Electronic Elections

October 24th, 2006

I used to work for a huge software company — consequently, electronic voting has never set well with me. If you’ve ever spent an entertaining evening in a darkened room with only a giant screen providing light, having a programmer take you through the electronic back allies they frequent, you’d understand just how cavalier such a notion as “one touch” voting is. It’s also been my experience [with a nod toward any programmers out there who protest] that they fall into two categories … the straight arrows and the rogues of the universe. I’m particularly fond of the latter — and it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine one of them cracking as simple a program as Diebold has produced just for the joy of it … profit would be a secondary consideration. And I’ll go on record as having noted that the rogues are less inclined to be shoved around by authority … it’s the straight arrows you have to worry about.

Voting machine woes, below — last article is by Greg Palast, surfacing to give us further warnings.

Jude

New voting systems, rules may spell trouble at polls
Election analysts expect complications, but some disagree over how widespread they will be in the midterm tally.
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, LA Times
October 24, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-elect24oct24,1,1747895.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

WASHINGTON — Ambitious efforts to modernize the nation’s patchwork voting system were finally supposed to pay big dividends in the 2006 congressional balloting, but instead election day could bring a new round of problems, confusion and partisan rancor.

Unproven electronic voting machines, stricter voter identification requirements in many states, new databases and partisan disputes over registration campaigns are all contributing to the concern. So are the closely divided nature of the American electorate and the rising stakes in this year’s voting as Democrats appear poised for major gains.

“The Nov. 7 election promises to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections: a divided body politic, an election system in flux, and the possibility — if not certainty — of problems at polls nationwide,” said a report released today by the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project.

“As the midterm elections approach, machine failures, database delays and foul-ups, inconsistent procedures, new rules and new equipment have some predicting chaos at the polls at worst and widespread polling place snafus at best,” said the report, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and is available on the Internet at electionline.org.

Some election officials insist such pessimistic predictions are overblown.

“It is a lot of new technology,” said Deborah L. Markowitz, president of the National Assn. of Secretaries of State. “But we did have test drives, which were our primary elections this summer and fall, and by and large, things went pretty well.” Markowitz, a Democrat, is Vermont’s secretary of state.

But Caltech political science professor Michael Alvarez said election systems in most states remain works in progress, and goals for preventing another debacle like Florida’s ballot counting in the 2000 presidential election have yet to be reached.

“States have made some progress, and you continue to see some improvement. But it doesn’t appear that we have fully fixed a lot of the problems with voting,” said Alvarez, who is co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project.

“The bottom line here is that we are in a period of closely contested elections in the American body politic,” Alvarez added. “Nobody would care about this if elections weren’t so close.”

In another reflection of the concern, a group of 10 technical experts wrote to Congress last month urging that lawmakers consider the adoption of quality control standards for electronic voting. One such safeguard would involve checking the electronic vote total against a statistically valid random sample of paper ballots verified by voters before they leave the polling place.

“We see the election process in the United States at grave risk,” wrote the technical experts, an informal group of quality control consultants, spearheaded by Larry P. English, president of Information Impact International, a data and information management firm in Brentwood, Tenn.

“The 2004 elections revealed many different types of failure in automated technologies,” the group wrote. “The 2006 [primaries] saw electronic vote counts that were changed several times. The truth is that introduction of automation increases the need to manage the reliability and accuracy of the election process as a whole.”

Researchers at the Election Reform Information Project focused on three major areas in which local, state and federal officials have labored to improve the accuracy and reliability of voting: electronic voting, voter identification and the creation of databases of eligible voters.

Electronic voting was supposed to eliminate the spectacle of hanging chads — the partially punched paper ballots that perplexed Florida officials after the 2000 vote. But one widely adopted method, the touch-screen voting known as DRE — or direct recording electronic — has raised concerns about security and reliability. Most states require a paper backup for votes cast on such systems.

Requirements for voters to show identification at the polls are also on the rise, with 23 states requiring some form of ID, compared with 11 in 2000. But the rules vary greatly from state to state. Some are being challenged in court on grounds that they may be used to intimidate legitimate voters. And many longtime voters may be unfamiliar with recent changes.

Under a 2002 federal law, states were required to create databases of all registered voters in their jurisdictions in an attempt to deter fraud, eliminate duplicate registrations and keep voter lists up to date. But the transition has proven more difficult than expected, partly because of mundane problems such as name changes and data entry errors.

