Category: National

Internet Voting, more problems beyond the News Hour report

Last week there was a PBS News Hour report on Internet Voting. It was fair and balanced as far as it went, but maybe a bit too fair to non-scientists and vendors touting Internet Voting. At Brad Blog, Earnest A Canning has an excellent piece pointing out some additional information not covered in the short News Hour segment.

Last week there was a PBS News Hour report on Internet Voting. It was fair and balanced as far as it went, but maybe a bit too fair to non-scientists and vendors touting Internet Voting. We wished it was more like the symposium in Connecticut where both pro and con members of the panel had adequate time to counter each others’ statements. At Brad Blog, Earnest A Canning has an excellent piece pointing out some additional information not covered in the short News Hour segment PBS News Hour Report Exposes Madness of Internet Voting, Officials Who Push For It Anyway <read>

Disturbingly, the new PBS documentary also reveals that, despite the spectacular failure and warnings from virtually every computer science and security expert, election and Pentagon officials are still pressing forward with what MIT Prof. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ronald L. Rivest describes, as seen in the short PBS report, as an “oxytopian” solution. “‘Secure Internet voting,'” Rivest charges, “is a bit like the phrase ‘safe cigarettes'”…

 The Revolving Door

In some instances, like that of Paul Stenbjorn, the former Executive Director of the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics who first pushed for the live D.C. Internet vote experiment and was then embarrassed by the D.C. Internet Voting Hack, the persistent effort to damn the science, the scientists and the extraordinary failures to move ahead with Internet Voting anyway, might be explained by the fact that he subsequently became the Director of US Operations at SCYTL, a manufacturer of online voting and election systems…

 Reliance upon technology that does not exist

Where, in the PBS report, West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant (D) expresses certainty — with no evidence to back it up — that there has been “no breach in our votes,” U.C. Berkley Computer Science Prof. David Wagner, who examined the SCYTL system, reported that there “is no known way to audit Internet voting.”

If there is no way to audit the voting, there is no way to know whether the votes have been “breached” and accurately recorded as per the voters’ intent.

Where Stenbjorn advanced the unscientific prediction that a secure system will be developed in the near future, Wagner, in the same report, noted: “It is not technologically feasible today to make Internet Voting safe against attack.”…

 No security against insider threat

One shortfall of the otherwise excellent PBS report — which includes interviews with a number of computer scientists The BRAD BLOG has turned to for years for their invaluable expertise on these issues — is that it only examined the concerns of system security from the perspective of an outsider attack, like the one that occurred in the D.C. Internet Voting Hack.

Even assuming that it were technologically feasible to prevent an outside attack, this does not begin to address the far more immediate threat that, whenever there is a lack of transparency in how votes are counted, there is a risk that the count can be manipulated by insiders with access to any e-voting system, be it Internet, Direct Recording Electronic (usually touchscreen) voting machines or paper-based computer optical scan systems.

As acknowledged by virtually all computer scientists and security experts, and even confirmed by the highly compromised, GOP-operative-created Baker/Carter National Election Reform Commission years ago, the greatest threat to all such electoral systems comes from insiders. As even the phony Baker/Carter commission noted: “There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.” Thus, there is almost nothing that can be done to protect against such exploits…

Convenience is no substitute for democracy

During the PBS report, Bob Carey, the Director of the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program not only expresses the unscientific belief that a foolproof Internet Voting system will be developed within five to six years, but he also downplays the risks identified by computer scientists as “unfair to military voters.”

The Wild West: Presidential Primary “Election” Edition

Selecting candidates for President is less safe and less democratic than most of us realize.

Four years ago there were five public hearings on voting in Connecticut. In reaction to election administration admissions by registrars, Representative Caruso referred to our system in the Nutmeg State as the “Wild West”. It seems that choosing a candidate for President by parties is another version of the Wild West.

