Category: Post-Election Audits

CT Mirror Viewpoints <read>

About half the states, including Connecticut, have both paper ballots and post-election audits. Because our audits were transparent and publicly verifiable, Connecticut Citizen Election Audit observers have been able to reveal multiple flaws in the process and in the official reporting of audit results. Earlier this year, however, the General Assembly unanimously cut Connecticut’s the audits from 10 percent of districts to 5 percent.

Now there is more bad news: our already inadequate audits have been partially replaced by electronic “audits” which are not transparent and not publicly verifiable. Instead, we now have “black box voting” augmented by “black box auditing.”  This should satisfy only those with blind trust in computers and blind trust in insiders with access to the “audit” computers.

Last week, without public notice, seven Connecticut municipalities conducted electronic “audits” under the guidance of the UConn Center for Voting Technology and the Secretary of the State’s Office, using the Audit Station developed by the Voter Center.

There is a science of election audits. Machine-assisted audits can offer efficiency and ease of use, but any audit process needs to be transparent and provide for independent public verification of the results. Machine-assisted manual audits in California and Colorado demonstrate how this can be achieved.  Public verification begins with publicly rescanning the ballots and providing the public with a computer readable list of how each ballot was counted. Then selecting a small random sample of the ballots and comparing the actual voter verified ballots to the record of how the machine counted them.

It is puzzling that the UConn Voter Center, the General Assembly, and the Secretary of the State have consistently chosen to ignore the peer-reviewed science which would provide an actual audit, appropriately trusted, even faster, and even less work for local officials.

Compare existing election audits to professional audits.  Professional audits include examining a sample of original documents such as receipts from vendors or signed checks.  Such audits are performed by individuals independent of those accountable for doing the original job. Public verifiability is critical to post-election audits, because they are performed by those responsible for conducting the election itself, protecting the original ballots, evaluating and recommending the election equipment.

The new Connecticut system ? including equipment and procedures ? involves rescanning, with officials reviewing scanned images of every ballot and how it was interpreted by the system. But, scanned images are not photographs: they are as vulnerable as other computer data, subject to machine errors, tampering, and human error.  Connecticut’s electronic “audits” do not verify that the ballot images correspond to the ballots. Ballots are the only evidence verified by voters.

Last week local officials reviewed each of the images for approximately one to three seconds. At that speed, it was difficult to verify that even one race of five displayed was accurately interpreted by the system. It would be more efficient, accurate, and trustworthy, to sample the paper ballots as in Colorado and California and compare them to the system interpretations.

The new system is being presented as much more economical for municipalities with less work and stress for local officials.  When and if it is working properly, without errors and unhacked, it could be much more accurate than the disorganized, inconsistent hand counting that is frequently performed in Connecticut.

A solution is at hand. The UConn Audit Station is capable of providing the kind of machine-assisted manual audits that would meet the requirements of sound science for election audits. It could provide transparent, publicly verifiable audits that are independent of the software, hardware, and the officials who are responsible for the audit and the election.

Amid national concerns for election integrity and calls for stronger audits nationwide, Connecticut is positioned to be a leader in election auditing. Our manual audits were a good start, with some flaws.

The Secretary of the State and the UConn Voter Center should work with national experts to develop procedures that take full advantage of the Audit Station, to deliver efficient and trustworthy election audits. Until then our manual audits should continue. Voters and the General Assembly should insist upon transparent and publicly verifiable elections.

Luther Weeks is Executive Director of the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit.

In the summer of 2008 I was on a panel in Fairfield, CT. I opened with remarks on “What Do You Want”. I said voters want five things and what Connecticut could do about them in the short run (three steps over two years).  The two years  passed and little changed, so in 2010 I repeated the post as What Do YOU [still] Want?  Here we are in late 2016 and little has changed for the better:

• We have a different Secretary of the State, Denise Merrill.
• In the last eight years, the science of auditing has progressed such that we could have much better audits at lower cost.
• Only about half the states have post-election audits of any type.  Experts debate if even one or two have effective, sufficient audits.
• Connecticut’s post-election audits remain insufficient, unreliable and ineffective.
• Earlier this year, the General Assembly has cut those insufficient audits in half.  The only state we know that has actually cut back on post-election audits.

