Category: National

Once again, there is little “Voter Fraud”. But “Voting Fraud” that is another matter.

As we have said before, for all intents and purposes voter fraud is very rare, while voting fraud does regularly occur. Common sense tells us that very few voters would risk intentionally voting illegally for the purpose of casting a single fraudulent vote, given the effort, huge risk, miniscule value. Common sense also tells us that there is likely several times the instances of voter fraud and voting fraud than are successfully uncovered and successfully prosecuted. Yet, voter fraud would still be rare and generally ineffective. Not so with voting fraud, especially that committed by insiders.

Def: Voter Fraud – an intentional vote by an individual voter in an election or district where they are not eligible to vote, to vote for someone else, or to vote more than once.

Def: Voting Fraud – an intentional action by one or more individuals to add, subtract, change votes, change voting results, or to intimidate others, create votes for other individuals, who may or may not be eligible to vote, etc.

As we have said before, for all intents and purposes voter fraud is very rare, while voting fraud does regularly occur. Common sense tells us that very few voters would risk intentionally voting illegally for the purpose of casting a single fraudulent vote, given the effort, huge risk, miniscule value. Common sense also tells us that there is likely several times the instances of voter fraud and voting fraud than are successfully uncovered and successfully prosecuted. Yet, voter fraud would still be rare and generally ineffective. Not so with voting fraud, especially that committed by insiders.

Article in the latest Mother Jones: The Dog That Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns – The GOP’s 10-year campaign to gin up voter fraud hysteria—and bring back Jim Crow at the ballot box <read>

As the article points out voter fraud is rare, yet laws touted as preventing voter fraud are actually a form of voter suppression and intimidation.

first there needs to be some actual fraud to crack down on. And that turns out to be remarkably elusive.

That’s not to say that there’s none at all. In a country of 300 million you’ll find a bit of almost anything. But multiple studies taking different approaches have all come to the same conclusion: The rate of voter fraud in American elections is close to zero.

In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite tracked down every single case brought by the Justice Department between 1996 and 2005 and found that the number of defendants had increased by roughly 1,000 percent under Ashcroft. But that only represents an increase from about six defendants per year to 60, and only a fraction of those were ever convicted of anything. A New York Times investigation in 2007 concluded that only 86 people had been convicted of voter fraud during the previous five years. Many of those appear to have simply made mistakes on registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, and more than 30 of the rest were penny-ante vote-buying schemes in local races for judge or sheriff. The investigation found virtually no evidence of any organized efforts to skew elections at the federal level.

Another set of studies has examined the claims of activist groups like Thor Hearne’s American Center for Voting Rights, which released a report in 2005 citing more than 100 cases involving nearly 300,000 allegedly fraudulent votes during the 2004 election cycle. The charges involved sensational-sounding allegations of double-voting, fraudulent addresses, and voting by felons and noncitizens. But in virtually every case they dissolved upon investigation. Some of them were just flatly false, and others were the result of clerical errors. Minnite painstakingly investigated each of the center’s charges individually and found only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has focused on voter fraud issues for years. In a 2007 report they concluded that “by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.” In the Missouri election of 2000 that got Sen. Bond so worked up, the Center found a grand total of four cases of people voting twice, out of more than 2 million ballots cast. In the end, the verified fraud rate was 0.0003 percent.

One key detail: The best-publicized fraud cases involve either absentee ballots or voter registration fraud (for example, paid signature gatherers filling in “Mary Poppins” on the forms, a form of cheating that’s routinely caught by registrars already). But photo ID laws can’t stop that: They only affect people actually trying to impersonate someone else at the polling place. And there’s virtually no record, either now or in the past, of this happening on a large scale.

What’s more, a moment’s thought suggests that this is vanishingly unlikely to be a severe problem, since there are few individuals willing to risk a felony charge merely to cast one extra vote and few organizations willing or able to organize large-scale in-person fraud and keep it a secret. When Indiana’s photo ID law, designed to prevent precisely this kind of fraud, went to the Supreme Court, the state couldn’t document [26] a single case of it happening. As the majority opinion in Crawford admits, “The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.”

