Category: National

Rant Against Congress’s Plans to Rescue the Election

Both the US House and Senate have proposals to improve our elections in the age COVID-19.  They are huge and dangerous, impossible to implement in Connecticut and many other states by November.

Instead of our usual format here, I will cover them by rants I have posted as comments on Facebook over the last two days. They are just to complex and out of touch with reality to comer in a neat and organized, point by point way.

Both the US House and Senate have proposals to improve our elections in the age COVID-19.  They are huge and dangerous, impossible to implement in Connecticut and many other states by November.

Instead of our usual format here, I will cover them by rants I have posted as comments on Facebook over the last two days. They are just to complex and out of touch with reality to comment in a neat and organized, point by point way.

By my count the Senate bill has eleven significant changes to current election law, procedures, and electronic systems in Connecticut elections. I have not counted the details in the House bill, while it is similar to the Senate bill it has at least two additional very difficult to  implement requirements.

Senate Bill Page Summary <read>  Senate Bill <read> House Bill (start at page 814) <read>

Selected Recent Rants (edited):

As Denise Merrill testified, just one of these changes is too much to do by Nov especially for the biggest election of the cycle. The Election Night Reporting system took about 5 years to get right, if it is now. Motor Voter has taken two years so far, if it is right now. The Senate bill has 11 significant changes we don’t have now including online AB requests, permanent AB for all, count ABs until the day before certification, signature cure also until that date, expanded email ballot delivery for disabled and those that don’t receive it by two days before the election, no exception for a disaster without internet or phone service, expanded (ambiguous) requirements for disabled, 20 days polling place early voting, etc. The House bill adds mandatory signature match for all ABs and days 15 days of early voting that must include the day before Election Day – that is a significant addition, where  the Senate bill provides four days between early voting and election day. The bills would pay for some hardware, software and implementation but I doubt for most of those local costs. We would almost necessarily need epollbooks to integrate the early voting data. Miss one part or screw it up for one voter, the US AG or v ANY citizen can sue for injunctive relief.

I’ll add it’s not 7 months as the AB stuff must be ready in Sept and Early voting in Oct. Plus all this is developed, tested, implemented and executed under COVID-19 separation rules. Unless it passes in time that we need it for the Aug Primary.

Lets not forget this is all being done under the gun of COVID-19. And the Electoral Count Act:

The bills have provisions for ABs that took CA, WA, OR, and CO years to implement. Secretary Merrill testified to the GAE last month that just one of those provisions was too difficult and risky to implement for Nov, I agree. There are several others even more difficult. Meeting those provisions and counting ABs are compounded by precautions for COVID-19. Even in CA where they have years of experience, they have 30 days to count ABs – now they have extended that to 51 days for the recent Primary – for 2020 the Safe Harbor date to report votes for electors is Dec 14, just 41 days after the election – Ask yourself what would happen if the Supreme Court stuck with the strong precedent from 1876 and disqualified the CA electors? And on top of that  CT is starting years behind in procedures, practices, automation, and systems.

What would I recommend?

By executive order of Governor Lamont, allow no-excuse AB, allow counting to go for 9 days not 2, to delay recanvasses until after day 10 – Day 10 is the certification date which is hard baked into the Connecticut Constitution, Registrar/SOTS and Clerk task forces created to plan to get their jobs done within the necessary time constraints, with state funding to cover planning training and the large staffing and supervision challenges for municipalities, including extra overhead for COVID-19. PS: The same for protecting everyone in polling places. Printers added to essential businesses.

 

New report articulates, electronics much more vulnerable than we think

Those who understand Turing’s Theorem know that computers are ultimately all vulnerable to virtually undetectable errors and fraud. A new report reminds us just how much worse it is than we think: Wired: Hundreds of Millions of PC Components Still Have Hackable Firmware

That laptop on your desk or that server on a data center rack isn’t so much a computer as a network of them. Its interconnected devices—from hard drives to webcams to trackpads, largely sourced from third parties—have their own dedicated chips and code. That represents a serious security problem: Despite years of warnings, those computers inside your computer remain disturbingly unprotected, offering an insidious and nearly undetectable way for sophisticated hackers to maintain a foothold inside your machine.

