Category: CT Skulduggery and Errors

Election Fraud In Bridgeport?

Update 6 /17/2009: Head of CA GOP Voter Registration Firm Pleads Guilty to Voter Registration Fraud
Update: 10/07/2008: Election Enforcement Commission investigation opened
Update: Secretary Bysiewicz Responds

(Without editorial comment, see Editor’s Note)

Update 6 /17/2009: Head of CA GOP Voter Registration Firm Pleads Guilty to Voter Registration Fraud <read>

Update: 10/07/2008: Election Enforcement Commission investigation opened <read>

Update: Secretary Bysiewicz Responds: <read>

“Voter fraud is an allegation that my office takes very seriously. The only state agency that can investigate potential voter fraud, however, is the State Elections Enforcement Commission. In fact, the Office of the Secretary of the State has consistently instructed local Registrars of Voters that if they see any voter registration cards that raise red flags or do not look correct, they should make photocopies for their own records and send the problematic cards to the State Elections Enforcement Commission for investigation. If anyone feels there is enough evidence to warrant an investigation, I would urge them to file a Complaint with the State Elections Enforcement Commission. ACORN has informed our office that there were indeed problems with voter registration cards being filled out improperly or incorrectly in Bridgeport and in fact those cards were not counted. This case proves the system works. Locally elected Registrars of Voters are trained statewide to detect discrepancies or inconsistencies in information provided on voter registration cards.?

As CTVotersCount.org readers know there are a lot of questionable practices and issues with the conduct of elections and post-election audits in Bridgeport which are the responsibility of the city’s Registrars and their election officials. <read> <read>.

Now issues of external fraud are being to be raised by one of the Bridgeport Registrars and the Republican Party Chair is calling for an investigation. We suggest watching the video. and reading the article

HARTFORD In the wake of a recent interview posted on the website ElectionJournal.org (www.electionjournal.org) with Bridgeport Republican Registrar of Voters Joe Borges, Chairman Chris Healy is calling for Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz to launch a full investigation into the activities of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN). “There should be no room for playing games with elections in Connecticut,” said Healy, the Chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party. “The allegations of voter registration fraud by ACORN should be fully investigated, and if any crimes are uncovered, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.?

According to the interview, which is now posted on the CTGOP blog The Everyday Republican, Bridgeport Republican Registrar of Voters Joseph Borges indicated that “at least 20%” of the voter registration cards ACORN had submitted were duplicative or falsified. Mr. Borges even told of one instance where an ACORN employee had solicited voter registration cards under the guise of “job employment applications”.

Broken System: Bridgeport Primary Does Not Add Up

Summary: This article and the Bridgeport Primary expose the problems with a “system” that ignores and excuses discrepancies that are discovered. As we have often pointed out in post-election audit reports, ignoring and excusing away discrepancies means that if there is ever an error or a fraud it will not be recognized. In this case we will never know who actually won the Bridgeport Primary. We may have some penalties assessed by Elections Enforcement. All we know for sure is that this was not a reliable election, that voting integrity in Connecticut is far from assured and does not exist in Bridgeport.

ConnPost article by Bill Cummings: Voting Numbers Do Not Add Up <read>

In the midst of a heated court battle over last fall’s Democratic mayoral primary, state Rep. Christopher Caruso’s legal team asserted there were more votes than voters.

City officials and their lawyers scoffed at Caruso’s contention, calling it untrue and irresponsible.

However, a Connecticut Post examination of election records from the Sept. 11, 2007, primary shows there were more votes than voters — 105 more.

Continue reading “Broken System: Bridgeport Primary Does Not Add Up”

Voting Machine Does Not Compute – Story Does Not Compute

The Danbury NewsTimes has the story of problems with a referendum in New Milford <read>. We are always pleased to see election integrity coverage, and we agree with the sentiments of this article, however there is something more to investigate. Apparently New Milford is not following procedures or there is more to the story.

Problems with New Milford’s budget referendum last week are a cause for concern on a much bigger voting process — the presidential election in November.

The new optical scanning machine at the town’s Lanesville district malfunctioned, which necessitated the hand counting of all 426 votes there.

Continue reading “Voting Machine Does Not Compute – Story Does Not Compute”

Reports of Dead Voters Greatly Exaggerated

Echoing Mark Twain, the dead voter issue has been greatly exaggerated – by everyone involved. Of course dead voters sounds more interesting and is easier for everyone to understand, report on, and react to than voting integrity which requires understanding computers, chain of custody, statistics, and auditing. Here is one of the many reports covering the latest status from the Secretary of the State <read>

On vacation these days so just catching up with the news every couple of days, so posts will be a bit delayed and reduced through the end of May.

ROVAC President Addresses Dead Voters – Media Remains Dead To Larger Issues

George Cody, President Registrars Of Voters Association Connecticut, responded to the Dead Voters Issue with a letter to the Hartford Courant <read>

Connecticut and the registrars are stuck between a rock and a hard place — aggressively clean up the database and risk dropping voters incorrectly — or demand clear evidence to drop a person from the rolls to avoid disenfranchisement.