For some examples of real and alleged voting fraud in Connecticut see <CTVotersCount Index: Error and Skulduggery in Connecticut>

Another 4th of July Suggestion

When one mixes religion and politics one gets politics.

Last year we suggested [re-]reading the Declaration of Independence to celebrated the 4th of July.

This year we have a book to suggest: Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.

I finished the book a few days ago. I could not put it down. Roger Williams was in the right place at the right time throughout his life in England and New England. At great risk he took advantage of the situations to our benefit. He risked his life to preserve his own independent ideas and to create a colony based on freedom of ideas, which led to the freedom we are guaranteed in the First Amendment. From the book description:

For four hundred years, Americans have wrestled with and fought over two concepts that define the nature of the nation: the proper relation between church and state and between a free individual and the state. These debates began with the extraordinary thought and struggles of Roger Williams, who had an unparalleled understanding of the conflict between a government that justified itself by “reason of state”-i.e. national security-and its perceived “will of God” and the “ancient rights and liberties” of individuals.

This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams’s interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop’s vision of his “City upon a Hill.”

According to the Author:

[Roger Williams] was saying that when one mixes religion and politics one gets politics.

Online tool to assist in absentee vote applications, available NOW!

We created this tool so that anyone who wishes to vote can be assisted – whether it be a traveling executive, a working parent, a home-bound person, or a college student away from home,

The U.S. Vote Foundation has created a tool to assist you in completing an application for an absentee ballot <Use the tool>

The toll is also described in this article: U.S. Vote Foundation web tool makes absentee voting easier <read>

[The tool]allows U.S. voters anywhere in the world to download and complete a state-specific absentee ballot request. “We created this tool so that anyone who wishes to vote can be assisted – whether it be a traveling executive, a working parent, a home-bound person, or a college student away from home,” said US Vote President and CEO Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat. “The point of our services is access. We want to make sure all Americans are equipped with the tools they need to vote, from the polling place to the kitchen table.”

The web tool allows voters to either create an account for future use, or fill out the required information as a one-time user. The online form asks basic voter information and then generates a state-specific form populated with the necessary information that the voter then prints, signs and mails to the address provided. Dzieduszycka-Suinat said that part of her inspiration for working on a tool like this is the lack of publicly available innovative voter services in the U.S. “All the organizations out there now need new and better tools,” she said.

Who lost in the Massachusetts Special Election?

An article in Metro West brings home the points discussed here in two recent posts.

An article in Metro West brings home the points discussed here in two recent posts:

First, Prof. Ron Rivest explained how audits can protect our votes, ironically not used in his home state of Massachussets <see Ron Rivest explains why elections should be audited, especially in MA.>

Second, the lack of audits in Wisconsin and one of the highest purposes of audits: Convince the losers and their supporters that they lost fairly. <see What We Worry Wisconsin! – Look ma no audits!>

We could have titled that last one Look MA no audits! Here is the result of no audits in Massachusetts, brought home this week in Metro West: Was the Brown-Coakley Senate election stolen? <read>

  • unanswered suspicions after an election
  • paper ballots, yet never checked
  • no certainty two years after an election
  • less trust in democracy

But 3 percent of the ballots were counted by hand, in 71 of the state’s smallest communities. If someone was meddling with the computer tally, Simon hypothesized in an August 2010 report, it might be evident by comparing those results with the percentages for the computer-counted ballots.

Simon established a baseline by looking at the previous two Senate races, where Kennedy and Sen. John Kerry defeated little-known opponents by wide margins. In 2008, the margin by which Kerry won in the optical scan ballots was almost identical to his margin on the hand-counted ballots – a disparity of just 1 percent. For the 2006 results, the numbers were similar, with Kennedy taking 69.5 percent of the vote on the opscan ballots and 68.9 percent in the hand-count communities.