Those who understand Turing’s Theorem know that computers are ultimately all vulnerable to virtually undetectable errors and fraud. A new report reminds us just how much worse it is than we think: Wired: Hundreds of Millions of PC Components Still Have Hackable Firmware <read>

That laptop on your desk or that server on a data center rack isn’t so much a computer as a network of them. Its interconnected devices—from hard drives to webcams to trackpads, largely sourced from third parties—have their own dedicated chips and code. That represents a serious security problem: Despite years of warnings, those computers inside your computer remain disturbingly unprotected, offering an insidious and nearly undetectable way for sophisticated hackers to maintain a foothold inside your machine.

That’s the helpful reminder provided by new research from security firm Eclypsium, which today released a report on components and PC peripherals connected to and inside of hundreds of millions of computers around the world. Eclypsium researchers found that a slew of network cards, trackpads, Wi-Fi adapters, USB hubs, and webcams all had firmware that could be updated with “unsigned” code that lacks any cryptographic verification. In other words, it could be rewritten without any security check.

You should be aware and concerned with you phone, laptop, camera, car, or basically anything that has software, firmware, or is connected to the Internet.

But what about, for instance, Connecticut’s AccuVoteOS voting machines and risks beyond the supply chain. Many tout that our machines are simple, do not use Windows, and therefor not subject to well-known vulnerabilities. Yet they do contain a computer, internal firmware, and are used with programmable memory cards. Known vulnerabilities such as the Hursti Hack. That simplicity and rare, obscure programming makes them hackable, simply hackable, and makes the expertise to hack them seemingly rare as well.

We doubt election officials in Connecticut observe closely when the machines are serviced by the vendor. We know that physical security for our machines  (and ballots) is weak, very weak. In most towns, multiple lone individuals can access them for hours undetected. In a few seconds firmware can be swapped, that looks just like the original.

Many argue that expertise to modify that firmware is rare in election officials, perhaps in vendor staff.  That is far from true.  All that is needed is one individual with that expertise (I guarantee there are many, and its easy for many more to learn that skill.). The person with access does not need that skill. All they need are the compromised chips, or memory cards. If they have evil intent or are threatened they can do they deed, if necessary get one of those jobs.

Lessons we likely will NOT learn from Iowa

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

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

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

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

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

In no particular order:

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

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

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

Early Returns from Iowa: Losers and Potential Winners

We may not know who won Iowa, yet we know the losers: Internet Voting, Caucusing, and Immediate Gratification.

NYTimes article: 2020 Iowa Caucus Updates: Delayed Results Lead to Confusion

““This is an embarrassment but it shouldn’t shake people’s confidence in the results,” Mr. Halderman said. “If this had been an election conducted by phone, or online, that would have been a major disaster. We might never know the results and would have had to re-run the entire contest.”

“This is an urgent reminder,” Mr. Halderman said, “of why online voting is not ready for prime time.”

Editorial: Potential Winners…

We may not know who won Iowa, yet we know the losers: Internet Voting, Caucusing, and Immediate Gratification.

NYTimes article: 2020 Iowa Caucus Updates: Delayed Results Lead to Confusion   <read>

“This app has never been used in any real election or tested at a statewide scale and it’s only been contemplated for use for two months now,” said Mr. Jefferson, who also serves on the board of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.

“This is an embarrassment but it shouldn’t shake people’s confidence in the results,” Mr. Halderman said. “If this had been an election conducted by phone, or online, that would have been a major disaster. We might never know the results and would have had to re-run the entire contest.”

“This is an urgent reminder,” Mr. Halderman said, “of why online voting is not ready for prime time.”

A detail that emphasizes how ridiculous caucuses can be:  Count Bernie 101, Mayor Pete: 66. Result after a coin-toss: 2 delegates each.  That is actually mathematically defensible, yet unsettling. The whole process from beginning to end seems like that.

Editorial: Potential Winners…

Picking up where Dr. Halderman left off: Perhaps tomorrow, we will be able to declare two winners: Paper Records and Publicly Verifiable Elections

Too early to tell. If there are good paper records and they were displayed and photographed or otherwise verified by candidate supporters, both of those ideas will prove their value. On the other hand, even so, will those lessons actually be learned?

