On Friday 2/29/2008 the Government Administration And Elections Committee held hearings on a variety of bills, several of which involve election administration <Agenda>
While we have interests for and against some of the other bills, three members of CTVotersCount testified toward improvements in SB 444, AN ACT CONCERNING CERTAIN REVISIONS AND TECHNICAL CHANGES TO THE ELECTION LAWS.
Continue reading “CTVotersCount Members Testify At GAE Hearing”
The fifth and last hearing was in East Haven on 2/27. Once again a different flavor and new information.
Ten Myths About Electronic Voting In Connecticut: Myth #1 – Connecticut has the toughest and strongest audit law in the country because we audit 10%.
Ten Myths About Electronic Voting In Connecticut <.pdf>
Myth #1 – Connecticut has the toughest and strongest audit law in the country because we audit 10%.
Reality
Myth #2 – UConn reports of the post-election audits proved that our voting machines count accurately.
Reality
Myth #3 –Hand counting is prone to human error. Electronic voting is more reliable because computers produce the same result over and over again. We should abandon manual audits and just run the ballots through another similar machine to validate the count.
Reality
Myth #4 – Auditing the paper by hand is too costly and time consuming.
Reality
Myth #5 – We can rely on procedures to catch errors and ensure the integrity of elections.
Reality
Myth #6 – Memory card errors cannot affect the outcome of our elections because election officials conduct pre-election testing of our electronic voting systems.
Reality
Myth #7 – We don’t have to worry about memory card problems because UConn tests the memory cards before and after each election.
Reality
Myth #8 – If we can trust our money to ATMs and online banking, we can trust our votes to computers.
Reality
Myth #9 – If there is ever a concern we can always count the paper.
Reality
The law limits when the paper can be counted.
Myth #10 – The only way to ensure that all the votes are counted and that every vote counts is to count 100% of the paper.
Reality
Properly programmed scanners do a reasonable job of counting ballots. The key to safe elections is to:
The Danbury hearing saw smaller attendance and fewer speakers than the previous three hearings. Yet, like the others it had its own tone and provided fresh prospectives.
Denise Weeks, Co-Founder CTVotersCount.org testified at the West Harford hearing <testimony>
Excerpts:
What is most alarming to me is the prevailing belief among registrars of voters and poll workers that machine counts are more reliable than hand counts, that the recent audits demonstrate that machines are more reliable and the conclusion by many that hand counted audits and recounts should be abandoned or replaced by machine audits and recounts.
My experience compels me to argue against these conclusions.
Computers are programmed by people and are every bit as prone to human error as hand counts.
People will make incorrect claims about state, and especially national, laws about electronic voting,… In one local state or community, people could make some problem sound totally insolvable, when in fact it’s routinely solved in other places. Once you know that and have that perspective, it’s easier to get something done. Continue reading “David Dill, Founder VerifiedVoting.org”
 Update: View Hearing at <CT-N>
There were about seventy five people at the West Hartford Government Administration and Elections Committee hearing. It was standing room only, with just a handful need to stand. Unlike the other hearings it was taped by CT-N.
The vast majority of attendees were registrars, moderators, and other election officials. It is hard to believe that this was not an orchestrated turn-out. In fact, before the hearing began, one disappointed registrar left – he told us he had been told it was some type of training, he had not expected a hearing – he had changed his plans to come, cancelled a meeting, and was leaving to go to another obligation.
According to an article in the New Haven Register, the Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz has revised recount procedures to eliminate manual recounts. <read>
As we reported last month, Secretary Bysiewicz was “Prepared” to eliminate manual recounts <read> It seems that preparation must have included writing new recount procedures which are now apparently in place, according to the Register:
Adam Joseph, a Bysiewicz spokesman, said new procedures put in place since the election will help avoid similar problems.
Under existing law and procedures worked out in consultation with the University of Connecticut’s Voting Technology Research Center, “What we’re going to direct registrars to do in upcoming elections with regard to recounts is to review the ballots†and “questionable ballots should be set aside,†he said.
Registrars would run the remaining ballots through with a different memory card and then count the questionable ballots by hand with all parties looking on, Joseph said.
Surprisingly, if Mr. Joseph was accurately quoted, this new procedure was put in place sometime between February 5th and February 23rd, for an election eight months off — while just last Friday the Secretary announced a Voting Security and Accessibility Board, presumably to advise her office on such matters. Equally surprising is that the change would be put in place at the same time the legislature is holding hearings around the state to gather concerns from the public relative to electronic voting.
It seems there will also be a push in the legislature from Representative Lawlor and others to fix this in the law, possibly preventing a future Secretary of the State from reverting to manual recounts:
Lawlor is a [Government Administration and Elections] committee member. Lawlor said that he, along with other members of East Haven’s legislative delegation, soon will submit legislation in response to last November’s East Haven mayoral election, which resulted in two hand recounts and, according to Lawlor, revealed “serious flaws†in the state’s guidelines regarding how recounts of the new paper ballots should be carried out.
