CTVotersCount.org

Secretary of the State’s Letter To Senator Schumer RE: Premier, ES&S

“We are concerned that this transaction will unduly stifle competition across the country and for Connecticut in a number of significant ways.”

Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz and Deputy Secretary Lesley Mara have sent the following letter to Senator Schumer relative to the Premier acquisition by ES&S.

October 26, 2009

The Honorable Charles Schumer
Chairman
Committee on Rules and Administration
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

RE: Sale of Diebold’s voting machine business, Premier Election Solutions, Inc. to Election Systems & Software Inc.

Dear Senator Schumer:

Thank you for the opportunity to share our concerns with you and the Committee regarding the sale of Premier Election Solutions, Inc. (“Premier”) to Election Systems and Software, Inc. (“ES&S”). We greatly appreciate your leadership in this important area and your recognition that this country’s election systems must be rigorously safeguarded.

We are concerned that this transaction will unduly stifle competition across the country and for Connecticut in a number of significant ways. First, for those states looking for new machines, there will be fewer vendors from which to choose, potentially driving up the cost of purchasing new machines and giving the states less leverage in demanding high standards of quality, especially with respect to transparency and security issues.

Second, once machines are purchased, this transaction can negatively affect the quality of ongoing service contracts with the states, contracts that include ongoing preventive maintenance of the machines and other services. Since ES&S offers a product that competes with the Premier product purchased by Connecticut, it seems unlikely that ES&S will dedicate sufficient resources and development energies to the extent necessary to support two distinct products. It seems much more likely that ES&S will devote the majority of its resources to its own present product line to the detriment of those customer states across the country that currently use the Premier product.

Finally, as ES&S positions itself to dominate the voting machine sales and service industry, it also assumes unfair control of the pace and quality of innovation down the road. In short, if ES&S is “the only game in town,” then the lack of outside competition may also impact future product innovation in this industry.

By way of background, the State of Connecticut entered into a contract with Diebold (now Premier) in June, 2006 for the acquisition of optical scan voting machines to replace the state’s lever voting machines. That contract included the purchase of equipment and accessories, training, on-site support during the first use of the equipment, programming of memory cards and ongoing maintenance. Our contract expires on December 31, 2026.

We conducted our first statewide use of the new equipment in November, 2007 and completed the largest single use of the new voting machines during the historic Presidential election last November. While that portion of the contract relating to the purchase and delivery of the equipment has been implemented, we have a strong interest in maintaining quality, ongoing service and maintenance of the product we have purchased for the seventeen (17) years that remain on our contract.

One provision in Connecticut’s contract with Premier requires Premier: (1) to address security vulnerabilities identified in a report by the University of California at Berkeley specifically entitled: “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter,”and (2) to provide Connecticut with any upgrade(s) addressing those vulnerabilities at no additional cost. Those upgrades were supposed to have been provided within one year and that deadline has now passed. Although Premier has received EAC certification for a new version of its product that it may claim addresses the issues contained in the subject report, the upgrades have not been offered to Connecticut for review. Now that ES&S has acquired Premier, we are concerned that ES&S may not dedicate the technical and other resources necessary to fulfill this provision in a timely way.

At the same time we chose optical scan voting machines in 2006, we also entered into a contract with IVS, LLC to provide one accessible voting machine at each polling place in the state. The “Vote-By-Phone” system uses a special telephone at each polling place to allow voters to cast their ballots. We specifically entered into a year-to-year arrangement for this product because it was, and remains, our goal to find a more permanent solution. Ultimately, we want a ballot that can be fed into the optical scan voting machine – the vote-by-phone ballots look different and must be hand counted separately. While the vote-by-phone system is especially helpful for persons who are sight-impaired or blind, we hope that a future technology can accommodate even more disabilities, including providing sip-and-puff options, foot pedals and other features to expand the usefulness and accessibility of the machines.