Iowa Democratic Party to use risky smartphone method for reporting results

From NPR:  Despite Election Security Fears, Iowa Caucuses Will Use New Smartphone App

Cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR said that the party’s decision to withhold the technical details of its app doesn’t do much to protect the system — and instead makes it hard to have complete confidence in it.

“The idea of security through obscurity is almost always a mistake,” says Doug Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa and a former caucus precinct leader. “Drawing the blinds on the process leaves us, in the public, in a position where we can’t even assess the competence of the people doing something on our behalf.”…

When initial results point to an apparent winner, then the assumption is any other person is trying to overturn the result, rather than insisting that it be accurate.

From NPR:  Despite Election Security Fears, Iowa Caucuses Will Use New Smartphone App <read>

Iowa’s Democratic Party plans to use a new Internet-connected smartphone app to help calculate and transmit results during the state’s caucuses next month, Iowa Public Radio and NPR have confirmed.

Party leaders say they decided to opt for that strategy fully aware of three years’ worth of warnings about Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election, in which cyberattacks played a central role…

In an interview, Price declined to provide more details about which company or companies designed the app, or about what specific measures have been put in place to guarantee the system’s security.

Cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR said that the party’s decision to withhold the technical details of its app doesn’t do much to protect the system — and instead makes it hard to have complete confidence in it.

“The idea of security through obscurity is almost always a mistake,” says Doug Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa and a former caucus precinct leader. “Drawing the blinds on the process leaves us, in the public, in a position where we can’t even assess the competence of the people doing something on our behalf.”…

When initial results point to an apparent winner, then the assumption is any other person is trying to overturn the result, rather than insisting that it be accurate.  Remember Gore v. Bush when the Supreme Court was worried that Bush would be harmed by a delay to recount FL?  Or in 2010 when one town in Connecticut erroneously reported thousands of extra votes for candidate Foley for Governor, bringing extra concerns that uncounted votes in Bridgeport might erroneously elect candidate Malloy?

“Once you report something, it’s really hard to undo it, no matter how many retractions you print, no matter how many apologies you say, it’s too late,” Jones says. “From that point of view, someone hacking the reporting process, even though its purpose is entirely informal, not intended to have any permanent importance, is something that could be very disruptive.”

Kim Zetter investigates NC pollbook for Russian hack — And additional FL incidents!

From Politico: How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election?

Why does what happened to a small Florida company and a few electronic poll books in a single North Carolina county matter to the integrity of the national election? The story of Election Day in Durham—and what we still don’t know about it—is a window into the complex, and often fragile, infrastructure that governs American voting…

The fact that so many significant questions about VR Systems remain unanswered three years after the 2016 election undermines the government’s assertions that it’s committed to providing election officials with all of the timely information they need to secure their systems in 2020. It also raises concerns that the public may never really know what occurred in 2016.

From Politico: How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election? <read>

Why does what happened to a small Florida company and a few electronic poll books in a single North Carolina county matter to the integrity of the national election? The story of Election Day in Durham—and what we still don’t know about it—is a window into the complex, and often fragile, infrastructure that governs American voting…The infrastructures around voting itself—from the voter registration databases and electronic poll books that serve as gatekeepers for determining who gets to cast a ballot to the back-end county systems that tally and communicate election results—are provided by a patchwork of firms selling proprietary systems, many of them small private companies like VR Systems. But there are no federal laws, and in most cases no state laws either, requiring these companies to be transparent or publicly accountable about their security measures or to report when they’ve been breached. They’re not even required to conduct a forensic investigation when they’ve experienced anomalies that suggest they might have been breached or targeted in an attack.

And yet a successful hack of any of these companies—even a small firm—could have far-flung implications.

