HowDoWeKnow | CTVotersCount.org

Lessons we likely will NOT learn from Iowa

There is a lot of lessons that could be learned from Iowa. Yet we may not learn them. On the other hand we may learn other lessons. In no particular order:

Bernie and Pete both won…
Change anything in the rules, and the result is likely to have been different…
People tend to tout their favorite reform as a cure for any crisis….

The bottom line: Be careful what you ask for, the cure may be worse than the disease. Its complicated. Don’t let a crisis go to waste, but avoid knee-jerk solutions.

“‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

There is a lot of lessons that could be learned from Iowa. Yet we may not learn them. On the other hand we may learn other lessons. As Mark Twain said “‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

In no particular order:

Bernie and Pete both won. We go crazy over exactly who won by a few votes or delegates. Sometimes it is critical and important, like in a close election where we need to declare a winner. Not in a single primary where one or a couple delegates are hardly likely to make a difference in the end. Pursue every vote, count everything as accurately as possible. Pursue every irregularity and act on that (unfortunately, that often does not happen.) No matter if Bernie won by 0.2% or Mayor Pete did, they both won. It is amazing the Pete came from nowhere and did so well. It is amazing that Bernie, with obstacle after obstacle placed in his way by the DNC and the media, rose to the top.
Change anything in the rules, and the result is likely to have been different.
Did Bernie win the popular vote? No more than Hillary did in 2016. That will likely outrage my democrat and Bernie friends, yet it is true for several reasons that we do not know. First, this is a town by town delegate contest. That is the rules. The turnout at the caucuses varies from district to district far from the population, and far from November. Those that propose the National Popular Vote claim that would cause more people to vote – more Democrats in blue states, more Republicans in red states, yet also more Democrats in red states, more Republicans in blue states – they are correct. Yet,nobody knows what the results of a true popular vote would have been in either case. Second, more in the case of Hillary or Al Gore, than in Iowa – there is very little scrutiny of the exact vote, no audit across the country. Who cares if Hillary won by 3,000,000 votes in CA or 2,500,000 or 200,000 in CT or 250,000. We do not have an accurate popular vote number for 2016 or 2000 or for any other year for that matter. Change the rules and it would matter.
People tend to tout their favorite reform as a cure for any crisis. This week, one reputedly smart state representative claimed that Iowa was a case for paper ballots. I agree we need paper ballots everywhere, yet Iowa had paper ballots. Even better the caucus votes were held in public so there was no question that the ballots were correct and not compromised in the reported vote count. That same representative votes in the General Assembly all the time without paper ballots. They push a button and it lights up a screen. That is a very transparent, publicly verifiable vote, closer to the Iowa caucus than elections in Connecticut, much safer than any secret voting system. Regularly in Connecticut insiders and political operative steal votes via absentee, almost as regularly that is used as a reason to call for more main-in voting.
Many say Iowa is a reason to get rid of caucuses. I agree.
Many say Iowa is a reason for Ranked Choice Voting. Actually the Iowa system is more like Ranked Choice Voting than winner take all. Like Ranked Choice Voting it takes more math and accuracy to determine the results, it makes close votes more likely, not just in the end, but at every round where a close vote can determine the ultimate result in a caucus or a RCV. RCV can take much longer for results to be determined. Errors in single RCV precincts are much more likely to effect the final result than in the Iowa Caucus.
Elections are complex, people don’t know that. It is hard to account for over 1700 precincts. It is hard to manage dozens or hundreds of people and count their votes correctly in a caucus. Its hard to apply the difficult equations to determine deligates accurately, in the environment of a caucus. It is hard to double check all that. Especially hard since there apparently is no training for caucus leaders, many recruited the day before. Hard to get 1700+ of those counts all correct, add them up and double check them. Hard for a candidate to have individuals in every precinct to collect the data, verify the vote counts, verify the formulas and get all that information to the campaign and then for the campaign to redo and double check that information.
May say Connecticut is better off because we have trained election officials. They are mostly correct. Yet, how do you know there are no errors in the results from Connecticut? How many inaccurate results are reported? In how many cases are results reported with more votes than voters signed in? In how many cases are more voters signed in than ballots counted? I do not know the answers exactly, yet there are many in every November election. Many times they do not matter when contests are decided by many votes. Yet in many cases they do matter. A rare example from 2018 where such a situation was uncovered, investigated and ultimately not remedied.
The Iowa app was a badly botched system implementation, with no real backup. Yet a few years ago Connecticut’s Secretary of the State tried to mandate a system where polling place moderators would put in all our results on election night with smart phones – with greatly tired officials who had worked a 17 hour day, with many times the small number of results posted from each caucus. That system was stopped by an uprising from election officials, who should have been part of designing the system. That took a couple of years for them to be heard by the Secretary’s Office who blamed the officials as being against technology. We now have a pretty good system that uses fresh staff with laptops in town hall to enter data using laptops, not smart phones. Yet that system took a couple of years of Novembers to work out all the bugs to work well enough to be mandated to every town.
Connecticut is fine. Until the next thing happens. Then the Secretary of the State will again say it was outside her responsibility as Chief Election Official, ask for more power and laws to prevent that specific problem. All will be well until the next thing happens…
Having paper ballots and checkin lists means we can resolve most issues, yet it will take time. Maybe weeks. Yet we cannot resolve all problems, missing ballots, voter suppression, screw-ups like the one in Stratford above, illegal absentee ballots etc. We need better plans and processes to resolve those issues, including more re-voting.