The latest demonstrations the weak underbelly of candidate selection are the caucuses in Iowa and Nevada:

Iowa had a very close vote count declaring Romney the victor, followed shortly by news of bad accounting from one meeting which would have Santorum the victor <read>, followed several weeks later with a confirmation of Santorum based on a recount missing records from eight locations. <read>

Earlier many were concerned with a hacker threat to the Iowa caucus <read>  And soon after a candidate’s campaign investigated for vote fraud in Virginia <read>

This week  added concerns with the Nevada caucus:  And a summary of caucus concerns from the AP  and the Washington Times <read> <read>

What else should be of concern, given that parties can pretty much choose their own way selecting a candidate? Internet voting subject to external hacking, insider fraud, and even subject to official override. Consider the risks of the party/non-party Wall Street financed and managed Americans Elect <read>, and the 2008 Democrats Abroad vote <read>

Book Review: Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

When it comes to election integrity, we note the many articles on elections and election reform are often emotional, subjective, one-sided, or inappropriately balanced. The same lack of rigor is often present in arguments raised by and to election officials and legislators considering election reform.  We ignore facts, reason, and open debate at our peril.

The context for many of our posts and all of our editorials is science. Endeavoring to understand and highlight the facts associated with elections impacting election integrity, reasoning from those facts, encouraging open debate, and choosing alternatives based on facts and reason. There are limits to science and reason: Some facts are difficult to establish, there are trade-offs, subjective values, and future speculation involved. Yet, we ignore facts, reason, and open debate at our peril.

When it comes to election integrity, we note the many articles on elections and election reform are often emotional, subjective, one-sided, or inappropriately balanced. The same lack of rigor is often present in arguments raised by and to election officials and legislators considering election reform. Some current examples include:

  • The initiatives for voter Id and unlimited absentee balloting. One side claiming massive voter fraud and the other claiming a dearth of document fraud. While the reality derived from the facts available seems to indicate very rare individual voter fraud, but cases of deliberate  multiple absentee voter fraud discovered in several localities after every election. Reason adds that deliberate multiple vote frauds are much more likely to effect results than individual frauds.
  • Internet/online voting is technically risky and open to fraud. We constantly read that “If we can do banking online, we should be able to do voting online” – with little recognition of the science that says voting is more risky and the significant level of banking fraud, especially given that banking fraud is much easier to detect than voting fraud. We seldom hear the question “If an army private can access all the secrets on military computers, how can anyone make online voting safe on personal computers?”
  • We hear calls for Election Day Registration and unlimited absentee balloting in the name of increasing turn-out, yet little recognition of the growing evidence that Election Day Registration increases turn-out, but that unlimited absentee voting does not increase turn-out, may actually decrease turn-out, and the speculation that early voting may actually help well financed candidates.
  • In Connecticut we hear how burdensome the post-election audits are on town budgets and the inconvenience to election officials. We seldom hear that statewide the audit costs are just a small fraction of the costs of printing ballots, and a percent or two of the salaries of the election officials who are inconvenienced in the interests of public integrity and confidence in elections.

The recent book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, articulates the need for science, the scientific method, and their increasing banishment from public discourse. Despite our own experience dealing with this problem in and with the media, legislature, congress, and in discussions with officials, reading this book provided additional insight into the causes and dangers of ignoring science as a basis for society.

Some of the insights I gained from the book:

  • In the name of saving money, almost all newspapers have eliminated their science sections.
  • It is not considered appropriate to discuss science in the political section of newspapers, however, it is fine to discuss economics and religion.
  • The author was one of many suggesting a science debate during the 2008 presidential election, with many petitioners, the debate was rejected by both campaigns. Many science questions were suggested to moderators in other debates in areas such as stem cells, global warming, etc. In all the debates, only a couple of science questions were asked, ironically in the two religion debates.
  • Excluding medical professionals such as Senator Paul and Representative Paul we are down to one scientist in the entire Congress, Representative Rush Holt from New Jersey.
  • The pubic and scientists are cultured to believe that science should be accomplished quietly in the laboratory and that it is inappropriate for scientists to be at the table and part of the public debate. (So, when election technology is discussed it is presumed that election officials and vendors can sufficiently represent the science and technology at the table).
  • Still many of our public policy questions involve science and applications of the scientific method; Global warming, fracking, health, defense technology, NASA projects, and disease prevention. Many issues involve detailed economic and statistical calculations or could benefit from rigorous scientific studies including public health, crime, punishment, improving the economy, creating jobs, the value and funding of entitlement programs.

