On Thursday, Nathan Barker of upstate New York’s Gouverneur Times — a far-Right online publication (featuring columns by the likes of Michelle Malkin, Oliver North, Chuck Norris, and all the rest of the wingnutters) — filed a lengthy, and somewhat breathless, report alleging a computer virus had infected several of the new e-voting systems in first-time use during the November 7th Special Election in NY’s 23rd Congressional district between Democratic candidate Bill Owens, Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, and Republican Dede Scozzafava (who dropped out of the race just prior to Election Day and threw her support to the Democrat).
Barker charged that a “VIRUS in the VOTING MACHINES” [his caps] resulted in “tainted results,” “casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines” used in the election.
Owens was reported to have won the election by a small margin on Election Night — made smaller as errors were discovered during the post-election canvass — before being hastily sworn in to the U.S. House just a few days later, in time to provide a crucial Democratic vote in favor of the health care insurance reform bill.
Barker’s detailed report clearly offers a hard-right undertone, obviously in support of the Conservative Party candidate Hoffman. The article also advances several unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and features a number of out-and-out inaccuracies as well. A number of the piece’s key allegations, though important, are also disputed by election officials, and at least one lead member of New York’s election integrity community — which is, itself, split between supporters of the new optical-scan e-voting systems and those calling for the retention of the Empire State’s long-used mechanical lever voting machines.
Nonetheless, Barker raises a number of significant points and important concerns, about which The BRAD BLOG has been warning for years, often in the face of derision, notably from the same Rightwing circles crying foul now, who had previously dismissed such concerns as those of ‘tin-foil hat wearing, sore losers and conspiracy theorists’ despite actual hard evidence and scientifically-sound details proffered about such concerns.
It’s somewhat amusing to see some on the Right, now that they have concerns about a close election, suddenly find religion on the very issues they’d derided as nonsense so stridently in the past. It’s very tempting to either disregard them now entirely, or torture them mercilessly on that point. But we’ll try to take the high road here since their central concerns, now that they’ve finally arrived and no matter how long overdue, have been ones that we’ve shared for years, whether or not they might have stood to adversely affect Democrats, Republicans or independents.
The bottom line is that whether a computer virus, malicious or otherwise, affected the results of the NY-23 Special Election or not — we’ve seen no actual evidence that it did, and state officials offer a differing explanation for the e-voting system failures that did occur — it certainly could have. The direct threat to democracy inherent in the concerns expressed by Barker (whether substantiated or not), underscore the foolishness of using such secret vote-counting systems at all. In New York — where voters, in real elections, are essentially being forced to serve as beta testers of these new, federally-uncertified systems, made by a company with a long track-record of failure, lies, obfuscation, near-bankruptcy, secretive foreign ownership, election disaster after disaster, and dissembling to the media, as well as federal, state and local officials — the foolishness is all the more apparent, unnecessary, unfortunate and a clear and present threat to democracy itself…
Allegations of a ‘Virus’ Lead to ‘Suspect’ Results
We’re on the road at the moment (literally, typing this in the car at 75mph) so we’re unable to check with officials for confirmation or clarification of details right now. So we’ll have to rely on Barker’s report at face value for the time being, along with those from others in New York who’ve posted or offered testimony disputing several of his key allegations.
According to Barker [Note: it’s unclear who the words in quotes are attributed to, or if they are simply meant as scare quotes]…
Republican Commissioner Judith Peck refused to speculate on whether the code that governs the counts could have been tampered with. She indicated that “as far as I know, the machine in question was not functioning properly and was repaired” by the technician.
Commissioners in other counties have stated that they were not made aware of the virus issue in Hamilton County.
Barker further reports that in St. Lawrence County, “Republican Commissioner Deborah Pahler said that the machines kept ‘freezing up… like Windows does all the time,’ and that they experienced several paper jams as well. The voted ballots that could not be scanned were placed in an Emergency Lock Box and re-scanned later at the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections. Election officials in St. Lawrence County were given no advance knowledge of a potential virus in the system.”