The bottom line: Be careful what you ask for, the cure may be worse than the disease. Its complicated. Don’t let a crisis go to waste, but avoid knee-jerk solutions.

“‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

BradCast DefCon: David Jefferson on hacking of almost every voting machine

As Brad says

Hopefully, what happened in Vegas does not stay in Vegas

We are not so optimistic. We have a long history of getting excited about voting irregularities and risks, followed by officials and the general public moving on.

As Brad says

Hopefully, what happened in Vegas does not stay in Vegas

We are not so optimistic. We have a long history of getting excited about voting irregularities and risks, followed by officials and the general public moving on. As Obama said in 2012 “We have got to fix this”. He created a solid commission that made a significant report, yet by then the country had moved on. This time, starting before the election, we have Secretaries of the State and Homeland Security telling us there is nothing to see here. Misinformed at best, self serving propaganda at worst. From the BradCast <read>

“That room was just crowded from morning to night,” Jefferson says, describing the room at DefCon. “And the amazing thing is that all of those successful hacks, these were by people who, most of them, had never seen a voting machine before, and certainly not the system sitting in front of them, and they had not met each other before. They didn’t come with a full set of tools that were tailored toward attacking these machines. They just started with a piece of hardware in front of them and their own laptops and ingenuity, attacking the various systems. And it was amazing how quickly they did it!”

Jefferson tells me, after all of these years, he is now seeing a major difference among the public, as well as election and elected officials (a number of whom were also in attendance), regarding the decades-long concerns by experts about electronic voting, tabulation and registration systems.

“I am seeing a kind of sea change here. For the first time, I am sensing that election officials, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI, and the intelligence community, and Congress, and the press, are suddenly, after the 2016 election experience, receptive to our message that these systems are extremely vulnerable and it’s a serious national security issue. As you know, in a democracy, the legitimacy of government depends on free and fair and secure elections. And people are beginning to realize that we haven’t had those for a long time.”

“I am seeing a kind of sea change here. For the first time, I am sensing that election officials, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI, and the intelligence community, and Congress, and the press, are suddenly, after the 2016 election experience, receptive to our message that these systems are extremely vulnerable and it’s a serious national security issue. As you know, in a democracy, the legitimacy of government depends on free and fair and secure elections. And people are beginning to realize that we haven’t had those for a long time.”

He explains how hacking methods attributed by many to Russians following the 2016 elections “are the same methods that anyone on Earth could use — insiders, criminal syndicates, nation-states other than Russia, as well, or our own political partisans. The fear, of course, is that these hacking attempts will be totally undetectable. But even if they are detectable, it’s difficult often to determine who did it, whether it’s an insider, or a domestic partisan, or some foreign organization.”