A couple of snippets:

The Great Dumbing Down

…As a result [of newspapers cutting science sections], Americans find themselves in an absurd and dangerous position: In a time when the majority of the world’s leading country’s larges challenges revolve around science, few reporters are covering them from the scientific angle.

In Europe, by contrast, just the opposite is happening: Science coverage has increased. A 2008 analysis of prime-time news on selected European TV stations showed that there were 218 science-related stories (including science and technology, environment, and health) among 2,676 mews stories aired during the same week in the years 2003 and 2004, and eleven-fold increase since 1989. And in the developing world, science is “flourishing”

Republican Science

By its very nature science is both progressive and conservative.

conservative: retentive of knowledge and cautous about making new assertions until they are fully defensible

and

progressive: open to wherever observation leads, independent of belief and ideology, and focused on creative knowlege

It would thous be a mistake to characterize scientists as mostly Democrats or mostly Republicans. They are mostly for freedom, creativity, caution, and knowledge — and not intrinsically of one or another party. In the early twenty-first century the party that most stands for freedom, openness, tolerance, caution, and science is the Democratic Party…

Early in the twentieth century this situation was almost reversed. Republican Abraham Lincoln had created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Republican William McKinley, admired by Karl Rove, won two presidential elections, in 1896 and 1900, both times over the anti-evolution Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and supported the creation of the Bureau of Standards

Finally, we note the contradictions in the often held beliefs that science can solve any problem: “If we can go to the moon, those scientists can solve global warming, protect us from nuclear waste, and make internet voting work if they would just work on it” and almost simultaneously strong questioning of the consensus scientific views that we are near irreversible global warming and that the earth is more than 10,000 years old.

Doug Chapin: New Pew Report Details Progress on Military, Overseas Voting

It really is remarkable how far this issue has come in about three years; Pew’s election team and its huge coalition of partners including OVF, the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program and the Uniform Law Commission (whose Uniform Military and Overseas Voting Act is one ongoing vehicle for state and local reform) should be deeply gratified at everything they have accomplished.

Doug Chapin, Program for Excellence in Election Administration, New Pew Report Details Progress on Military, Overseas Voting <read>

Democracy from Afar finds that “47 states and the District of Columbia enacted laws to protect the voting rights of military and overseas citizens”. More specifically, Pew found that “many states have implemented changes to their laws or administrative codes,” including –

+ Enough time to vote: 38 states and the District have laws or rules meeting or exceeding federal requirements to send ballots to military and overseas voters at least 45 days before an election AND 8 additional states changed their primary dates to accommodate the requirement;

+ Electronic transmission of unvoted ballots: All states and the District allow military and overseas voters to receive blank ballots electronically;

+ Eliminating requirements for notarization or witnesses: 46 states and the District do not call for either for military and overseas voters; and

+ Expanded use of Federal Write-in Absentee Ballots (FWABs): 34 states and the District mandate FWABs be used as a backup ballot for all elections, including state and local.

All of these changes are summarized state-by-state in a typically handy-dandy Pew chart on page 5 of the report.

It really is remarkable how far this issue has come in about three years; Pew’s election team and its huge coalition of partners including OVF, the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program and the Uniform Law Commission (whose Uniform Military and Overseas Voting Act is one ongoing vehicle for state and local reform) should be deeply gratified at everything they have accomplished.

Looking at the state summary report on page 5, we Connecticut meets all four of the major criteria.  We would go farther in web convenience: Better web information accessible to overseas voters; ballot selection on the web based on polling place look up for each.