But VR Systems doesn’t just make poll book software. It also makes voter-registration software, which, in addition to processing and managing new and existing voter records, helps direct voters to their proper precinct and do other tasks. And it hosts websites for counties to post their election results. VR Systems software is so instrumental to elections in some counties that a former Florida election official said that 90 percent of what his staff did on a daily basis to manage voters and voter data was done through VR Systems software…

The company’s expansive reach into so many aspects of election administration and into so many states—and its use of remote access to gain entry into customer computers for troubleshooting—raises a number of troubling questions about the potential for damage if the Russians (or any other hackers) got into VR Systems’ network The company’s expansive reach into so many aspects of election administration and into so many states—and its use of remote access to gain entry into customer computers for troubleshooting—raises a number of troubling questions about the potential for damage if the Russians (or any other hackers) got into VR Systems’ network —either in 2016, or at any other time. Could they, for example, alter the company’s poll book software to cause the devices to malfunction and create long delays at the polls? Or tamper with the voter records downloaded to poll books to make it difficult for voters to cast ballots—by erroneously indicating, for example, that a voter had already cast a ballot, as voters in Durham experienced? Could they change results posted to county websites to cause the media to miscall election outcomes and create confusion? Cybersecurity experts say yes. In the case of the latter scenario, Russian hackers proved their ability to do precisely this in Ukraine’s results system in 2014.

Apparently NC is not the only suspicious incident related to VR Systems, and perfect for one Russian M.O.:

An incident in Florida in 2016 shows what this kind of Election Day confusion might look like in the U.S. During the Florida state primary in August 2016—just six days after the Russians targeted VR Systems in their phishing operation—the results webpage VR Systems hosted for Broward County, a Democratic stronghold, began displaying election results a half hour before the polls closed, in violation of state law. This triggered a cascade of problems that prevented several other Florida counties from displaying their results in a timely manner once the election ended…

If an attacker is inside VR Systems’ network or otherwise obtains the VPN credentials for a VR Systems employee, he can potentially remotely connect to customer systems just as if he were a VR Systems employee. When it comes to Russian hacking, this threat is not theoretical: It is precisely how Russian state hackers tunneled into Ukrainian electric distribution plants in 2015 to cause a power outage to more than 200,000 customers in the middle of winter.

VR systems was likely successfully hacked:

The Mueller report goes a step further. It says that not only did Russian hackers send phishing emails in August 2016 to employees of “a voting technology company that developed software used by numerous U.S. counties to manage voter rolls,” but the hackers succeeded in installing malware on the unidentified company’s network. The Mueller investigators write: “We understand the FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU [Russia’s military intelligence service] to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”… Since the Mueller report was published earlier this year, it has been confirmed that two Florida counties were hacked by the Russians after receiving phishing emails…

It is possible that the reports from Mueller and the NSA are wrong, and that their authors—with no firsthand knowledge of events and with limited details about what occurred—mistakenly concluded that the phishing campaign against VR Systems was successful…

The fact that so many significant questions about VR Systems remain unanswered three years after the 2016 election undermines the government’s assertions that it’s committed to providing election officials with all of the timely information they need to secure their systems in 2020. It also raises concerns that the public may never really know what occurred in 2016.

Its a long article, well worth reading. There are many details supporting and going  beyond what we have highlighted here.

*****Update from Kim Zetter 1/02/2020 Election probe finds security flaws in key North Carolina county but no signs of Russian hacking  <read>

“Absence of evidence shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence of absence,” said Susan Greenhalgh, vice president of policy and programs for National Election Defense Coalition. “I would hope the lesson learned here is that we need to be vigilant about irregularities from their onset … and promptly initiate investigations to rule out malicious cyber events.”

 

BMD’s are dangerous to democracy

One of the key issues this year is the purchase of Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) for all voters vs. Voter Marked Paper Ballots. In recent weeks, two board members have resigned from Verified Voting over a perception that VV is doing too much to tout Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs) of BMDs to the detriment of secure, evidence based elections.  An  extensive article in the NY Review of Books highlights the issues with BMDs: How New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy. By mid-week Verified Voting had issued a clarification that states its general opposition to BMDs.

Editorial: We should not be wasting Federal and state money on BMDs except for those with disabilities. Instead, we should be using a portion of the savings on developing better BMDs that better serve those with disabilities.