Names are removed from the active rolls upon positive evidence of a change in status or residency. Proof positive is required to make changes in status. Registrars use several methods to seek out information. When notified of a voters death, they make every effort to verify the information through obituaries, death certificate records in the town clerk’s office or through local probate records. There is often a time gap in this information and, as the article points out, registrars do not have regular access to state and federal records. The time required to match and verify the information might lead to a delay in a voter’s final removal from the rolls, but the status of these voters is changed to inactive during the verification process.

When voters move out of state or town, their former town of residence is not necessarily notified, resulting in only anecdotal information…

The subsequent follow-up done by the students appears to have found clerical problems, rather than any evidence of potential fraud. Connecticut citizens can also rest assured that all voters are asked to present identification at all elections or to sign a statement about eligibility prior to voting. The Courant’s reporter has been kind enough to supply a list of the questionable names. This list will be disseminated to the towns for follow-up. We only wish we had this list earlier to make corrections and provide input to the study other than post-study comments.

Clerical problems do occur. When voters move out of town without notifying their former town, the chain of information is broken. They will often remain listed as active voters until we receive corrective information. If that move is out of state, notification is at best infrequent. Mistakes based on duplicate or similar names or incorrect post-election entry of who voted is another source of confusion.

We look forward to working with the list provided to further clean our lists. The centralized voter database has contributed to addressing in-state moves, but the real solution is with the voters and their families. If there is a change in any voter’s address or status, notify your registrar so corrective action can be taken.

We would like better data, but we are sympathetic to the registrars’ challenges on this issue. We are also interested in the Media’s and the Secretary of the State’s aggressive response to this issue in contrast to the much more significant issue of post-election audit integrity.

With the dead voter issue we are talking about 300 possible errors between 1994 and 2007. In just the last post-election audit we are talking about chain of custody lapses in several towns and 304 ballots missing in just one municipality in just one election. Perhaps it has to do with the media response to the two issues. While there has been a flurry of articles in the Connecticut press on the dead voters report, to our knowledge the mainstream media has yet to publish a single word on the results of the post-election audits of the November Election and the February Primary. Also missing is media concern with significant quality control issues in programming and testing elections also uncovered by researchers at the the University of Connecticut.

Voter Rolls: No Grave Concern

Update: Secretary of the State’s <press release>

A UConn study reported in the Hartford Courant demonstrates that the ultimate disability is not a barrier to voting in Connecticut: Dead Voters? Probe Finds Errors In Records, <read>. The deceased continue on the voter rolls and occasionally vote.

a list of more than 300 people across Connecticut who appear to have voted from the grave in elections dating to 1994, a two-month investigation of voting records by journalism students at the University of Connecticut has found.

The mysterious voters were identified by matching a statewide database of 2 million registered voters and their voting histories with two separate computer lists of dead people maintained by the state Department of Public Health and the federal Social Security Administration.

Following up on the matches, UConn students examined the records of nearly 100 of the suspect voters at 10 town and city halls among those with the most cases. Guilford led the state with 39, followed by West Hartford (17), Enfield (15), Stonington (13) and Norwalk (11).

Some people appeared to have voted frequently after death, the research found. In Hebron, for example, records show one man voted 17 times after he died in 1992.

The investigation also identified more than 8,500 people listed as dead who are still registered to vote in Connecticut, most long after their deaths. In Hamden, one woman remained a registered voter although she died in 1979…

All but nine of Connecticut’s 169 municipalities listed dead people on active voter rolls. At least 100 cases were identified in each of 28 cities and towns. In New Haven alone, 370 dead people were still registered; in Enfield there were 321; in West Haven, 310; in Hartford, 298; and in Bridgeport, 293.

While there are serious problems with Connecticut’s online voter registration system, concerns with deceased voters center around the antiquated clerical systems and local election administration:

Continue reading “Voter Rolls: No Grave Concern”

Will The Voter Registration System Be Fixed In Time?

Stamford Advocate: State fixing voter system after primary glitches, <read>

Will the pressure on the Secretary of the State’s Office and the Department of Information Technology be sufficient such that the system will actually be fixed to function when it is most needed?

For background, see our our earlier coverage of the Norwich Public Hearings. Let us hope that the “fix” by April 24th includes some realistic stress testing of the system.

From the Advocate:

Continue reading “Will The Voter Registration System Be Fixed In Time?”

Voter Registration System – Lots Of Finger Pointing

Stamford Advocate article has Registrars, Secretary of the State, and the Department of Information Technology statements about the unreliable voter registration system <read>

A few years ago, registrars of voters in Stamford and Norwalk faced off with the state over their reluctance to join the new centralized voter registration system.