As a result, there is concern that some voters may show up on election day only to find they have been purged from the list.

“We are in a kind of extraordinary period. The system is changing more rapidly than at any time in recent memory, and doing so when the nation politically is evenly divided,” said Doug Chapin, director of the group that produced the new report. “It is under pressure like never before.”

California does not have many truly competitive federal races, but voting problems could affect some statewide and local races, Alvarez said. Jurisdictions across the state have been adopting electronic voting, and the June primary brought its share of problems. The state has established security standards for the systems, including the requirement to produce a paper record of each vote.

Some of the voting changes have alarmed political partisans. Democrats, in particular, are concerned that identification requirements could effectively disenfranchise many minority and low-income voters who would be expected to vote for Democratic candidates.

Electronic voting, however, has raised concerns across the political spectrum.

University-based computer scientists have managed to hack into some of the systems in laboratory experiments, although no incidents of tampering with an actual election are known to have occurred.

Manufacturers have defended the systems as secure and reliable. But they have also refused to make their software public, a step that some critics say would demystify the systems and make it easier for independent experts to verify accuracy.

Critics “are not saying dump the technology, they are saying fine-tune the technology,” said Markowitz, the state elections official.

Some of the most publicized problems with electronic systems have involved not the computers themselves, but the people running them.

During Maryland’s primary in September, election officials in the affluent Washington suburb of Montgomery County forgot to include voter access cards in the election packages delivered to polling places. As a result, the machines would not function. Lines of frustrated voters swelled as officials tried to unscramble the glitch.

Voting problems could become a major national issue again if they affect races that could tip the balance of power in the House or Senate. Both parties have teams of lawyers ready to deploy to cities and states with disputed elections.

“Not all states with problems will have close elections, and not all states with close elections will have problems,” said Chapin. “It’s where the two come together that you have the potential for the kind of back and forth we saw [in 2000].” ++

Chicago Voter Database Hacked
Civic Group Claims It Could Have Tampered With Voter Roles
JAKE TAPPER and REBECCA ABRAHAMS
Oct. 23, 2006
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2601085&page=1

As if there weren’t enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.

Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project — which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies — tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.

“It was a serious identity theft problem, but also a problem that could potentially create problems with the election,” Wilson said.

A nefarious hacker could have changed every voter’s status from active to inactive, which would have prevented them from voting, he said.

“Or we could’ve changed the information on what precinct you were in or what polling place you were supposed to go to,” he said. “So there were ways that we could potentially change the entire online data base and disenfranchise voters throughout the entire city of Chicago.”

“If we’d wanted to, we could’ve wiped the entire database out,” Wilson claimed.

Tom Leach, a spokesman for the Chicago Election Board, tells ABC News that the problem seems to have arisen because the city’s database allowing voters to locate their voting precinct once asked voters for detailed information such as Social Security numbers.

Approximately six years ago, Leach said, when the website was updated — requiring only name and address — city computer experts “never cut the links to the Social Security numbers and the dates of birth.”

Leach said he doubted the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project could have disenfranchised voters or wiped out the database, but he and the Election Board were very concerned and had taken steps to remedy whatever problems exist, including bringing in an outside computer forensic expert to verify that the database is secure and to ensure no one had already hacked the database.

“We’re also making arrangements to remove the Social Security numbers,” he added, and the Election Board was also alerting law enforcement to the problem as pointed out to them.

“Even though they could hack into the Web site, they couldn’t hack into the voter file,” Leach said. “The Web site feeds into a copy file, not the actual original file.”

Leach said the issue had absolutely nothing to do with the city’s electronic voting machines, which are manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems.

But Wilson counters that this is just one hole in a system that may be full of them.

“This is a part of the entire electronic voting program that we’re depending on — computerized voter databases and electronic voting machines,” Wilson said. “Any computer is subject to failure and security flaws and we have seen in electronic voting hundreds of news reports about dozens and dozens of jurisdictions where there are problems.” ++

Recipe for a Cooked Election
Greg Palast
Saturday, October 21, 2006 by Yes! Magazine
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1021-25.htm

A nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage. Most are called “spoiled,” supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted. This “spoilage” has occurred for decades, but it reached unprecedented heights in the last two presidential elections. In the 2004 election, for example, more than three million ballots were never counted.

Almost as deep a secret is that people are doing something about it. In New Mexico, citizen activists, disgusted by systematic vote disappearance, demanded change — and got it.