One of the key issues this year is the purchase of Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) for all voters vs. Voter Marked Paper Ballots. In recent weeks, two board members have resigned from Verified Voting over a perception that VV is doing too much to tout Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs) of BMDs to the detriment of secure, evidence based elections.  An  extensive article in the NY Review of Books highlights the issues with BMDs: How New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy <read>

The problem cited by the two board members, Philip Stark and Rich DeMillo, was VV touting RLAs of BMDs, with that publicity used as evidence in court by vendors refuting claims of the inadequacy of BMDs.

By mid-week Verified Voting had issued a clarification that states its general opposition to BMDs:  Verified Voting Blog: Verified Voting Statement on Ballot Marking Devices and Risk-limiting Audits <read>

Verified Voting strongly advocates for best practices, including hand-marked paper ballots (with some judicious use of BMDs), careful voter verification of machine-marked ballots, strong chain of custody for all paper ballots, proper ballot accounting, and risk-limiting audits to verify tabulations of paper ballots.

We have one nit with VVs position, when they say: “Verified Voting recommends that any electronic tabulation of paper ballots be checked by a risk-limiting audit.” We say that RLA, better described as Risk Limiting Tabulation Audits, are unsuitable for small contests. They are excellent for Statewide and Federal contests, yet at some point between that size and contests with a few thousand ballots the only actual RLA would be more costly or always degrade into a full recount.

From the Review of Books article:

Most leading election security experts instead recommend hand-marked paper ballots as a primary voting system, with an exception for voters with disabilities. These experts include Professor Rich DeMillo of Georgia Tech, Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Professor Philip Stark of the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Duncan Buell of the University of South Carolina, Professor Alex J. Halderman of the University of Michigan, and Harri Hursti, who is “considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic of electronic voting security” and is “famously known for his successful attempt to demonstrate how the Diebold Election Systems’ voting machines could be hacked.” These scholars warn that even a robust manual audit, known as a Risk Limiting Audit, cannot detect whether a BMD-marked paper ballot has been hacked. BMDs instead put the burden on voters themselves to detect whether such ballots include fraudulent or erroneous machine marks or omissions—even though studies already show that many voters won’t notice.

For this reason, many analysts have cautioned against acquiring these new ballot-marking machines for universal use, but election officials in at least 250 jurisdictions across the country have ignored their advice. Georgia (all one hundred and fifty-nine counties), South Carolina (all forty-six counties), and Delaware (all three counties) have already chosen these systems for statewide use in 2020. At least one or more counties in the following additional states have done the same: Pennsylvania (for the most populous county, plus at least four more), Wisconsin (for Waukesha, Kenosha, Chippewa and perhaps more), Ohio (for the most populous county and others), Tennessee (for at least ten counties), North Carolina (for the most populous county), West Virginia (for the most populous county and at least one other), Texas (for at least Dallas and Travis counties), Kentucky (for the most populous county), Arkansas (at least four counties), Indiana (for the most populous county and at least eight others), Kansas (for the first and second most populous counties), California (again, for the most populous county), Montana (at least one county, though not until 2022), and Colorado (for early voting). New York state has certified (that is, voted to allow) one such system as well.

Editorial: We should not be wasting Federal and State money on BMDs except for those with disabilities. Instead, we should be using a portion of the savings on developing better BMDs that better serve those with disabilities.

 

We Told You So Dept: NPV Compact Author Admits One of Its Flaws

In the hypothetical that all states agreed to the compact, Aram thinks some election reforms would be in order:

“One of the things that I think should be done, that would need to be done, after enough states sign onto this but before it goes into effect – there should be some standardization of the balloting process, and the counting process, so we can get a reliable national tally.”..

“I’ve advocated for states to adopt this idea, but defer implementation until say 2032. So, Florida would adopt it today, but say ‘our adoption takes effect when you get to 270, but no earlier than 2032,” Amar said. “That would both give Congress time, in the meanwhile, to iron out any logistical wrinkles of the kind that you just mentioned. And it would also defuse the wrongheaded, but persistent, assumption that some people have that this is going to help one political party and hurt the other.”

Unfortunately, his recommendations do not go far enough to cure the problem he now recognizes..