In anticipating a future Request for Proposal for accessible voting machines, both ES&S and Premier have traditionally offered ballot marking devices that might meet the state’s business requirements. It was also our understanding that Premier was conducting its own research and technical development to offer a new product that might be even more attractive to customers. With the acquisition of Premier by ES&S, one vendor is lost to this process and it seems likely that Premier’s innovation and research into any new product will be lost as well. This transaction will result in fewer vendors participating in the RFP process in Connecticut, with the attendant consequence that the state will have less leverage in negotiating for the best possible price. Further, as previously mentioned, this dynamic may stifle the innovation that could lead to more efficient machines.

Thank you again for conducting a thorough review of this transaction and its impact on election systems across the country. It is imperative that competition be maintained to provide optimal opportunities for states to purchase voting machines that are cost-effective and machines that ensure transparency, auditability, security and accuracy. A more concentrated voting machine industry jeopardizes such competition and places states at a disadvantage in fulfilling their responsibilities to the voters they serve.

Please do not hesitate to contact this office if we can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Susan Bysiewicz
Secretary of the State

Lesley D. Mara
Deputy Secretary of the State

Earlier coverage of the acquisition <here> <here>

Statisticians, Political Scientists, Election Officials, and Advocates Recommendations to NIST

“We strongly recommend that the next version of the VVSG support auditing election outcomes by facilitating small-batch reporting in standardized electronic reporting formats, and usable voter-verifiable cast vote records.”

Last weekend I participated in a working meeting in Alexandria, VA to design pragmatic post-election audits. One result was a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST) making suggestions for the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines which they are in the process of updating. I am one of two participants and endorsers from Connecticut <Letter>

Overview

Two key goals of vote tabulation audits are

-To verify that the election outcomes implied by the reported vote totals are correct, and
-To provide data for process improvement: specifically, to identify and quantify various causes of discrepancies between voter intentions and the originally reported vote totals.

Difficulty in obtaining subtotals of the machine tallies to compare with manually-derived totals from small batches of ballots is a major problem. Efficient vote tabulation audits require – in addition to software-independent audit trails – timely, comprehensive, detailed, standardized, machine-readable subtotals of the votes as recorded by the vote tabulation systems. For greatest efficiency, individual ballot interpretations should be available to support emerging methods that audit at the ballot level (that is, batches of size 1) without breaching confidentiality.

Future VVSGs should contain audit-related requirements for all voting systems, designed in consultation with experts in election auditing, to ensure that the next generation of voting systems facilitate election audits.

Key areas for standards include:

-Usability of the paper record
-Comprehensive reporting of all important data elements
-Small-batch or individual ballot reporting capability
-Machine-readable, standard election result reporting formats, with support for standardized identification of contests and candidates, –that facilitate aggregation for electoral contests spanning multiple jurisdictions
-Machine-readable, standard audit result reporting formats, including audit units selected and discrepancies found

…

Voting systems should make it easy to create detailed reports with subtotals by contest, by ballot batch, by precinct, or by scanner or tabulation machine.

One common, standardized data format is needed for reporting audit results, as well as initial election results. Implementation details are outside the scope of this letter; election auditing experts should participate in specifying these requirements.

In summary, we strongly recommend that the next version of the VVSG support auditing election outcomes by facilitating small-batch reporting in standardized electronic reporting formats, and usable voter-verifiable cast vote records.

One a personal note, it was great to meet in person several political scientists, officials and advocates whom I’ve know only from frequent email and conference call presentations; see again, those I have met previously; and meet several additional scientists, advocates, and officials dedicated to election integrity.

Another Candidate for Secretary of the State?

Opponent charges that Mary Glassman might run for Secretary of the State and resign in a year if she is reelected First Selectman, this fall.

Courant: Rough Tactics In Simsbury First Selectman Race <read>

Opponent charges that Mary Glassman might run for Secretary of the State and resign in a year if she is reelected First Selectman, this fall:

Darren Cunningham, the Republican challenger of incumbent First Selectman Mary Glassman, issued a news release Friday calling on Glassman to pledge that, if re-elected on Tuesday, she will serve out her two-year term and not run for higher statewide office.