In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away — more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. The official number is bad enough — 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government’s Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count.

Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. Why doesn’t your government tell you this?

Hey, they do. It’s right there in black and white in a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election — in a footnote. The Census tabulation of voters voting in the 2004 presidential race “differs,” it reads, from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count, which, with the exception of the Census’s whispered footnote, has not been reported. In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called “spoilage.” Spoilage, not the voters, picked our President for us. Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the three million ballots uncounted due to technical “glitches,” millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, “It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.” That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the USA, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don’t get counted decides our winners.

In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney’s bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that’s not how it went down.

The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The principal means of the election heist — voiding ballots — went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale next time

Like a forensic crime scene investigation unit, we can perform a post mortem starting with the exhumation of more than three million uncounted votes:

Provisional Ballots Rejected. An entirely new species of ballot debuted nationwide in 2004: the “provisional ballot.” These were crucial to the Bush victory. Not because Republicans won this “provisional” vote. They won by rejecting provisional ballots that were cast overwhelmingly in Democratic precincts. The sum of “the uncounted” is astonishing: 675,676 ballots lost in the counties reporting to the federal government. Add in the missing jurisdictions and the un-vote climbs to over a million: 1,090,729 provisional ballots tossed out.

Spoiled Ballots. You vote, you assume it’s counted. Think again. Your “x” was too light for a machine to read. You didn’t punch the card hard enough and so you “hung your chad.” Therefore, your vote didn’t count and, crucially, you’ll never know it. The federal Election Assistance Commission toted up nearly a million ballots cast but not counted. Add in states too shy to report to Washington, the total “spoilage” jumps to a rotten 1,389,231.

Absentee Ballots Uncounted. The number of absentee ballots has quintupled in many states, with the number rejected on picayune technical grounds rising to over half a million (526,420) in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic.

Voters Barred from Voting. In this category we find a combination of incompetence and trickery that stops voters from pulling the lever in the first place. There’s the purge of “felon” voters that continues to eliminate thousands whose only crime is VWB — Voting While Black. It includes subtle games like eliminating polling stations in selected districts, creating impossible lines. No one can pretend to calculate a hard number for all votes lost this way any more than you can find every bullet fragment in a mutilated body. But it’s a safe bet that the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands of voters locked out of the voting booth.

The test kitchen
But do these un-votes really turn the election? Voters from both parties used provisional or absentee ballots, and the machines can’t tell if a hanging chad is Democratic or Republican, right? Not so. To see how it works, we went to New Mexico.

Dig this: In November 2004 during early voting in Precinct 13, Taos, New Mexico, John Kerry took 73 votes. George Bush got three. On election day, 216 in that precinct voted Kerry. Bush got 25 votes, and came in third.

Third? Taking second place in the precinct, with 40 votes, was no one at all.

Or, at least, that’s what the machines said.

Precinct 13 is better known as the Taos Pueblo. Every single voter there is an American Native or married to one.

Precinct 13 wasn’t unique. On Navajo lands, indecision struck on an epidemic scale. They walked in, they didn’t vote. In nine precincts in McKinley County, New Mexico, which is 74.7 percent Navajo, fewer than one in ten voters picked a president. Those who voted on paper ballots early or absentee knew who they wanted (Kerry, overwhelmingly), but the machine-counted vote said Indians simply couldn’t make up their minds or just plain didn’t care.

On average, across the state, the machine printouts say that 7.3 percent — one in twelve voters — in majority Native precincts didn’t vote for president. That’s three times the percentage of white voters who appeared to abstain. In pueblo after pueblo, on reservation after reservation throughout the United States, the story was the same.

Nationally, one out of every 12 ballots cast by Native Americans did not contain a vote for President. Indians by the thousands drove to the voting station, walked into the booth, said, “Who cares?” and walked out without voting for president.

So we dropped in on Taos, Precinct 13. The “old” pueblo is old indeed— built 500 to 1,000 years ago. In these adobe dwellings stacked like mud condos, no electricity is allowed nor running water — nor Republicans as far as records show. Richard Archuleta, a massive man with long, gray pigtails and hands as big as fl ank steaks, is the head of tourism for the pueblo. Richard wasn’t buying the indecision theory of the Native non-count. Indians were worried about their Bureau of Indian Affairs grants, their gaming licenses, and working conditions at their other big employer: the U.S. military.