Testimony in FL by Prof Vik Amer:  Bill Looks To Create ‘National Popular Vote,’ Lawmakers Hear From One Of The Idea’s Authors <read/listen>

In the hypothetical that all states agreed to the compact, Aram thinks some election reforms would be in order:

“One of the things that I think should be done, that would need to be done, after enough states sign onto this but before it goes into effect – there should be some standardization of the balloting process, and the counting process, so we can get a reliable national tally.”

That kind of overhaul would take time. For that reason and others, Aram wants his plan to have a delayed implementation.

“I’ve advocated for states to adopt this idea, but defer implementation until say 2032. So, Florida would adopt it today, but say ‘our adoption takes effect when you get to 270, but no earlier than 2032,” Amar said. “That would both give Congress time, in the meanwhile, to iron out any logistical wrinkles of the kind that you just mentioned. And it would also defuse the wrongheaded, but persistent, assumption that some people have that this is going to help one political party and hurt the other.”

Unfortunately, his recommendations do not go far enough to cure the problem he now recognizes. To implement the NPV there needs to be a Constitutional Amendment and reform of the Electoral Count Act.  We would need a sufficient uniform system, uniform franchise, enforceable and enforced to make a national popular vote system that would truly make every vote equal and verifiable. For more see our latest testimony before the CT General Assembly <read>

The arguments for and against BMDs go on, amidst expensive problems in PA

From Bloomberg  Expensive, Glitchy Voting Machines Expose 2020 Hacking Risks

Paper ballots may be safer and cheaper, but local officials swoon at digital equipment…

Cybersecurity experts are baffled by local election officials choosing the computerized voting machines. “It’s a mystery to me,” said Rich DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer science professor and former Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer. “Does someone have 8 x 10 glossies? No one has been able to figure out the behavior of elections officials. It’s like they all drink the same Kool-Aid.”

The animus is mutual. At conferences, election administrators swap complaints about cyber experts treating them like idiots, said Dana DeBeauvoir, head of elections in Travis County, Texa

We have long agreed with all those calling for Voter Marked Paper Ballots. Paying double or more for machines that are risky and lead to long lines can most easily be explained by the extensive lobbying of election officials and legislative bodies.

From Bloomberg  Expensive, Glitchy Voting Machines Expose 2020 Hacking Risks <read>

Paper ballots may be safer and cheaper, but local officials swoon at digital equipment…

Her experience Nov. 5 was no isolated glitch. Over the course of the day, the new election machinery, bought over the objections of cybersecurity experts, continued to malfunction. Built by Election Systems & Software, the ExpressVote XL was designed to marry touchscreen technology with a paper-trail for post-election audits. Instead, it created such chaos that poll workers had to crack open the machines, remove the ballot records and use scanners summoned from across state lines to conduct a recount that lasted until 5 a.m.

In one case, it turned out a candidate that the XL showed getting just 15 votes had won by about 1,000. Neither Northampton nor ES&S know what went wrong…

But now, the machinery that was supposed to be the solution has spawned a whole new controversy, this time with national security at stake—the prospect of foreign states disrupting American elections…

Yet many state and local jurisdictions, like Northampton County, are buying a new generation of computerized voting machines ahead of the 2020 presidential election that security experts say are less secure and cost more—about $24 per voter, compared with $12 per voter in jurisdictions using a mix of the two systems, according to the University of Pittsburgh, which analyzed costs in Pennsylvania…

Cybersecurity experts are baffled by local election officials choosing the computerized voting machines. “It’s a mystery to me,” said Rich DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer science professor and former Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer. “Does someone have 8 x 10 glossies? No one has been able to figure out the behavior of elections officials. It’s like they all drink the same Kool-Aid.”

The animus is mutual. At conferences, election administrators swap complaints about cyber experts treating them like idiots, said Dana DeBeauvoir, head of elections in Travis County, Texas, whose office purchased a computerized system DeMillo deplores. Hand-marked ballots are “a supremely horrible idea” cooked up by people in Washington “who have never had to really conduct an election,” she said.

We have long agreed with all those calling for Voter Marked Paper Ballots. Paying double or more for machines that are risky and lead to long lines can most easily be explained by the extensive lobbying of election officials and legislative bodies.