Cunningham is calling for Glassman to make such a pledge because of an article Thursday in the online newspaper New Haven Independent. In that article, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said that he is not endorsing a local candidate for Connecticut secretary of the state because he is waiting to hear whether Glassman will be a candidate for that office.

In 2006, while much attention was paid to the Ned Lamont/Joe Lieberman Primary and U.S. Senate election, there was also a hard fought Democratic Primary for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. John DeStefano prevailed over Dan Malloy for Governor, yet Malloy’s choice for Lieutenant Governor, Mary Glassman, prevailed and became DeStafano’s runningmate in the general election. Although they lost, Mary Glassman gained recognition statewide.

Glassman responded during an interview Friday by saying that she was “disappointed” with Cunningham’s news release.

“I’ve worked hard for Simsbury these past two years, and I am looking forward to serving the town over the next two years,” Glassman said. “I have no plans to run for secretary of the state.”

Timely Reminders from Secretary Bysiewicz and CTVotersCount

Referendums and questions are exempt from the Connecticut post-election audit law. However, they are not exempt from the risks of error and fraud.

In a press release, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz reminds voters of the importance of questions on the November municipal ballots:

“Towns throughout Connecticut are facing some crucial decisions on
schools, local budgets, road repair and other issues, so it is
imperative that voters make their voices heard next Tuesday,” said
Secretary Bysiewicz. “Local elections are enormously important for
determining the future direction of all of our communities.”

CTVotersCount reminds voters and the legislature that:

Referendums and questions are exempt from the Connecticut post-election audit law. However, they are not exempt from the risks of error and fraud. The post-election audit law needs to be strengthened is several ways; including subjecting all critical ballots and contests to be subject to selection for audit; and all ballots and contests are critical.

For more information: FAQ: Why Would Anyone Steal A Referendum?

Another Candidate for Secretary Of The State

Gerry Garcia, a financial adviser, who was 9th Ward alderman from 1996 to 2001, promised to be “a new voice to speak on behalf of Connecticut voters and small businesses.”

New Haven Register: Ex-alderman eyes Bysiewicz’s post <read>

A former Democratic alderman is the first person in Connecticut to declare his candidacy for secretary of the state.

Contrary to the story, he is not “the first person”. Looking at the SEEC site we see two others who have declared their candidacy and have been listed there for several months. Republicans Richard Abbate and Corey Brinson. Also on the list is Rep James Spallone’s exploratory committee which we understand is for Secretary of the State (see Update below for another exploratory candidate, Rep Kevin Roldan).

Gerry Garcia, a financial adviser, who was 9th Ward alderman from 1996 to 2001, promised to be “a new voice to speak on behalf of Connecticut voters and small businesses.”…

Garcia has promised to work to make Connecticut an early voting state, which would allow citizens to send in a paper ballot during a limited period leading up to Election Day. Ballots are now available only to those who will be out of town on Election Day.

Garcia, 38, who attended city public schools and earned his undergraduate and master’s in business from Yale University, said he would try to make voting more accessible in the state and would build on reforms instituted by Bysiewicz.

Garcia, who is of Puerto Rican and Jewish descent, headed a Puerto Rican social service organization while at Yale, as well its largest Jewish fraternity.

He worked as an assistant project director at the Anti-Defamation League in 1994. After getting his master’s degree, he moved to New York, where he was an investment banker before returning to Connecticut in 2006…

For all our coverage of the 2010 Secretary of the State race see 2010

*****

Update: New Haven Independent Article <read> The Independent points out an additional exploratory campaign: <Rep. Kevin Roldan of Hartford> So now we count three Democrats and two Republicans.

Here is Garcia’s web site: <GarciaForConnecticut.com>

Hartford Advocate: A New Day? [For Elections Enforcement]

Views of elections enforcement from Representative Chris Caruso and SEEC Director Al Lenge.