On the pueblo’s mud-brick walls there were several hand painted signs announcing Democratic Party powwows, none for Republicans. Indecisive? Indians are Democrats. Case closed. The color that counts It wasn’t just Native Americans who couldn’t seem to pick a President. Throughout New Mexico, indecisiveness was pandemic … at least, that is, among people of color. Or so the machines said. Across the state, high-majority Hispanic precincts recorded a 7.1 percent vote for nobody for president.

We asked Dr. Philip Klinkner, the expert who ran stats for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, to look at the New Mexico data. His solid statistical analysis discovered that if you’re Hispanic, the chance your vote will not record on the machine was 500% higher than if you are white. For Natives, it’s off the charts. The Hispanic and Native vote is no small potatoes. Every tenth New Mexican is American Native ( 9.5 percent) and half the remaining population (43 percent) is Mexican-American.

Our team drove an hour across the high desert from the Taos Reservation to Española in Rio Arriba County. According to the official tallies, entire precincts of Mexican-Americans registered few or zero votes for president in the last two elections. Española is where the Los Alamos workers live, not the Ph.D.s in the white lab coats, but the women who clean the hallways and the men who bury the toxins. This was not Bush country, and the people we met with, including the leaders of the get-out-the-vote operations, knew of no Hispanics who insisted on waiting at the polling station to cast their vote for “nobody for President.” The huge majority of Mexican- Americans, especially in New Mexico, and a crushing majority of Natives (over 90 percent), vote Democratic.

What if those voters weren’t indecisive; what if they punched in a choice and it didn’t record? Let’s do the arithmetic. As minority voters cast 89 percent of the state’s 21,084 blank ballots, that’s 18,765 missing minority votes. Given the preferences of other voters in those pueblos and barrios, those 18,765 voters of color should have swamped Bush’s 5,988 vote “majority” with Kerry votes. But that would have required those votes be counted.

The voting-industrial complex
New Mexico’s Secretary of State, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, seemed curiously uncurious about Hispanic and Native precincts where nearly one in ten voters couldn’t be bothered to choose a president.

Vigil-Giron, along with Governor Bill Richardson, not only stopped any attempt at a recount directly following the election, but demanded that all the machines be wiped clean. This not only concealed evidence of potential fraud but destroyed it. In 2006, New Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled the Secretary of State’s machine-cleaning job illegal — too late to change the outcome of the election, of course.

But who are we to second-guess Secretary Vigil-Giron? After all, she is a big shot, at the time president, no less, of the National Association of Secretaries of State, the top banana of all our nation&rsquos elections officials.

Vigil-Giron, after putting a stop to the recount, rather than schlep out to investigate the missing vote among the iguanas and Navajos, left the state to officiate at a dinner meeting in Minneapolis for her national association. It was held on a dinner boat. The tab for the moonlight ride was picked up by touch-screen voting machine maker ES&S Corporation. Breakfast, in case you&rsquore curious, was served by touchscreen maker Diebold Corp.

At the time of this writing, Vigil-Giron is busy planning the next big confab of vendors and state officials — this time in Santa Fe, “the city different.” But aside from Wal-Mart signing on as a sponsor, nothing much is different when it comes to the inner workings of the voting industrial complex.

Except for one thing.

Where’s the action?

While Vigil-Giron is greeting her fellow Secretaries and casually introducing them to this year’s vendors, it is likely she’ll keep quiet about a few things. Voter Action, a group of motivated citizens, some jumping into activism for the first time, sued the state of New Mexico in 2005 over the bad machines and the failure to count the vote. The activists ran a public campaign with their revelations about New Mexico’s broken democracy. Last year, Voter Action invited our investigations team to lay out our findings to huge citizens’ meetings in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Soon, the whole horrid vote-losing game was on local community radio and TV stations. It worked.

Governor Richardson, who ducked the issue for three years, and his Secretary of State, once openly hostile to reform, had to relent in the face of the public uprising. In February of 2006, Richardson signed a model law requiring that all voting in the state take place on new paper ballot machines, with verifiable tabulating systems. Richardson now claims the mantle of leader of the voting reform campaign.

Voter Action, successful in New Mexico, is now pursuing lawsuits in seven states to stop the Secretaries of State from purchasing electronic voting systems which have records of inaccuracy, security risks, and have been proven unreliable.

In New Mexico we learned, once again, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. To protect your right to vote, you must know what is happening in your state – before, during, and after Election Day – and be willing to hold your leaders accountable. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Entry Filed under: Political Waves