While a virus discovered on one voting machine is reason enough to check all voting machines in use in the county, since such viruses could be spread from machine to machine via the central programming and/or tabulation system, there is little reason to believe that a virus found in Hamilton County might affect machines in use in an entirely different county — unless it might have infected the machines at the manufacturer level, in this case, Dominion Voting and/or Sequoia Voting Systems.
Nonetheless, Barker is correct to suggest that such a problem, if it was discovered, should have been disclosed fully and publicly, so that other counties could carry out similar pre-election inspections on all machines as a precaution.
He then goes on to report that “counts from any district that used the ImageCast machines are suspect” due to “”the virus'” and that “one County official” (who is not named) “has raised concern that it’s possible that ALL of the machines in the NY-23 election had the ‘virus’ but only a few malfunctioned as a result.”
‘There Was No Virus’
But New Yorkers for Verified Voting’s Bo Lipari, a state leader in the fight against the use of touch-screen voting — once considered by the state as a replacement for their lever machines — and in favor of the new paper ballot-based optical-scan systems, reports that there was no virus on the machines at all.
“There was no virus in the NY-23 machines,” Lipari writes on his personal blog, basing his assessment, in part, on the Dominion/Sequoia ImageCast’s use of the Linux operation systems, which, he says “is nearly immune to viruses.” But while Linux may be used on the ImageCasts themselves, Lipari’s belief in their near-immunity to virus — or out and out malware — may be somewhat overstated. Moreover, the Election Management System (EMS) used to program the ImageCast ballot readers is, indeed, Microsoft Windows-based.
Lipari also points to the NY State Board of Elections’ account of the problem, as offered on November 10, in which officials downplayed machine failures as a memory problem rather than a virus or malware, limited to “a handful of machines” and not “catastrophic”. Lipari says he confirmed their report of what happened “in a phone conversation with staff earlier this week”.
“A problem did occur that affected certain machines around the state,” he says. “The issue was a bug in the Dominion source code that caused the machine to hang while creating ballot images for certain vote combinations in multiple candidate elections”. He reports that it was discovered and fixed during pre-election testing:
Lipari gave the voting machine companies “an ‘F’ for blowing an easy one in their first roll-out of their new scanner” but lauded the process in which “pre-election testing found the bug before the election. He says “a reasonable fix was found and approved, and it was applied to the machines that needed it before the election – well, almost.”
Both he and NY’s elections operation director Anna E. Svizzero averred that the problems with the paper-based op-scan systems were an improvement over the state’s lever systems because at least a paper ballot record of the voter’s intent was available for a manual count after the election where problems occurred.
“When the scanner stopped working, the ballots were removed and counted, so no votes were lost,” Lipari contends. “Compare this to lever machines, where counters on the back would get stuck and wouldn’t turn when the vote is cast, something that occurred with far more frequency than most New Yorkers realize. When the counters on the back of a lever machines froze, a machine bug typically not discovered until the polls close, those votes were lost forever.”
“We certainly have more lever machine problems than BMD (ballot marking device) or scanner issues,” Svizzero told the NY Board of Commissioners in Albany during her post-election report.
[Update: Howard Stanislevic, another New York election integrity advocate and a critic of the state’s new e-voting system offers a number of additional questions about the state’s explanations for the problems and the failure of officials to properly mitigate the bugs discovered in the software just prior to the election.]Supporters of Lever Machines See It Differently
While the Right, at least those who supported Hoffman in NY-23, may be turning into new converts to the realities of the dangers of e-voting (whether or not they fully understand the issue is a separate matter, which we’ll speak to in a moment), and longtime opponents of touch-screens who’ve supported new op-scan systems in NY see the latest developments in a positively light, there are many who advocate sticking with the lever systems which have served the Empire State well, for the most part, for the last century. New York is now the only state still using those machines.
“We’ve used lever voting machines for 100 years, without any election integrity movement arising to claim that they didn’t like the equipment,” Teresa Hommel, an advocate of lever systems, involved in the fight to keep them in the state tells The BRAD BLOG. “The machines can be properly maintained and used for another 100 years. There is no shortage of parts and service,” she added in response to those who have alleged such systems can no longer be appropriately serviced.