Hartford Advocate article on State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) and criticism of its history of enforcement: A New Day? Critics hope a new head of the state’s Elections Enforcement Commission will be tougher on corrupt politicians <read>

Jeffrey B. Garfield just retired as head of Connecticut’s Elections Enforcement Commission, ending more than 30 years as the official watchdog of our campaign laws.

In theory, Garfield was an ever-vigilant guardian ready to rip the entrails out of any scum-sucking politician who violated our sacred election system.

In reality, Garfield and the EEC more often played the role of flaccid, placid lapdog than ass-chewing election Rottweiler, particularly when it came to incumbent state elected officials.

Garfield’s departure has triggered gushing praise for his long service as well as questions about how effective his enforcement efforts were in the past and whether recent reforms will be able to prevent abuses in the future…

Garfield’s replacement, Albert P. Lenge, insists recent reforms have already made the EEC a tougher, more effective agency. “It’s a brand new day,” Lenge said this week. Let’s hope so…

The EEC seemed more eager to go after challengers and municipal officials than to take on the people who controlled the commission’s budget. The commission almost never launched an investigation on its own, preferring to wait for formal complaints. Garfield said the commission didn’t have the resources to go out looking for violators.

Proof of how weak the enforcement was came in an eruption of federally prosecuted corruption cases that included convictions of ex-Gov. John G. Rowland, Silvester, ex-Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and ex-state Sen. Ernest Newton III. Those scandals finally led in 2005 to passage of public campaign financing and reforms intended to insulate the commission’s enforcement arm from political pressure.

“Had they [Garfield and the EEC] been stronger, had the whistle been blown sooner, you probably wouldn’t have seen the level of corruption that came about,” said state Rep. Chris Caruso, a Bridgeport Democrat who formerly served as co-chairman of the legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee…

Lenge, who served as the commission’s deputy director and general counsel since 1995, doesn’t agree with many criticisms of the EEC’s past performance and also argues recent reforms have made the agency even stronger…

“Those were strong enforcement actions,” said Lenge. Caruso thinks the penalties should have been much heavier.

“There’s been a tradition within the EEC to level fines of a few thousand dollars on sitting state officials,” said Caruso. “In public opinion, really those are slaps on the wrist.”

Lenge says the emphasis on bigger fines ignores the effect an EEC reprimand can have on an incumbent’s reelection. “Just a finding [of wrongdoing] or a reprimand sometimes sends a strong message,” Lenge said.

He also disputes there was ever an EEC tactic of going after easy targets like local or challenge candidates.

Lenge said creation of an enforcement unit that is insulated from the director and the rest of the EEC staff has made the agency more independent and more likely to take on powerful incumbents. He also argues the commission has lots more resources now, with a staff that’s grown from seven in 1995 to 52 today. The EEC is now auditing every single 2008 legislative campaign and will initiate investigations if need be.

In the past we have criticized the speed of the SEEC and the Legislature because election regulations and procedures are not enforceable by the SEEC, leaving little room for holding election officials to account for lapses in the conduct of elections and audits.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on Citizens United v. FEC

the Court would have to ignore several time-honored principles that have served for the past two centuries to preserve the public’s respect for and acceptance of its decisions…At the oral argument last month, one justice seemed to suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for a tobacco company to try to defeat a candidate who wants to regulate tobacco, and to use its shareholders’ money to do so.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on Citizens United v. FEC <read>

The principles involved and the consequences of the case:

while I have disagreed with many Supreme Court decisions, I have great respect for that institution and for the men and women who serve on the Court. But this step would be so damaging to our democracy and is so unwarranted and unnecessary that I must speak out. That is why Senator McCain and I have come to the floor today.