He also confirms what I’ve been trying to point out since the 2016 election, that despite officials continuously claiming that no voting results were changed by anyone, be it Russia or anybody else, “they cannot know that. They simply can’t know. Certainly in those states where there are no paper ballots, such as in Georgia, for example, it’s impossible for them to know. And even in states where there are, if they don’t go back and either recount the paper ballots, or at least recount a random sample of them, no, they can’t know either.”

“Election officials have fooled themselves into believing the claims of their [private voting machine] vendors that the systems are secure from all kinds of attack. And it’s just never been true,” Jefferson argues.

Not much different than what we have all been saying for many years. Let us hope with Brad that this time many will hear and act!

I highly recommend listening to the podcast which has much more than than Brad’s post. The election discussion starts about 40% into the podcast.

Controlling Voting Algorithms is Critical

A short op-ed in the Courant from Bloomberg View, by Cathy O’Neil describes the risks of artificial intelligence algorithms used by the likes of Facebook and Google: Controlling A Pervasive Use Of Algorithms Critical

We should have concerns with algorithms beyond Artificial Intelligence. The same concerns apply to any algorithm (computer code/manual process), such as voting machines. We have no access to the code in our AccuVoteOS optical scanners. Yet we know from studies such as the California Top-To-Bottom-Review, Hacking Democracy’s Hursti Hack, and studies by UConn that the system is vulnerable to attack. We do not know and cannot know for sure if the software running on a particular AccuVoteOS and its memory card is correct and accurate.

Humans are gradually coming to recognize the vast influence that artificial intelligence will have on society. What we need to think about more, though, is how to hold it accountable to the people whose lives it will change…

In short, people are being kept in the dark about how widely artificial intelligence is used, the extent to which it actually affects them and the ways in which it may be flawed. That’s unacceptable. At the very least, some basic information should be made publicly available:

Scale: Whose data is collected, how, and why? How reliable are those data? What are the known flaws and omissions?

Impact: How does the algorithm process the data? How are the results of its decisions used?

Accuracy: How often does the algorithm make mistakes — say, by wrongly identifying people as criminals or failing to identify them as criminals? What is the breakdown of errors by race and gender?

Such accountability is particularly important for government entities that have the power to restrict our liberty. If their processes are opaque and unaccountable, we risk handing our rights to a flawed machine.

The best defense is a comprehensive, sufficient Post Election Audit.

Yet now Connecticut audits with the UConn Audit Station with undisclosed software. Even if we knew the software and tested it, there still would be no assurance that we missed something in our tests, there was a hardware error, or the software was compromised. As we wrote in a recent op-ed in the CTMirror and as covered in the most recent Citizen Audit Report the only defense is a manual audit of that Audit Station, every time it is used.

Covering the items in the Courant Op-Ed:

Scale: Whose data is collected, how, and why? How reliable are those data? What are the known flaws and omissions?
Our voting data is collected. It is only as reliable as the optical scanner as deployed. The system is vulnerable to attack in a variety of ways.

Impact: How does the algorithm process the data? How are the results of its decisions used?
It is supposed to be a straight-forward interpretation of marks to vote counts, provided the scanner is properly configured and programmed. The results are used to determine who leads our democracy AND if our votes actually determine that.

Accuracy: How often does the algorithm make mistakes — say, by wrongly identifying people as criminals or failing to identify them as criminals? What is the breakdown of errors by race and gender?
Here this is, how often does in inaccurately count votes? Did it count them accurately enough in this election? If we had trustworthy audits of the voting machines and the Audit Station we could answer these questions.

Common Sense: The Skeptics Guide to Election Integrity and Fraud

Two events in the last week or so prompt this post. First, last Saturday I was at the Reason Rally at the Lincoln Memorial. One speaker said “Be skeptical of everything”. A later speaker assured us, among other things, that two things I believe to be true were actually conspiracy theories.

Second, a recent series of posts by Richard Charmin, essentially claiming that in many states the primary was stolen.