She also echoed, in her comments, a point made by Barker, that once ballots have left the precinct after the election, the chain of custody for those ballots, and therefore their integrity, can fall into serious question. “Paper ballots can be a blessing or a curse, because they hold an authentic record of the voters’ intent ONLY UNTIL THEY ARE REMOVED FROM OBSERVERS’ VIEW.” [her caps].
“New York law allows paper ballots to be removed from observers’ view for up to 15 days after close of polls on election day, before audits and recounts take place,” Hommel writes. “Lipari is apparently happy to rely upon ‘documented chain-of-custody’ — which is unreliable because if someone wants to tamper, they will make sure that their documentation is perfect.”
She also disputes Lipari’s claim that op-scan systems are better than lever machines because, as he contends, “When the scanner freezes, everyone knows about it,” unlike with lever systems where problems are generally discovered only after the close of polls, and votes can be potentially lost in the bargain.
“Maybe,” Hommel says in reply, “but when a scanner switches votes, it is not likely that people will know about it because New York law requires only a flat 3% audit of scanners (after the ballots have been out of observers’ view for up to 15 days). The flat 3% audit means many races will not be subject to audit at all.”
In her defense, even though we have our own misgivings about lever systems, we’d also add that where lever machines might fail, only the votes cast on that one machine are in jeopardy. There is no way, unlike with electronic voting systems, that a problem — whether due to a virus or a memory problem, as said to have occurred in NY-23 — can plague machines county wide and thus jeopardize the entirety of the resulsts of an election.
Hommel also points out that moving to op-scan systems, as New York is in the process of doing, will cause a significant increase to county election budgets in the state which is already facing massive budget shortfalls. The result, she suggests, will be a decrease in the number of polling places, something that has occurred in state after state where electronic voting systems have been introduced over the last several years.
Her full reply to Lipari’s blog item disputing the alleged “virus” in NY-23, can be read here [PDF].
Where Barker is Right and Wrong
The Gouverneur Times’ Barker, who, we’re happy to see, has done quite a bit of studying up on the issue, is correct in some of his key assertions, while being wildly off-base on others.
He stokes Hoffman’s recent, silly, wholly unsubstantiated assertion that the community organization ACORN may have been involved in “stealing” the election. Such baseless, knee-jerk assertions may play well among the rightwing base, a majority of which, according to a recent Democratic poll, actually believe ACORN stole last year’s Presidential Election for Barack Obama. But such claims are entirely without evidence and only serve to undermine Barker’s legitimate concerns.
He also stokes fears of ballot box stuffing vis a vis op-scanners where, he charges, “10 voted ballots could be deposited in the slot for every one voter… and if the electronic count was compromised, the ‘paper backup’ would be useless.” That point is partially true, and partially not. While it’s possible to physically stuff such a machine, it would be fairly easily discovered (unlike an electronic hack of the same machines), when the number of scanned ballots did not match the number of physical ballots in the box itself. Which ballots were actually scanned, and which ones were simply stuffed into the box would also then be easily determined, presuming the software works as intended. [UPDATE: See CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION to that point, issued at end of this article.] But he, and Hommel, are right in that once physical ballots leave the polling place, chain of custody issues come into question, casting a potential cloud over election results in the case of a challenge.
On one point that Barker notes at the very end of his article, he is just flat out wrong. He asserts that “the State had no choice but to use” the new machines due to a federal court order “demand[ing] that New York have the machines in place and use them or be found in violation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 which requires that all polling locations have handicapped-accessible voting machines with a variety of options available so that anyone may use the machine to vote.”
The fact is that HAVA requires only one disabled-accessible voting system per polling place. Though both state and federal officials — as well as the most ardent proponents of e-voting, such as the voting machine companies who have profited handsomely by them — offered disinformation for years contending that HAVA required all voters to use e-voting systems, and outlawed lever machines. That claim is simply wrong. Lever machines are perfectly legal under HAVA, and as long as the state assures that the disabled have a way to vote privately and independently at each polling place, lever machines may be used in full compliance with federal law.
But where Barker is correct is of the most note.
