entry, probably prepared ahead. The news for voting integrity was that she referenced the anticipated Brennan Report, to which she provided a link. (It is 40 pages plus another 50 in appendixes). I attempted scanning it quickly it appears to be more of a survey confirming many other reports without taking many strong stands. Yet, it will take a real read to really see what it has to offer. Report.

– I asked if she was happy with the confidence levels of 2-4% of detecting fraud in municipal and state legislateive races. She said “NO”. But, in reality it is clear she confused the 10% random district audit level with the resulting confidence level. So, not surprisingly, we learned that she, like many seems to have a weak grasp of statistics, at least in a fast blogging session. Unfortunately, the one hour blog session is not an environment suitable to educating on such subjects. I am sure most people can understand enough if we could actually sit down with their full attention for a few minutes.

– I asked that if when SB1311 mentioned primaries, elections, and races, if it included referendums and questions in audits?. I was disappointed to have my suspicions confirmed that they will not be audited. And pleased that she expressed the possibility of working on that in the future.

I would hope that she and other officials are not detered from similar sessions.

University of Connecticut, Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal

In July, 2007 a similar report was released on the Diebold TSX, which demonstrated that that the state’s choice of Diebold Optical Scan was far superior to the Diebold DRE option, however, the October 2006 report is the one that applies to our voting systems.

We identify a number of new vulnerabilities of this system which, if exploited maliciously, can invalidate the results of an election process utilizing the terminal. Furthermore, based on our findings an AV-OS can be compromised with off-the-shelf equipment in a matter of minutes even if the machine has its removable memory card sealed in place…Such vote tabulation corruptions can lay dormant until the election day, thus avoiding detection through pre-election tests
The vulnerability assessment provided in this paper is based only on experimentation with the system. At no point in time had we used, or had access to, internal documentation from the manufacturer we conclude that attackers with access to the components of the AV-OS
system can reverse-engineer it in ways that critically compromise its security, discover the vulnerabilities presented here in and develop the attacks that exploit them.

Unfortunately, presumably the secret programming of each election by Diebold allows access to the memory cards by those with all the documentation.

Read the full report