To our knowledge, Representative Lawlor was the first legislator to call for scrapping manual recounts. <read>
At the Public Hearings we have been providing copies of Ten Myths About Electronic Voting In Connecticut. Although about audits, Myth #3 applies equally to recounts:
Myth #3 Hand counting is prone to human error. Electronic voting is more reliable because computers produce the same result over and over again. We should abandon manual audits and just run the ballots through another machine to validate the count.
Reality
Bonus: RFK Jr. interviews election official, Ion Sancho, who understands the issues <watch>
Why do we need independent audits? – Because people too close to the system have too much faith in its integrity and too much stake in proving it worked perfectly.
Today we welcome and heartily applaud the defense of random post-election audits by the Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz, while we point to the dangers of blind faith in computers, procedures, Diebold Premier, and LHS..
Stamford Advocate article: State to audit Greenwich primary results <read>
Update: Our complements are tempered by the latest news that the Secretary is abandoning manual recounts. Alse we hope that when she said “it’s important to do a random audit each year” she meant after each election.
Lets start with Secretary Bysiewicz:
Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz defended the system, which requires municipal election officials to send the hand count results to the University of Connecticut for a statistical analysis. A report on that analysis should be available in about a month, she said.
“I have had a few legislators say, ‘Gee, maybe in the future we won’t need this.’ I would fight that,” Bysiewicz said. “I think from the voters standpoint and from the standpoint of the integrity of the election process, it’s important to do a random audit each year to ensure people that their vote is being counted properly and that, if there is fraud, we can ferret that out.”
Municipalities chosen for the random audit will receive reimbursement for “reasonable” expenses incurred from the process, Bysiewicz said.
“Yes, it does cost some time and effort, but I think it is a worthwhile investment in the security and integrity of our election process,” Bysiewicz said.
Let us turn to an example how not to be perceived as performing the duties of Registrar in carrying out the law in an unbiased manner:
Election officials in Greenwich are reluctantly preparing for a state-mandated audit of this month’s Super Tuesday primary results…
“It’s drudge work,” said Veronica Baron Musca, the town’s Republican registrar of voters.
Lest we think the bias is political or that having registrars of two parties insures an adversarial check and balance in the conduct of the audit:
Sharon Vecchiolla, the Democratic registrar, said she hopes the mandatory audits might become unnecessary over time if the results show no disparities between the hand counts and machine tallies.
Yes, if they find no problems the reward might be less audits. Quite an incentive to avoid surfacing problems, for which the only perceived rewards would be more drudgery and perhaps close scruting of the conduct of the election in a town unlucky enough to detect an error.
Now for that blind faith:
Musca said she had confidence in the machines’ accuracy. There’s no way you can make a mistake. You color in your ovals and the machine reads it,” she said. “It’s as good as scanning their can of peas (at the supermarket). If they trust the price on their can of peas, they should trust this as well.”
Unfortunately, Grocery Scanning (like ATM banking) is not the same as optical scan voting.
Since we have heard this before, it deserves its own Frequently Asked Question for our archives. <read>
[Greenwich Registrar of Voters] Musca said she had confidence in the machines’ accuracy. There’s no way you can make a mistake. You color in your ovals and the machine reads it,” she said. “It’s as good as scanning their can of peas (at the supermarket). If they trust the price on their can of peas, they should trust this as well.” <ref>
Unfortunately, Grocery Scanning (like ATM banking) is not the same as optical scan voting. Its not just that the computers are different – the whole “system” is different.
If the store programmed the peas incorrectly, then a customer would notice – their receipt and the money they paid would be incorrect – or the store would notice that they were losing money on peas – or perhaps an observant unbiased clerk that did not have blind faith in the scanner would notice. If just one customer or store employee noticed then the problem would be swiftly corrected and likely correct at least until the next change in price for peas was input by another employee.
Why do registrars say that manual counting of ballots is error prone? Because it is done by people who are inherently unreliable. Why do grocery scanners make mistakes? Because they are programmed and updated by people who are inherently unreliable.
How do we detect and correct problems with grocery scanners? We have checks and balances to offset the errors often made by humans – the store should have them while they input prices and upgrade the system – the receipt and money exchange is another check.
How do we detect and correct problems with voting systems – we test as well as we can beforehand – we independently test memory cards (we should) – we do sufficient random audits after elections. We cannot check receipts – we have something better in Connecticut: the ballots filled out by the voters. There is no money transaction we can check, they voter cannot detect an error and see that it is fixed for subsequent voters.
How do we detect and correct problems with human hand counted audits? We count with best practices that reduce problems with counting in the first place: teams of three or four counters; redundant counting of small batches; counting without knowledge of original machine counts; public observation of procedures. If counts don’t match machine results we count again, more carefully. If they still don’t match we do forensic research on the ballots and machines to determine the reason for the discrepancy and then work to determine the cause. (These are all things we should do. Unfortunately, at this time these are not the sort of things that are always done in Connecticut).
Let us not forget that paying a few cents more for a can of peas is hardly the same as losing democracy. We take voting integrity as a hassle at our peril.