To overrule the Austin decision in this case, the Court would have to ignore several time-honored principles that have served for the past two centuries to preserve the public’s respect for and acceptance of its decisions. First, it is a basic tenet of constitutional law that the Court will not decide a case on constitutional grounds unless absolutely necessary, and that it if there is no choice but to reach a constitutional issue, the Court will decide the case as narrowly as possible…

The second principle is known as stare decisis, meaning that the Court respects its precedents and overrules them only in the most unusual of cases. Chief Justice John Roberts, whom many believe to be the swing justice in this case, made grand promises of what he called “judicial modesty,” when he came before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005. Respect for precedent was a key component of the approach that he asked us to believe he possessed…

Talk about a jolt to the legal system. It’s hard to imagine a bigger jolt than to strike down laws in over 20 states and a federal law that has been the cornerstone of the nation’s campaign finance system for 100 years. The settled expectations that would be upset by this decision are enormous. And subsequent developments surely have not shown that the Austin decision is unworkable. Indeed, the Court relied on it as recently as 2003 in the McConnell case and even cited it in the Wisconsin Right to Life decision just two years ago, written by none other than Chief Justice Roberts. To be sure, there are justices on the Court who dissented from the Austin decision when it came down and continue to do so today. But if stare decisis means anything, a precedent on which so many state legislatures and the American people have relied should not be cast aside simply because a few new justices have arrived on the Court.

Third, the courts decide cases only on a full evidentiary record so that all sides have a chance to put forward their best arguments and the court can be confident that it is making a decision based on the best information available. In this case, precisely because the Supreme Court reached out to pose a broad constitutional question that had not been raised below, there is no record whatsoever to which the Court can turn. None. And the question here demands a complete record because the legal standard under prevailing First Amendment law is whether the statute is designed to address a compelling state interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that result…

Does the Supreme Court really believe that the First Amendment requires the American people to accept a system where banks and investment firms, having just taken our country into its worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, can spend millions upon millions of dollars of ads directly advocating the defeat of those candidates who didn’t vote to bail them out or want to prevent future economic disaster by imposing strict new financial services regulations?…

At the oral argument last month, one justice seemed to suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for a tobacco company to try to defeat a candidate who wants to regulate tobacco, and to use its shareholders’ money to do so. This is the system that the Supreme Court may bequeath to this country if it doesn’t turn back. Some will say that corporate interests already have too much power

Low Tech, Computer Hack

Just a little reminder that we can have all the physical security, encryption, open source, and source disclosure in the world. Yet, there are still low tech ways to hack systems available to high school “D students”.

Update: Nationwide: Computers Increase Students’ Temptation To Cheat

Two Manchester High School students breached the school district’s computer system and altered grades and attendance records, police said Tuesday.

The incident remains under investigation.

Police said the students learned the user name and password to the system from watching a school administrator log in.

They changed grades and attendance records multiple times over the past two weeks, police said. One of the students changed a grade from a D to a C, police said. Another student discovered what they were doing and told a school official about it.

Update: 10/30/2009 Courant: Nationwide: Computers Increase Students’ Temptation To Cheat <read>

More evidenced that it does not take researcg at Princeton or UConn to cheat with computers. Are registrars any more savvy than school administrators in preventing and detecting fraud?

Much of it is using computers for cheating, but some is hacking:

There’s nothing new about cheating, said Lt. James Wardwell, a computer forensics expert with the New Britain Police Department, “and the computer is just another tool to help someone accomplish a bad deed.”

What is new is that cheating in America’s high schools has become “rampant, and it’s getting worse,” according to a 2008 nationwide survey by the Josephson Institute, the California-based nonprofit organization that runs the Character Counts! youth ethics program in schools in Connecticut and throughout the country.

The survey of 30,000 high school students found that 64 percent said they had cheated on a test during the past year, up from 60 percent in 2006. The survey did not address school computer hacking, but 36 percent of respondents said they had used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, an increase from 33 percent in 2006.

Some students have been lured into cyber-cheating by the apparent cloak that computers and personal communication devices provide, Michael Josephson, president of the ethics institute, said. Armed with stolen information, kids can enter school record systems from their bedrooms, or they can photograph copies of tests with their cellphones and send them to others who have to take the same test…

Newspaper reports from throughout the country show that the methods students use to crack school computer programs range from simply watching a school staff member entering a password — the method used in Manchester, according to police — to sneaking spyware onto school computers. “Key-logger” programs, for instance, record all strokes on a computer keyboard and send a record to another computer.