What I said in 2008 remains true today

My topic for the next few minutes is simple. It is: “What Do You Want”.

Let us begin with a quote from Colorado’s Secretary of State, Mike Coffman whose words inspired this talk and a quote from our own Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz.

Secretary Bysiewicz sent a letter in March to voters like you, who signed our petition last year. She said, in part: “We still have a lot of work to do and we need concerned citizens like you to stay involved…I share your belief that we should make our audit law the strongest in the nation and that its size and scope is adequate to achieve its goals…”

In June, Colorado’s Mike Coffman gave his view, of activists like CTVotersCount, “I think they have a fundamental belief that anything electronic, as it relates to voting, is evil and undermines our political system,”…”They believe in a world of conspiracy theories and are highly motivated. No matter what I do, so long as it leaves some form of electronic voting intact, it will be wrong by their standards.”

I agree with both of them. With Secretary Bysiewicz that we still “have a lot of work to do”; With Secretary Coffman, that voting advocates are “highly motivated”.

However, I do not believe that “anything electronic” is “evil” nor do I have a goal of eliminating “anything electronic” from voting.

So, What Should You Want?

Most fundamentally, five things:

• That the ballot is secret, votes cannot be bought, coerced, added, lost, or modified
• That your vote is counted, counted accurately, and counted exactly once
• That everyone’s vote is counted accurately and reflected in the election results
• That everyone has confidence that everyone’s vote is counted accurately
• That, failing any of the above, appropriate corrective action will be taken

You deserve no more and no less. Democracy requires no less. Do you want anything less? Do you believe democracy can exist and flourish with less?

I’m open to any solution that will ensure Democracy. Whatever we can implement that ensures Democracy and is most efficient for officials and most convenient for the voters, I will support it.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

We do not have a blank slate. We have just spent millions of dollars on purchasing the most cost effective, most voter verifiable, and auditable type of electronic voting system available, that meet Federally mandated requirements.

I could talk of the long term, realistically six to ten years off. But Democracy cannot wait. There are real risks now. There are actions we can take over the next two years to ensure Democracy in Connecticut – to lead the way for the Nation. Yes, I said two years, if we start now, taking decisive action, with the equipment we have.

The Short List

Let me finish with the short list of what we need to do now, over the next two years. The three items I think of when Secretary Bysiewicz says “We still have a lot of work to do”:

First, an element of prevention. Each of our elections is programmed in Massachusetts by contractors; Contractors over which we have little, if any, oversight. UConn has developed an outstanding program to independently test the memory cards to detect many potential errors or fraud. 100% of our memory cards need to be tested independently in Connecticut with that program; before the cards are shipped to election officials; before the cards are used in any election.

Second, an element of detection and confidence: We need strong post-election audits to detect errors and fraud. Our current audits are insufficient, unreliable and ineffective. Our audits should be based on the current science of election auditing and recognized post-election audit principles.

Third, a solid chain-of-custody to make credible elections and audits possible. We need to protect and account for ballots before, during, and after the election. Ballots, memory cards, and optical scanners must be protected from illegal modification or covert access whenever they could be compromised.

Would you trust chain-of-custody standards less than those we require for evidence in criminal cases?

In Summary

You are committed to the proposition that Democracy survive and flourish. We have serious work to do. It can happen in Connecticut. Voting Integrity, like the Constitution, can start here in the Constitution State and spread to the Nation.

CTVotersCount is dedicated to pursuing  “What You Want”.  As a great teacher said “Anything worth doing is worth failing at, and failing at, and failing at…until you succeed”