Simon checked a third lopsided race, the attorney general contest Coakley won in 2006 and, again, the hand-counted electorate matched up closely to the optically scanned electorate. The disparity in results in that race was just .8 percent…

But 2010 was a different story. In hand-count communities, Coakley won, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent. On the optically scanned ballots, Brown won, 52.6 percent to 47.4 percent for Coakley. That adds up to a disparity of 8 percent.

That disparity “stands as an unexplained anomaly of dramatic numerical proportions,” Simonwrites. It raises questions he can’t answer, but he concedes it proves nothing. It certainly doesn’t prove anyone falsified the tallies made by computer.

But it is curious enough to make you wish someone was double-checking the results.

Who lost? Everyone interested in democracy, because it requires accurate elections that voters and losers can trust.

UConn paper warns of limitations of cryptography

Use of good tools must go hand-in-hand with good use of tools

We have just become aware of an excellent paper from the University of Connecticut (UConn):  Integrity of Electronic Voting Systems: Fallacious Use of Cryptogrphy <read>

The report describes the limits of cryptography to protect the integrity of election equipment, our votes, and ultimately our democracy. They also provide a memorable phrase widely applicable beyond cryptography and elections:

Use of good tools must go hand-in-hand with good use of tools. In particular, severe security deficiencies have been reported in electronic voting terminals despite the use of cryptography. In this way, superficial uses of cryptography can lead to a false sense of security. Worse, cryptography can prevent meaningful independent technological audits of voting equipment when encryption obfuscates the auditable data. A vendor may provide its own test and audit tools, but relying on the self-test and self-audit features is problematic as one should never trust self-auditing software (cf. relying on a corporate entity to perform self-audit).

They the describe the challenges and limitations of using cryptography in general, the general vulnerabilities in the Diebold-Premier-Dominion AccuVote-TSx, and demonstrating two specific attacks:

we designed and tested two attacks against the AV-TSx terminal. In the first, the attacker wishes to swap votes received by two candidates. The attacker can be successful provided that the sizes of the two files that define the candidate representation in the digital slate are identical. We found that is not a rare occurrence and in fact our test election contained such pairs of candidates. The swapping was applied to the name definitions of the two candidates and included the integrity check. In the second attack, the attacker simply wishes to make one of the candidates disappear from the slate. This can be achieved though a modification of the file that defines the layout of the candidate’s name.

All our findings are based on straightforward experimentation with the voting terminal; we had no access to internal or proprietary information about the terminal or access to source code.

They point that systems are vulnerable because of their complexity:

Two observations are critical in this respect: (i) The safety and correctness of a large system is only as good as its weakest link. Additionally, a single failure — whether benign or malicious — can ripple through and affect the entire system. (ii) Procedural counter-measures can be used to mitigate the weaknesses of the system, however, in a large system relying on many distributed procedural elements, the probability of a procedure failure can be extremely high, even if each individual procedure fails with small probability.

They also provide examples of other measures which provide vulnerability

Cryptographic techniques can mitigate the risks of attacks against removable media cards. The level of protection depends upon the strength of the cryptographic techniques, upon the safekeeping of the digital keys used to protect the cards, but also upon the safe-keeping of the voting terminal themselves. Indeed, the firmware of the voting terminal necessarily holds a copy of the digital keys used to protect the removable media. A successful attack against the terminal compromises those keys that an attacker can use to produce forged, compromised removable media cards. This situation is analogous to one where a person always hides a physical key under the doormat – knowing where the key is hidden defeats the purpose of having a lock. The trust in the whole system depends on the vendor diligence in…

Once a card is programmed on EMS, it is shipped to the election officials to be inserted into the voting terminal where it stays for the duration of the election before being shipped back for aggregating the results (where central tabulation is used). The integrity of the card during the entire process is critical to the integrity of the election.