So, where do I come out? I stand with Carl Sagan who said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” and the speaker at the Reason Rally who said to “be skeptical of everything”. Here we have competing extraordinary claims:

By Richard Charmin: That, in a large number of states the election results were manipulated in favor of a single candidate.
Implicitly by complacence: “Move on, nothing to see here, exit polls are always wrong in the U.S. Don’t be concerned that every time someone brings this up, they are always wrong in favor of one candidate or party”

Note: This is then twelfth post in an occasional series on Common Sense Election Integrity, summarizing, updating, and expanding on many previous posts covering election integrity, focused on Connecticut. <previous> [just an interesting coincidence the last Common Sense post was exactly one year ago!] <next>

Second, a recent series of posts by Richard Charmin, essentially claiming that in many states the primary was stolen, based on, among other things, a pretty consistent difference between raw exit polls and the results, almost always favoring one candidate. Looking at the details, we see that Connecticut is one of those states.

So, where do I come out? I stand with Carl Sagan who said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” and the speaker at the Reason Rally who said to be skeptical of everything. Here we have competing extraordinary claims:

By Richard Charmin: That, in a large number of states the election results were manipulated in favor of a single candidate.
Implicitly by complacence: “Move on, nothing to see here, exit polls are always wrong in the U.S. Don’t be concerned that every time someone brings this up, they are always wrong in favor of one candidate or party”

It is clear that both of these are extraordinary claims. We are disappointed in the lack of others providing factual evidence and solid arguments refuting or confirming either of these extra ordinary claims.

Democracy requires solid answers. Voters and Candidates deserve solid answers. What is required is Evidence Based Elections, elections that provide strong evidence that the outcome reflects the votes of the voters.

At this point we do not have that evidence in Connecticut. One approach would be a strong post-election audit showing that votes were counted accurately, that ballot counts matched the voters checked in, and that polling place and central count absentee counts were accurately accumulated.

In Connecticut, there are gaps in the post-election audit, transparency lacking in the totaling process, and challenges in verifying all the data. We are at work on developing answers which might provide reasonably convincing evidence for Connecticut.

Update: Skeptics Guide Part 2: Absence of Evidence is Not Evidence of Absence

Another example of a transparent, evidence-based vote

Last week I spent a morning in New London’s historic Town Hall observing a post-election audit. I noticed this interesting device. Can you explain it, without reading further?

While you are thinking, here is a panorama of the Council Chambers. Two plaques on the wall list the Mayors starting in 1646 and note New London was founded by John Winthrop, the Younger.

Now back to the device above. It is actually a mechanism for requesting and publicly displaying voters. Those are ping-pong balls with the names of council members. The Clerk calls off a member’s name and then places the ball in the yea or nay track. In the end the longest track wins.

Unlike votes in our elections, the council does not have to deal with a secret ballot. Like votes in the General Assembly where they are recorded on a big board, or when we raise our hands in a public meeting the whole process is transparent and easily validated by everyone present.

In a town council or legislature it is a good idea since the members should be accountable to the public. When we vote by secret ballot it is to prevent any voter from being bribed, coerced, or otherwise beholden to anyone but ourselves for our vote.

How Do We Know? Two cases tell the tale

Bradblog has an instructive post bringing home the limitations and possibilities of optical scan paper ballot elections: Caught on Tape: Election Officials Behaving Badly

Bradblog has an instructive post bringing home the limitations and possibilities of optical scan paper ballot elections: Caught on Tape: Election Officials Behaving Badly <read>

As we have often said in Myth 9:

Myth #9 – If there is ever a concern we can always count the paper.

Reality

The law limits when the paper can be counted.

Brad brings an example from Ohio, where complying with a reasonable request could put legitimate concerns to rest:

Beiersdorfer is a geology professor, fracking expert and supporter of the ProtectYoungstown.org anti-fracking initiative. As you’ll here, at the meeting of the Elections Board, he politely asked for a hand-count of paper ballots regarding the ballot initiative, after a post-election poll appeared to offer contradictory results to those reported by the unverified computer optical-scan tabulation systems used in the county. (An electronic tabulation system, I’ll note, which has failed in election after election elsewhere.) In response, Betras freaks out and charges that Beiersdorfer has accused him of “rigging an election”.

“You just basically accused this board of elections of election fraud!,” Betras, a Democratic, snaps in outraged response, as caught on tape. “I find it highly offensive you’d accuse me of a crime!” His fellow election commissioner, Munroe, a Republican, takes similar offense.

All of that, simply because a voter wished to oversee the results of an election to confirm that computer-reported results were accurate — in a town with a history of election problems and where some of the same election officials reportedly spent some $30,000 of tax-payer money in a failed effort to keep the initiative off the ballot in the first place (before being overruled by the state Supreme Court.)