In some cases, cyber-cheating students have lifted user names and passwords from hard copy lists left in school offices. Some school staff members use their own names, or slightly altered variations, as passwords, enabling a student to enter a grading or attendance site after a few guesses.

That was the case in Naples, Fla., recently, where police say a 16-year-old boy slipped into school district computers by guessing an employee’s password. The boy was then able to change the grades of five or six students, according to Florida news reports.

Nationwide: Computers Increase Students’ Temptation To Cheat

Open Source Voting Software Released

Open source has great potential to facilitate voting integrity and independence from sole source voting equipment/software vendors and outsourcing of elections. This particular project is comprehensive including voter registration capabilities and has interest from major players.

Wired Article: Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released <read>

Not actually the first, yet a significant development. From the Wired article:

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes…

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

Open source has great potential to facilitate voting integrity and independence from sole source equipment/software vendors and outsourcing of elections. This particular project is comprehensive including voter registration capabilities and has interest from major players:

The foundation has elicited help from academics and election officials from eight states as well as voter advocacy groups, such as Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, to guide developers in building the system. Technology bigwigs such as Oracle, Sun and IBM have also approached the group to help with the project…

The foundation already has California, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington interested in adopting the system and is in talks with 11 other states. Florida, which has been racked by voting machine problems since the 2000 presidential debacle, has also expressed interest, as has Georgia, which uses machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) statewide.

Other coverage:

InformationWeek Blog: Can Open Source Software Save Democracy? <read> A good overview and summary of the business challenges for vendors. This is why we are skeptical that left on their own high quality proprietary solutions will be developed:

But the solutions aren’t necessarily obvious: only electronic voting machines are truly accessible to all voters, technicians do need reset buttons, wireless features are needed to report results in a timely manner, and a paper audit trail doesn’t ensure that votes are counted properly unless you can determine which (the electronic or paper) reflects actual voter intent.

The problems are compounded because there’s little profit margin in voting machines (which are paid for by cash-strapped local governments) and thus little incentive for voting machine vendors to invest a great deal in R&D.

And surprisingly, at least to me, from the John Birch Society: Open Source Election Software Revealed <read>

Through a collaborative effort between state and local elections officials and technology experts, the group aims to create federally certified voting software that will restore trust and transparency in elections by allowing anyone to inspect the code. Proprietary voting systems used in recent elections have come under fire for secrecy, unreliability and a host of other problems.

Al Lenge Named Director of State Elections Enforcement Commission

Al Lenge, long time Deputy Director of the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) was named Director, replacing retired Director Jeff Garfield.

From Jon Lender at the Hartford Courant: Al Lenge, long time Deputy Director of the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) was named Director, replacing retired Director Jeff Garfield <read>

Lenge has been deputy director and assistant general counsel since 1995, and previously headed the elections division at the office of the Secretary of the State.

In a statement Wednesday, the commisson called Lenge “a committed and experienced leader who has been involved in all aspects of election and campaign finance law.” Garfield said: “He brings continuity,experience and dedication to his new role and will continue to make significant contributions to the operations of the Commission with the utmost degree of professionalism.”

“I am excited and welcome this new opportunity to continue to serve the Commission and the people of the State of Connecticut in ensuring fairness and impartiality in the administration of election laws. The SEEC faces a challenging year ahead,” Lenge said in a statement. “I will draw on my experience during this critical phase of the Commission’s development and continue to build and foster relationships among staff, other state agencies and our partners. I am honored to serve as Executive Director and I especially look forward to working closely with the legislature on the major reforms concerning public campaign financing.”

This is no surprise. I doubt there is anyone more qualified. Although we have criticized the SEEC for lack of speed, we have found both Mr. Garfield and Mr. Lenge easy to work with, committed and knowledgeable. Congratulations.