He is right to have concerns about the USB ports on the op-scan machines, which could potentially be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. He is right that the Sequoia Voting Systems company itself, as well as their machines, have proven themselves to be unreliable (to put it generously), even though Sequoia has mostly removed themselves from the state contract due to cash-flow problems, deferring to their partner Dominion, a Canadian firm. He is right that Sequoia was once and, as The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively in a detailed 2006 investigative series, is still working directly with a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez, even though they’ve lied to state and federal officials about that relationship.
Of most note, however, are Barker’s concerns about even the possibility of a system-wide machine failure — be it from a “virus” as he alleges, a “memory problem” as Lipari and state officials claim happened in NY-23, or from hackers either inside or outside of election official offices. Those very real and substantiated concerns illustrate the direct threat to confidence in election results and, subsequently, to democracy itself. These are issues that e-voting supporters have yet to contend with, despite all manner of warnings about such concerns, from numerous state studies, to academic findings, to even testimony from CIA cybersecurity experts who have found that e-voting cannot be properly secured.
(We’ll also note here that open source voting systems, which have become the new hope for e-voting proponents of late — even Sequoia, after years of disingenuously claiming that disclosed source code would jeopardize security of voting systems has announced plans to submit such a system for federal certification testing — do little to mitigate security and accuracy concerns, and may actually offer an even more menacing and unjustified sense of security in such secret vote-counting systems.)
Barker writes that “A manual paper-ballot recount of the vote could resolve computer vote accuracy questions.” The truth is, no it couldn’t, due to the chain of custody concerns about those ballots, as Hommel notes in her response to Lipari. Such a manual hand-count of all votes cast in the NY-23 election should certainly occur nonetheless, as it should have in the first place, but it would certainly be appropriate now, given the questions and various failures that are confirmed to have occurred.
Even with such a count however, and even if the Conservative Party’s Hoffman was found to have received more votes than the Democratic Party’s Owens, the occupant of the House seat in NY-23 is no longer up to state officials, voters, or even the courts of New York. The custody of that seat is now firmly in the hands of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a regrettable fact underscored by a shameful precedent set by Republicans following a similarly convoluted 2006 Special Election in California, as The BRAD BLOG detailed last week.
The Solution to the Continuing Election Madness
These situations will only increase over time, as they have in the last several years, particularly now that supporters of both parties — as well as independents — are becoming more and more aware of the threats posed by e-voting.
In that light, we recently called, in an OpEd, for pilot programs to be instituted around the country to study the positives and negatives of implementation of “Democracy’s Gold Standard”: fully public, transparent, hand-counting of paper ballots, at the polling place on Election Night, before ballots are moved anywhere.
While critics of hand-counting and proponents of e-voting — most notably those on the Right — have long held that hand-counting is the least accurate way of determining election results, their claims are without merit. Hand-counting is only “inaccurate”, according to such critics, in elections other than those that really count. In the closest of elections, a hand-count is always called for, and is used to determine the definitive winner.
If such manual counts are accurate enough to determine the winner of the closest elections, aren’t they accurate enough for all elections?
Transparent, citizen-overseen hand-counting of paper ballots at the polling place on Election Night is not unlike universal, single-payer health care, in that the majority of experts on both issues likely appreciate — even if only to themselves — that while mitigating policies may be put in place for the short-term, eventually there is only one real, ultimate solution. For health care, it’s both a civil and human right to receive treatment for illness and disease, and thus, eventually we will have to move to a single-payer system where all are entitled to health care. For true democratic self-governance, as described in the U.S. Constitution, the citizenry need to be able to oversee and verify the results of their own public elections. Only hand-counted paper ballots, at the polling place on Election Night, offer that full transparency to we the people.
We welcome rightwingers like Barker and the Gouverneur Times to this issue, and hope that they will become allies in the fight for true, reliable, secure and transparent democracy of which we can all be proud some day, whether our own favorite candidates may win or lose under such a fully democratic (small “d”) system.
CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: A number of New Yorkers have contacted us to note that paper ballots stuffed into the op-scanner’s storage box could not be “easily” identified as fraudulent, as we asserted in the article above. While digital images of the properly scanned ballots could be used to determine which ones were correctly voted and which ones weren’t, such images can also be gamed, and couldn’t be relied on, in any case, “if the electronic count was compromised,” as originally asserted by Barker in his Gouverneur Times article. Identification of which ballots were legit and which ones were not, could also not be determined by the use of serial numbers or barcodes, as is possible in other voting systems used elsewhere, since NY election law disallows the use of such identifying marks on ballots.
However, John W. Conklin, NY Board of Elections’ Public Information officer has issued a statement in response to several of the points raised in Barker’s article, including his assertion that a slot in the op-scan systems allowed that “10 voted ballots could be deposited in the slot for every one voter.”
“A gap between the scanning device and the ballot box was discovered during functional testing of the ballot marking devices more than a year ago,” Conklin writes. “Every machine in use on Election Day was retrofitted to completely block access to that gap.”
UPDATE 11/23/09: A number of responses have now been posted in reply to the Gouverneur Times’ Thursday article. We cover those responses, and re-iterate our call for a full hand-count of the NY-23 election in an update piece now posted here…
I fear that the right-wingers who are now realizing the dangers inherent in electronic voting and vote-counting will simply revert back to calling us wingnuts the next time an election favors the Republican candidate.
But if they are honest, they will care about all elections regardless of whom the people select with their votes.
A very detailed and in-depth report, Brad. Thank you.
Hand counting fails, when the chain of custody is broken.
The chain of custody get’s broken when you have overzealous officials who leverage (untrained in electronics and programming) local law enforcement to arrest poll watchers, evacuate buildings. The public needs election cops working for them, to protect the public from the officials.
The reason all electronics and software (including the latest fad encryption) fails us in our elections, is because their signals are invisible, and so such devices which tabulate votes are a broken chain of custody themselves. Humans can not see electricity! The only way electronics could work is if transparency is given up. In a politically hostile environment where power and money are involved, this is unacceptable. Transparency keeps people alive. Non transparency make people targets.
Mail in voting fails because the USPS is not a poll worker and doesn’t have ANY (zero) public poll watchers. Regardless if your an official or not, you can not be trusted alone without public oversight with our votes. I don’t care if you think you know your mail carrier.
“Electronic Registered Voter Poll Books” fail because of the same reasons electronic vote tabulation devices fail. They are a broken chain of custody, and their data can not be trusted and furthermore with all the “glitches” (A new Corporate Fascist Stolen Term now with it’s meaning bent to avoid saying the word “FAILURES”) they are not dependable either.
A glitch is a failure!
Look Elections need several things.
Transparency. you can’t see what any single person voted
Public Chain of Custody – made up of the public, not officials, must be taken seriously, must have trained law enforcement who understand these problems, and not be politically linked or controlled by local officials. ala Hoyt Axton’s Speed Trap )
Backup Plan – elections need some plan put in place with what to do when problems happen. This is completely ignored, and instead they try to swear the guy in as quick as possible. If the chain of custody is broken, the common sense thing to do is to re-hold the broken parts of the election, but instead, such common sense is disregarded, along with vaporized electronic votes.
This is why there is NO electronic solution.
There is no such thing as a GLITCH in an election, there are only FAILURES.
Lora ~ Right. Or that they’ll co-opt the dangers of e-voting, like they did Ron Paul’s message, and gleefully teabagginese it. Willfully igna’tize it. Force the rational rest of us to waste precious man-hours patrolling them / disputing their mindless megaphoning of non-facts cherry-picked to hype whatever dumb, scary non-issue they presuppose for their own (skeevy) reasons.
But, who knows? Maybe they can learn how to learn stuff. I extend them the benefit of the doubt, even though optimism just breeds resentment.
And of course, I stand with them in their quest to divine the authentic count that represents true will of the majority of voters of NY-23. (Sincerely, I do.)
Great job, Brad. Complex issues nicely laid out.
It’s the same old thing. Just like the teabaggers. When “their guys” do are fascists, it’s “OK”. When “their guys” lose a close election, e-vote machines should be banned. WE have been saying these things about BOTH parties at every turn! Not just when Democrats lose elections or when Republicans are fascists or not following the Constitution! That’s why I’m not sure to join in with them even when they’re right. Because they’re selectively right. Only when it’s “their guys”. If they showed they care about e-vote machines that turn ANY election, not just “their guys”, or if they show me they care about ANYONE not following the Constitution, not just Democrats, I’d take them seriously and join in with them when they’re right.