Instead of satisfaction and confidence in government, Ohioans are left with suspicion and doubt. Suspicion and doubt fueled by contradictory evidence, and the appearance of cover-up.

On the plus side, Brad points to a county in New York that demonstrates and alternative that provides confidence:

[Virginia]Martin, the Democratic co-chair of the Columbia County, NY Board of Elections — one of the few counties in the nation to publicly hand-count every paper ballot before certifying any election (my recent interview with Martin and her Republican co-chair on that specific topic is here) — explains on today’s show: “We election officials often find ourselves in the crosshairs. There’s always somebody in the public who’s not happy about something that’s transpired at the Board of Elections. There’s a winner and there’s a loser, so we often are in a position of having to defend ourselves. I can understand why they would be very sensitive.”

But, she adds, that type of concern simply doesn’t come up in her county, given that the public is invited to oversee the hand-count of paper ballots for every election. As an election official, she insists on hand-counts, she says, because: “I wasn’t comfortable with trusting what the computer said, because I know computers can make mistakes. I know that computers can be programmed incorrectly — inadvertently. I also know they can be manipulated, they can be tampered with. I personally can’t know how a computer counts anything, because I don’t get to see that. So how am I going to know that the result is correct?”

We do not insist on counting all paper ballots by hand after every election, yet it does automatically contribute to confidence. We recommend sufficient post-election audits, close-vote recounts, and economical means for the public to access all paper ballots or cause selective publicly verifiable manual recounts.

For further details and links to videos and related posts, see the Bradblog post. <read>

How Do We Know?

It used to be “Do you know where your children are tonight?” Now we must ask “Do you know which laws and regulations were violated yesterday?”

Laws and regulations are insufficient to protect us from individual, organized, and corporate skulduggery. The reality is thoroughly articulated by Truth-Out: Capitalism and Its Regulation Delusion: Lessons From the Volkswagen Debacle

It used to be “Do you know where your children are tonight?” Now we must ask “Do you know which laws and regulations were violated yesterday?”

VW’s massive evasion was hardly the only socially destructive mockery of regulation. Ford and other auto companies had earlier done the same as Volkswagen, gotten caught and paid fines. Other auto companies have not yet been caught, but similar evidence has surfaced about diesel vehicles produced by Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi. Exposures and punishments, if and when they occur, clearly fall far short of dissuading major capitalists from evading regulations. Thus, we now know that General Motors and Toyota did not follow regulations recently requiring notification of government agencies after crashes, injuries and deaths associated with ignitions and airbags, respectively.

As products using computer devices increase, they spread opportunities for similar evasions of regulations. New mechanisms have enabled electrical appliance makers to falsify regulated energy-use tests. Capitalist competition and profit were motivators in these and many other regulation evasions too. The problem is endemic, for example, in the food and drink industry. Since 2008’s global capitalist crash, the world has learned of parallel failures of financial regulation with horrific social consequences. Nor is the failed relationship of capitalism and regulation only a US problem; it is global.

Paraphrasing, we could say “As voting and voting support using computer devices increase, they spread opportunities for similar evasions of regulations, changing results, and voter suppression. New mechanisms could enable elections officials, vendors, and hackers to falsify pre-election testing, audits, and recounts. Capitalist competition and profit are included in the motivators for these and many other regulation evasions too.”

We said “could” because we do not know and ask “How Do We Know? How Could We Know?” that election fraud has not happened in in a particular election and will not happen? Actually we know that it has happened, but we have no estimate of how widespread and successful election fraud has been. The question is “How do we prevent and detect election manipulation?”

We recommend reading the entire article. Some of it applies more to corporations and their main business activities, yet the delusion of regulation/laws generalizes to elections:

Regulation thus represents an enduring delusion (much like taxes on profits that show parallel histories of corporate opposition and evasion). Whether it be “self-regulation,” performed by capitalist enterprises or industry organizations, or regulation by government, both amount to applying bandages when the problem is a grave internal illness. Regulations do not successfully correct or repair

As we blog forward, we will be asking those questions of our election system “How Do We Know?, “How Can We know.