All of these changes are summarized state-by-state in a typically handy-dandy Pew chart on page 5 of the report.

It really is remarkable how far this issue has come in about three years; Pew’s election team and its huge coalition of partners including OVF, the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program and the Uniform Law Commission (whose Uniform Military and Overseas Voting Act is one ongoing vehicle for state and local reform) should be deeply gratified at everything they have accomplished.

Looking at the state by state summary on page 5 of the report, we see that Connecticut scores well, employing all the items used to compare states. We could go further following the states with best practices: Providing better web information, more conveniently and web ballot access and printing based on voter registration information.

Overall, one more reason not to employ risky, expensive online voting. Conventional, less flashy, methods are just as convenient and effective while being safe and more economical.

Coalition Nov 2011 Audit Observation Report – Data Available for Public Review

Coalition finds continuing problems with audit integrity
Provides calculations and official data on the web for public review and verification

For the first time, in the interest of public information and transparency, we are making all official municipal audit reports and the data we complied available for everyone to review on the web. Citizens can see the reports from their own town, other towns, and perform their own audit of the Coalition’s data entry and calculations based on those official reports. The November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of the continued:

  • Lack of integrity in the random district selection and race selection processes.
  • Lack of consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.
  • Discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by municipalities and the lack of standards for determining need for further investigation of discrepancies.
  • Weaknesses in the ballot chain-of-custody.

 <Full Report, Press Release, Excerpts>        <Review detail data and municipal reports>

Coalition finds continuing problems with audit integrity
Provides calculations and official data on the web for public review and verification

For the first time, in the interest of public information and transparency, we are making all official municipal audit reports and the data we complied available for everyone to review on the web. Citizens can see the reports from their own town, other towns, and perform their own audit of the Coalition’s data entry and calculations based on those official reports. The November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of the continued:

  • Lack of integrity in the random district selection and race selection processes.
  • Lack of consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.
  • Discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by municipalities and the lack of standards for determining need for further investigation of discrepancies.
  • Weaknesses in the ballot chain-of-custody.

 <Full Report, Press Release, Excerpts>        <Review detail data and municipal reports>

Americans Elect – A license to steal the presidency?

This is seriously dangerous. If you don’t join Americans Elect, their vote could determine the President. If you do join Americans Elect, the vote could be manipulated in the backroom or by hackers. Or the self-appointed board could override the actual vote.

We have written before of Americans Elect it seems the real story gets more and more suspect, more and more dangerous. A new story/investigation in Irregular Times: Americans Elect: A Corporation and a Political Party <read>

This is seriously dangerous. If you don’t join Americans Elect, their vote could determine the President. If you do join Americans Elect, the vote could be manipulated in the backroom or by hackers. Or the self-appointed board could override the actual vote.

In July of 2011, Americans Elect Chief Operating Officer Elliot Ackerman declared, “The key delineation to make is that we’re not a party.” These unequivocal claims are contradicted by Americans Elect’s observable behavior; Americans Elect has registered as a political party in a number of states…

Why does it matter whether Americans Elect is or is not a political party? As a registered 501c4 corporation, Americans Elect can hide the sources of unlimited funding from the American people. If it declared itself to be a political party, it would have to follow the rules for political parties, which include significant limitations to how much money they may take from individuals and mandate disclosure of them. Americans Elect is simultaneously using party status to get on the ballot for 2012 and sloughing off party status to avoid contribution requirements…

There are three elections envisioned by the Americans Elect bylaws, two of them taking place online. The first election is to select an Americans Elect presidential nominee, and only registered Americans Elect Delegates (see below) will be able to participate. The second election is the presidential election on Election Day 2012, one in which the Americans Elect nominee will be on the ballot in all 50 states and in which every registered voter in America will be able to participate as usual. The third election will take place after the November presidential election if no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes. In that circumstance, Americans Elect will hold another online vote of its Delegates to decide whether the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate will be given the electoral votes won by Americans Elect’s candidate. This third election would allow Americans Elect to throw the presidency to either party, a powerful position to hold. Americans Elect needs to win just one state in order to occupy that powerful position and trigger a third election…