If the card can be tampered with while in transit to the precinct election officials, the entire system can be compromised. The election description can be made inconsistent with the paper ballot leading to an incorrect interpretation of the votes and therefore incorrect tallying.

Implications for Connecticut

Although we use the AccuVote-OS and this report is on the AccuVote-TSx many similar risks apply, even if the AccuVote-OS makes less use of cryptography. As the UConn report points out:

in 2005 H. Hursti released his findings on the Diebold OpticalScan system (the so-called “Hursti Hack”). This was an early design that used only a superficial password protection to secure the system. Newer designs normally incorporate some cryptographic tools; however, the application of the tools remains haphazard.

That is the same system in use today, everywhere in Connecticut.

 

“Chicken Littles” win in Colorado: Ironically, a new official Privileged Class

Those of us in the non-privileged majority will not have access to voted ballots until after elections are certified — too late, citizen activists persuasively argue, for effective public oversight. Many of those activists, it should be noted, have followed election issues closely for years and know a thing or two about them, too.

A new official eyes-only ballot secrecy law just passed and was signed by the Governor of Colorado. Denver Post Editorial <read>

Too bad. Colorado now has an election system with a privileged class of people — not only candidates but also political parties and representatives of issue committees that gave money to ballot measures — who may inspect voted ballots when everyone else, including the media, is excluded.

Those of us in the non-privileged majority will not have access to voted ballots until after elections are certified — too late, citizen activists persuasively argue, for effective public oversight. Many of those activists, it should be noted, have followed election issues closely for years and know a thing or two about them, too.

Ironically, the legislation was supposedly about protecting citizen access to election records, even though the courts had done a pretty good job in that regard during the run-up to the legislative session. It seems clear in retrospect that the bill was designed in part to help clerks keep the pesky public at bay and to insulate current procedures that the clerks themselves admit leave some ballots traceable…

Rather than try to resolve underlying problems that lead to potentially traceable ballots, the new law simply grants clerks broad discretion to hold back problematic ballots from open-records requests.

What We Worry Wisconsin! – Look ma no audits!

Wisconsin reminds us of the highest purpose of post-election audits. And that having paper ballots alone is insufficient.

Wisconsin reminds us of the highest purpose of post-election audits: Convince the losers and their supporters that they lost fairly.

And that having paper ballots alone is insufficient. See Myth #9 – If there is ever a concern we can always count the paper.

Video: Brad Freidman discusses the lack of checking and the questions that remain in Wisconsin, along with the real risks, even with scanners like ours! <post with video>

Ron Rivest explains why elections should be audited, especially in MA.

Prof Ron Rivest recently summarized in the Boston Globe why elections should be audited. While MIT is a leading source of election integrity research, ironically, it sits in a state with voter verified paper ballots, yet does not use them to verify election results.

Prof Ron Rivest recently summarized in the Boston Globe why elections should be audited. While MIT is a leading source of election integrity research, ironically, it sits in a state with voter verified paper ballots, yet does not use them to verify election results.

The Podium

Protecting Your Vote

THIS STORY APPEARED IN The Boston Globe
April 03, 2012|By Ronald L. Rivest

Sometimes, a few votes make a huge difference.

Just ask Rick Santorum. In January, Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses, but, because of vote counting and tabulation errors, Mitt Romney was declared the winner. In the two weeks before the error became clear, Romney’s campaign gained momentum, while Santorum’s withered.

Unfortunately, the same problem – or worse – could easily occur in Massachusetts. This year, voters will choose the president, and control of the US Senate may come down to the race shaping up between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

How will voters know their votes will be counted accurately? Massachusetts voters cast paper ballots. This is a good foundation for an election system, since the paper ballots form an “audit trail” that can be examined (and if necessary, recounted). In almost all cities and towns in the state, those ballots are slid into machines that read the ballots and total up all the votes at each polling place. The machines are reprogrammed for every election, but only 50 to 75 ballots are used to check the new programming, even though 1,000 ballots or more are likely to be put into each voting machine on Election Day. Votes from each location are then brought together and tabulated. In both steps of the process, there is the possibility of significant error.