The registrars unsuccessfully argued the technology, which is meant to prevent registration and voting duplication, was unreliable. Norwalk’s two registrars were fined by the state for noncompliance.But it turns out they were right.

Citing “tremendous difficulties” in the week before Connecticut’s Feb. 5 presidential primary, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz has asked the governor and the state Department of Information Technology to prioritize an upgrade of the voter system before November…

Bysiewicz’s letter to Gov. M. Jodi Rell, which said efforts to improve the system this spring have “stalled,” prompted a scathing response from Diane Wallace, the state’s chief information officer.

Wallace said her office will continue to work with Bysiewicz to resolve the issues. But she also accused Bysiewicz of finger-pointing.

“Your letter minimizes your office’s involvement and responsibility, casts blame where it is not deserved, and seriously undermines the mutual trust that we have worked as an IT service provider to develop,” Wallace wrote Bysiewicz. “As you know, the application was developed by private consultants, hired by the secretary of the state’s office. . . . The system has a well-known history of sub-par performance and requires more than the seasonal and sporadic attention afforded to it by your office.”

Bysciewicz replied that she is not trying to blame the information technology department but wants assurance her office’s needs are prioritized.

Press Conference: Bysiewicz “Tried To Rest Lingering Skepticism”

Christine Stuart has an accurate report of yesterday’s Press Conference and the post-election audit discussion: <read>

Asked why the machines tend to over count by one vote, Dr. Alex Shvartsman, director of the voter research center, said he didn’t know. “That’s a very good question,” he said, adding that the center would continue to look into the results.

But Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz was quick to step in an answer the same question for Dr. Shvartsman as she tried to put to rest any lingering skepticism about the results. She said that the machine overcounts may have happened in races with multiple candidates when voters unintentionally marked an additional bubbles on the sheet.

For example, a voter may have wanted to vote for three of five candidates, but accidentally made a mark in a fourth bubble, Bysiewicz said. In such a case, the machine counts the vote, but a poll worker conducting a hand recount may not count the additional vote because to them it appeared to be an inadvertent mark or smudge, she said.

Another issue was that 175 audit reports submitted to the University of Connecticut were “incomplete, unuseable, or obviously incorrect.” About 70 percent of the 958 reports submitted by 70 polling places were complete. The center decided to use about 783 of the reports to complete their audit.

The audit found that 66.4 percent show a discrepancy of 0 to 1 vote between the machine counts and hand counts; 89.4 percent show a discrepancy of 5 votes or fewer; and 31 records, or 4 percent, show a discrepancy of 10 or more votes.

Bysiewicz said overcounts happened in races where candidates were cross-endorsed by two parties.

Lingering “Skepticism”:

  • The machines do not “tend to overcount by one vote”. They tend to count very accurately in most cases. That “one” is an average that can be misleading. I was sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for a reporter to ask what the top counting errors were. The Coalition report and Dr. Shvartsman’s had about the same numbers, his overcounts were: 72, 54, 28, 26, 26, 22, 16, 14, 14 In our report we did not include the 72 because it was an obvious counting error.
  • Checking after the press conference, the analysis by the Secretary of the State’s office is not yet complete – they have not checked all 31 races to see how many were candidates listed on more than one line – the overcount of 72 votes was due to misclassifing votes of a candidate listed on two lines and was offset by an undercount of 74 votes on another line. (that is why we did not list it as a discrepancy in the Coalition report)
  • Finally, even if all of the 31 highest overcounts were candidates listed on more than one line, it is not in itself an indication that they were all due to human counting errors – some could be due to election programming errors – without further research the cause would all be speculation.

Post-Election Memory Card Tests, 8% “Junk Data”

Last week Dr. Shvartsman of the UConn VoTeR Center released a report on Pre-Election testing of memory cards, that report showed 3.5% of the memory cards had “Junk Data” (the cards could not be read) and that many election officials had difficulty following pre-election testing procedures.

This week Dr. Shvartsman released another Post-Election study of 100 cards collected for evaluation after the election. These cards were not randomly selected. The results were similar to pre-election testing with more “Junk Data” cards at 8%. <read>

Once again we appreciate the work of the Secretary of the State’s Office and Dr. Shvartsman’s team in implementing this program. We have much sympathy for election officials who had difficulty complying with the program this time as procedures were added close to the election. We have no sympathy for LHS Associates. Two things seem clear:

  • We should expect that compliance with procedures by election officials will improve dramatically over each of the elections in 2008, making this program a unique and valuable addition to election security
  • We should be very very disappointed with the performance of LHS in quality control — with years of experience programming elections in other New England states — they should have met commitments to Connecticut to provide tested cards to Connecticut municipalities. There is no reason to give them a pass for the November 2007 election.

The report was released at an 11:00am press conference at the Secretary of the State’s office. Also available at the conference was a yet to be posted analysis of the post-election audits by the VoTeR Center. The data presented was generally consistent with the data compiled and reported by the Coalition. We will cover that report when it is released in its final form.