In the top tier of Americans Elect is the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors and only the Board of Directors appoints its own members and corporate officers. The Board of Directors and its appointed designates write the rules for the Americans Elect elections and may overrule all actions of Employees. The Board of Directors may overrule nearly all actions of Delegates and writes the rules within which Delegates “independently” make a presidential nomination, constraining Delegates’ choices. The Board of Directors is the only body in the entire Americans Elect system to make procedural decisions by democratic majority vote, making it the swiftest means for Americans Elect to take political action…

Another reason why Americans Elect needs to disclose information about its origins, funding and activities is its unfortunate history. It’s not just that Americans Elect is currently making claims that don’t match the observable facts; there’s a history of misrepresentation, misdirection and malfunction in Americans Elect’s previous effort under the name Unity08

These are just some snippets. The full details in the article demonstrate the dangers.

 

Concern with electronic skulduggery is Right, Left, and Center

Hackers threaten Presidential Primary. The particular threat may or may not be real. Yet, being concerned with electronic skulduggery is Right, Left, and Center

AP, via Yahoo: Iowa GOP worried by hacker threat to caucus vote <read>

As the article points out the particular threat may or may not be real, but as those quoted in the article point out, cyber threats to voting are real:

With two weeks remaining before Iowa kicks off the 2012 campaign with its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, the state Republican Party is taking steps to secure its electronic vote collection system after receiving a mysterious threat to its computers…

state authorities have not taken any actions since the call to “peacefully shut down” the caucuses does not amount to a crime, said Jim Saunders, director of the Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center at the state’s Department of Public Safety…

The GOP is also encouraging the party activists who run the precinct votes to use paper ballots instead of a show of hands, which has been the practice in some areas. The ballots would provide a backup in the event of any later confusion about the results…

Drew Ivers, chairman of Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s campaign in Iowa and a member of the state GOP central committee, said party officials and consultants will also monitor for any hacking threat using software and other methods, but added, “How do you stop a hacker? That’s the question.”…

Among the early voting states, the hacking concerns have most spooked officials in Iowa. In New Hampshire, whose primary is one week after the Iowa caucuses, officials rely on a mostly manual process that uses paper and is less vulnerable to an attack on computer systems, said Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens. In South Carolina, which follows 11 days later, State Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said he was not aware of any concerns.

But Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa who has consulted for both political parties, said the Iowa Republican Party is right to be concerned about the security of their computer systems. The Internet, he said, is “becoming more and more like the Wild West.”

Voting machine investigation leads to serious issues and cover-up

This is serious stuff. The words that come to mind are: Illegal, unacceptable, unconscionable, ridiculous, unconstitutional, and undemocratic.

Brad Friedman articulated the details last week  <read>

Forensic Analysis Finds Venango County, PA, E-Voting System ‘Remotely Accessed’ on ‘Multiple Occasions’ by Unknown Computer

Battle for independent election investigation rages in rural Republican county, pitting renegade Election Board against County Commission, giant E-Vote firm ES&S…

What is wrong in this situation?

  • Illegal software found on vote accumulation machine
  • On several occasions the system was accessed remotely, unauthorized
  • Evidence of an illegal flash drive mounted on the system
  • The log shows out of sequence events
  • The Election Board that should be leading the charge to get to the bottom of the problem is fighting to cover-up the evidence and avoid investigation
  • The vendor, ES&S who should be offering to assist in the investigation is keeping the code secret and suing the investigators to stop, to keep the evidence hidden
  • There is no paper record of the votes such that investigators and citizens can determine if votes or elections were comprised

This is serious stuff. The words that come to mind are: Illegal, unacceptable, unconscionable, ridiculous, unconstitutional, and undemocratic.