As a technologist, I have spent decades working with information systems and computer programs, and can say one thing with certainty: mistakes can happen. In banking, business, and engineering, similar problems often arise, and they are solved elegantly: with random testing. The IRS does not take every tax return on faith – it audits a small number of them. These audits uncover errors and fraud, and serve as deterrent. Athletes are randomly tested for performance-enhancing drugs. Factories pull random samples of their products off the production line and conduct quality control checks. Municipalities send inspectors to gas stations to make sure that when the meter says you have pumped a gallon, there actually is a gallon of gas in your tank.

Audits and random tests are used anytime there are numbers involved and a lot at stake. And what could be more important than the elections we use to choose our government’s leaders?

Twenty-six states have election audits and that number is growing. After an election, the state selects a few random polling places to count the ballots by hand. The hand-counted totals are compared to machine results. If the numbers are close enough, there is confidence that any errors or mis-programming sufficient to have affected the election outcome will be discovered. Because only a few random polling locations are audited, costs are kept low. Many people are surprised to learn that we don’t audit election results here in Massachusetts.

There need not be any big conspiracies or widespread failures to make audits worthwhile. Voting machines are just like any other machine. Sometimes they break. In Waterville, Maine, voting machine malfunctions caused a Senate candidate to receive 27,000 votes – about 16,000 more than the number of registered voters in the entire district. In Barry County, Michigan, flawed programming caused incorrect results. The problem was discovered only when a county clerk received the results from the precinct where he voted and noticed that the candidate for whom he voted for had received no votes.

In addition to providing security and confidence, audits provide information. Information that election officials can use to make sure every person’s vote is counted. Audits can uncover common voter mistakes that could be fixed with, for example, better instructions. Audits can tell election officials if a ballot has been poorly designed in a way many voters cannot understand, so that future ballots can be designed better.

Let’s make 2012 the year where all Massachusetts voters have confidence that their vote will be counted. There is audit legislation pending in the Legislature. Lawmakers should pass it in time for the November election. Elections matter. And every vote counts.

Ronald L. Rivest is a professor of computer science at MIT. He is a founder of RSA Data Security.

CA, we told you so… predictable, unintended consequences of open primaries

We wish in cases like this that we were more frequently wrong in our predictions.

Update: 12/12/2012 California | All Bark, No Bite: How California’s Top-Two Primary System Reinforces the Status Quo | State of Elections or as we might say “Barking up the wrong tree”.

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Update: Brad points out that it also applies both ways e.g. the Senate race <read>
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It seems like a couple of years ago that Ralph Nader and CTVotersCount warned California against open primaries: CA Prop 14: Unsafe at any but greed? <read> You can read Nader’s comments there, here is what we added back in July 2010:

However, we can add to his arguments our vision of the dilemma facing the intelligent voter on primary day: Faced with five, ten, or thirty candidates for an office: Who do you vote for, your favorite, or one you think might have a chance at being in the top two; one that might be more acceptable than others the poll say have a chance? It is just another, perhaps more complex crap shoot.

Now Brad Friedman points to the dilemma facing Democrats in some California counties in Congressional primaries: Will CA’s New ‘Cajun Primary’ System Allow Minority GOP To Capture Congressional Seats? CA-26 House race exemplifies anti-democratic potential of 2010’s voter-approved ‘Top Two’ open primary system… <read>

One example is in the newly created CA-26 Congressional District, which reveals a potential formula by which the GOP can overcome adverse party registration numbers — in that case, 40% (D), 36% (R), 19% (I) — in order to seize a Congressional seat.