Hats off to the citizens of Pennsylvania who fight for voting integrity, the researchers at Carnegie-Mellon, and the interim Election Board.

According to the Initial Report from a landmark independent forensic audit of the Venango County, PA, touch-screen voting system — the same system used in dozens of counties across the state and country — someone used a computer that was not a part of county’s election network to remotely access the central election tabulator computer, illegally, “on multiple occasions.” Despite the disturbing report, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG and posted in full below, we may never get to learn who did it or why, if Venango’s County Commissioners, a local judge, and the nation’s largest e-voting company have their way. And that’s not all we won’t get to find out about.

The battle for election integrity continues in Venango, with the County Commissioners teaming up with e-voting vendor Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) on one side, and the county’s renegade interim Republican-majority Board of Elections on the other. The Commissioners and ES&S have been working to spike the independent scientific forensic audit of the county’s failed electronic voting machines that was commissioned by the interim Board of Elections. Making matters worse, the Board has now been removed from power by a county judge, a decision they are attempting to appeal as the three-person board and their supporters continue to fight the entrenched establishment for transparency and accountability in the rural Western Pennsylvania county…

Omaha-based ES&S, which had issued no objections prior to the start of the study, but changed its mind quickly after it began (as we detailed in an Exclusive report in late October) has now hardened their position, sending threatening legal letters to both the county and the two computer scientists. The e-voting firm has warned them they are likely to face a lawsuit if they do not agree to complete confidentiality and if results of their analysis are released publicly without their prior review and approval…

There were real, not just theoretical, concerns motivating the investigation in the first place:

As the analysis finally began, Election Integrity advocate Marybeth Kuznik, founder of the non-partisan watchdog organization VotePA.us explained that the Board was calling for the investigation after the county had experienced “numerous reports of vote-flipping, candidates missing from screens, write-ins missing, and high undervote rates in their May 17 Primary.”

While reporting on the Venango Board’s efforts to get their analysis under way during one of our regular fill-in stints as guest host for the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show in late October, we received an unexpected call from Adams to offer more details on why his Board had sought the forensic audit.

“It started with an election in 2008 when the machines were basically showing a large number of undervotes,” he explained. “And then there were candidates for positions in the county and they had zero votes, but there was like 250 or 260 undervotes.”

“Wait a minute, there were people who had zero votes on the ballot? Is that normal?” we interrupted to ask.

“No. No, it is not normal,” he responded directly, describing the anomaly as “a red flag.” When pressed to explain why he believed the the County Commissioners and their legal representatives had been working so hard for months to keep the audit from happening, Adams told us bluntly: “They know there’s something wrong.”

This provides one more reason to scrap unverifiable election systems without a voter verifiable paper record in favor of more economical, auditable optical scan technology. But that is not enough!

  • Every state, every ballot should be subject to sufficient post-election audits. But that is not enough!
  • Strong security and chains of custody is needed for ballots.
  • And a total audit of voting systems and election systems should be required: e.g. Do pollbook counts match ballot counts? Are voters given a fair opportunity to vote? Are absentee ballots properly secured and submitted? Is there any evidence of machine tampering or irregularities?

Scanners like ours: Optical scanner counts differ for same ballots

There should be an investigation, however, we suggest that determining the cause is not a complete cure. I could happen again. It could have happened in the past. Maybe in Connecticut.

Brad Friedman reported the story last week <read>

A close race on election night. Rescanned to check but the other candidate won. Then they did a hand count and confirmed the original result. UT like Connecticut is fortunate to have chosen optical scanners with voter completed paper ballots. But we need to verify the accuracy of scanners with audits, recanvasses, and recounts.

The first “recount” of Provo’s Municipal Council District 1 ballots — carried out on the same op-scan systems that tallied them in the first place — was held yesterday, only to be abruptly called off when the results were found to be “extremely in favor of the opposite candidate.”…

“The numbers were varying too much,” Utah County Chief Deputy Clerk/Auditor Scott Hogensen tells the Deseret News about the District 1 race. “It became obvious the machines weren’t counting things correctly.”

But whether the Diebold op-scanners tallied the ballots inaccurately on Election Day or during the so-called “recount” remains unknown at the moment.

According to Deseret News, “Morrow said she asked for the recount to be done by hand in the first place but the request was denied.”…

two hand-counts on Wednesday have now confirmed the accuracy of the original optical-scan count giving the election victory to Gary Winterton after all. The “recount” on the same op-scan systems seem to have been inaccurate, while the original count was accurate. We still don’t know why, of course.

It was not a small, trivial difference, we are talking over 700 votes!

No word yet on why the second scanner might have miscounted. There should be an investigation, however, we suggest that determining the cause is not a complete cure. No matter the cause:

  • It could happen again in Utah or Connecticut
  • Another time it might be the original scanner, not the second one, and/or election day officials making the error
  • It might be far enough off that there is no automatic recount or recanvass
  • It might not be the machine, it might be procedures, yet exonerating the machine does not provide comfort, whatever the cause it can happen again in Utah or Connecticut
  • Perhaps it has happened before – maybe last year in Connecticut one or more of the differences between hand counts and machine counts might not have been human errors as assumed by the Secretary of the State’s office. <read>

We leave with this further item from Brad illustrating the tendency for officials to leap to unfounded, yet assuring conclusions based on assumptions:

Amusingly, and for reasons unknown, [Utah County Chief Deputy Clerk/Auditor Scott] Hogensen told Deseret News that, according to the paper, he “does not believe machine malfunctions affect the outcome of any other races in the county.”

This has happened a couple of times before with other scanners. <one example><another>

Secrecy vs. Anonymity of ballots

From Aspen we have a discussion of the value of anonymous ballots and the meaning of the secret ballot. What voting free from coercion requires is the secret casting of ballots and the ongoing safeguarding of those ballots along with the anonymity of the voter associated with each ballot.

Recently we discussed the distinction between integrity and confidence. From Aspen we have a discussion of the value of anonymous ballots and the meaning of the secret ballot. What voting free from coercion requires is the secret casting of ballots and the ongoing safeguarding of those ballots along with the anonymity of the voter associated with each ballot <read>

Before 1947, Col­orado bal­lots were marked with unique num­bers and were not anony­mous. Vot­ers might mark their bal­lots in secrecy, but their votes were trace­able through delib­er­ate num­ber­ing. A 1947 con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment out­lawed any marks on bal­lots that make them trace­able. This rev­o­lu­tion­ary change facil­i­tated effec­tive pri­vacy of Col­oradans’ vot­ing process and is the foun­da­tion of our civil right to expect our votes to remain secret. This vot­ing method — some­times referred to as the “secret bal­lot” — iron­i­cally does not allow for secrets on ballots.

How­ever, oppo­nents of elec­tion trans­parency talk end­lessly about “secret bal­lots.” Hate to tell you, there’s no such thing. “Secret bal­lots” have no place, indeed no mean­ing, in our elec­tion law. Vot­ers are enti­tled to pri­vacy while vot­ing and a sys­tem designed to pre­vent trac­ing a bal­lot to a voter. These safe­guards ensure NO ONE learns how any­one else voted. They ensure what every­one wants: Nobody knows how I voted.

We agree with the writers. When lawmakers use the word secret ballot we believe the actual intent is that the identity of the voter should always remain secret, which is equivalent to anonymous ballot, not that ballots remain secret. In fact, in order to perform publicly observable audits, recounts, racanvasses, or to make ballots public requires that they not be secret. In fact, if non-transparent audits, recounts, or recanvasses or any official review of ballots is allowed then ballots would not be secret – they would be available for officials to inspect but kept from the voters.

In the Connecticut Constitution we have, in Article 6 Section 5:

The right of secret voting shall be preserved.

Obviously consistent with anonymous ballots, rather than preserving ballots in secret.

Update: 04/17/2012: On to the Colorado Supreme Court <read>