Because four Democrats are competing in the CA-26 primary, long suffering progressives, including this writer, who had previously been forced to cast a protest vote in the now defunct, heavily gerrymandered CA-24 District of the outgoing, extreme right-wing Republican Elton Gallegly, may awake on June 6 to the reality that, come next November, they will be forced to choose between a ‘Tea Party’ Republican and a County Supervisor who “changed her voter registration…from Republican to ‘no party preference’ in preparation for her bid for Congress”…

The upcoming CA-26 primary underscores the undemocratic potential of such a primary system. In a three-way race, all other things being equal, one would anticipate 40% to a Democrat, 36% to the Republican and the balance perhaps going to a genuine independent candidate. But here, the 40% for Democrats will be carved up amongst four Democratic candidates running in the same race with one GOP candidate openly running as a Republican and another who had been a Republican until she decided to shed the party label for the upcoming primary to run as an ostensible “Independent.”

Stealth Republican?

The CA-26 race provides a paradigm example of how a “Cajun Primary” can facilitate a seizure of power by a minority party through the use of a stealth Republican, who deceptively dons an “Independent” label.

We wish in cases like this that we were more frequently wrong in our predictions.

NIST: Internet voting not yet feasible. (And neither are email and fax voting)

Use of fax poses the fewest challenges, however fax offers limited protection for voter privacy. While the threats to telephone, e-mail, and web can be mitigated through the use of procedural and technical security controls, they are still more serious and challenging to overcome.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in response to an inquiry, summarized the risks of Internet voting <read>

Internet voting is not yet feasible, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology have concluded. ”Malware on voters’ personal computers poses a serious threat that could compromise the secrecy or integrity of voters’ ballots,” said Belinda Collins, senior advisor for voting standards within NIST’s information technology laboratory, in an May 18 statement. ”And, the United States currently lacks an infrastructure for secure electronic voter authentication,” she added. Collins released the statement in response to an inquiry from Common Cause, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit active in campaign finance and election reform.

“This statement should serve as a blunt warning that we just aren’t ready yet and proves that we can’t trust the empty promises of ‘secure Internet voting’ from the for-profit vendors,” said Susannah Goodman, head of Common Cause’s Voting Integrity Project. ”We urge election officials and state and federal lawmakers to heed NIST’s warning and step back, support further research and STOP online voting programs until they can be made secure,” Goodman added…

The statement is based on two NIST reports:

This 2011 report http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/upload/NISTIR-7770-feb2011-2.pdf  Strongly articulates the many risks of Internet voting and the slight mitigations available. It references an earlier report that explains the risks of all types of electronic transmission of voted ballots. Perhaps email voting and fax voting were sufficiently covered in the early report that it was not necessary to spell that out in more detail than the earlier report:

In December 2008, NIST released NISTIR 7551, A Threat Analysis on UOCAVA Voting Systems [3], which documents the threats to UOCAVA voting systems using electronic technologies for all aspects of overseas and military voting. NISTIR 7551 considered the use of postal mail, telephone, fax, electronic mail, and web servers to facilitate transmission of voter registration materials, blank ballots, and cast ballots. It documented threats and potential high-level mitigating security controls associated with each of these methods. The report concluded that threats to the electronic transmission of voter registration materials and blank ballots can be mitigated with the use of procedures and widely deployed security technologies. However, the threats associated with electronic transmission, notably Internet-based transmission, of cast ballots are more serious and challenging to overcome and the report suggested that emerging trends and developments in that area should continue to be studied and monitored.

Here is that earlier report: http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/upload/uocava-threatanalysis-final.pdf

Voted ballot return: Sending completed ballots from UOCAVA voters to local election officials can be expedited through the use of the electronic transmission options. However, their use can present significant challenges to the integrity of the election. Use of fax poses the fewest challenges, however fax offers limited protection for voter privacy. While the threats to telephone, e-mail, and web can be mitigated through the use of procedural and technical security controls, they are still more serious and challenging to overcome.

Sadly the CT Legislature passed a bill this year the included email and fax voting, without hearings. The Governor is considering vetoing that bill which may be unconstitutional and risks democracy in the name of soldiers who are dedicated to preserving that democracy.