But here’s what would happen if you join them: when there’s a Republican president or when a non-Republican had an election stolen, they’d drop you like a hot potato.
That’s why I laugh, when people say: “Hey! I’m a liberal, but Rush Limbaugh’s right about this!” Yeah, he’s always right when there’s not a Republican president.
I’d join people who are consistent, not selectively right. Or they ignore it when “their guys” are breaking the law. I just can’t take them seriously, they have ZERO credibility.
Are they sincere, or do they just want their party running things corruptly, they don’t want another party running things corruptly? They’re not against corruption, they’re against corrupt Democrats. They’re NOT against corrupt Republicans. How can you take people like that seriously? I’d look for people who are looking into the Hoffman election who have a track record against being against previous questionable elections by both parties. Not people who jump in when they think their party had an election stolen. ONLY when they think “their guys” had an election stolen.
That won’t fix anything!!!
Fabulous job, Brad.
But as it’s always going to be whatever wins with these guys, I’m voting for:
torture them mercilessly.
Sounds good to me.
Thanks for the suggestion, and it’s the only way justice will prevail.
Kudos!
S
While multiple books have been written to cover the complex scope of the problems created by both touch screen and optical scan voting, the solution is both straightforward and simple.
That solution was summed up by Brad Friedman in two recent articles, Democracy’s Gold Standard (“Hand-Marked, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, Publicly Tabulated at Every Polling Place in America…”) and German High Court: E-Voting Unconstitutional (“The democracy the U.S. helped to create in Germany gets it, while, as usual, the U.S. itself remains largely clueless and/or indifferent to the need for transparency in its own…”)
Infatuated with computer technology, enticed by the ephemeral promise of electronic efficiency, Americans have overlooked the truth contained in the old saw that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Well, how about this: we support sincere efforts to determine if the vote count in NY-23 was corrupted, and if electronic voting or vote-counting systems come under attack, we support those investigations and efforts to eliminate secret, hackable, manipulable vote-counting.
THEN, we run with it and remind EVERYONE that the REPUBLICANS OBJECTED to having their votes counted secretly and non-verifiably and use it to mainstream the issue and fight against such blatantly undemocratic systems of voting and vote-counting.
Sadly, I predict that the threat of this becoming publicized and perhaps catching on will be enough to cause the Repubs to back away — far, far away.
There is some good information there, Brad. It looks like you’ve done some good research. However, your conclusion about the hand count “gold standard” is not compelling.
Hand counted paper ballots could be a solution, but your articles do not make the case for it. The cost of administering elections is mainly personnel costs. You need a lot of people to do a hand count. Pointing to other countries or small jurisdictions in the U.S. doesn’t make the case. You have to show how it could work in urban jurisdictions in the U.S.
See
Joyce McCloy’s paper (html format, click on the .doc link to see the images of the ballots).
Also, have a look at this 2007 San Francisco Examiner article. Many of us advocated hand counting over going through with the Sequoia purchase. The Director of Elections estimated 400 people over a period of one month to complete the hand count. We urged hand count advocates in San Francisco (and everywhere else) to speak up. Some people did speak up and said they’d volunteer to do hand counts…. like about 20 people did.
They went ahead with the Sequoia purchase.
The problem is that you need many people. And they need to be screened, hired, trained, and managed. They have to be paid.
Here are a few questions that need to be answered in order to have successful hand counted paper ballots in urban jurisdictions.
How many counters are required for each precinct to complete the count on Election night?
What hourly rate would you have to offer counters to ensure an adequate number of counters at each poll site?
If the cost of setting up a poll site is increased as a result, what impact might that have on the trend toward absentee voting?
How many counters will be needed at headquarters to count absentee ballots?
What retention rate could you expect for trained, screened, reliable counters? i.e., what percentage of the total would you need to hire each year figuring that people move, change situations (become too busy), or otherwise need to be replaced?
How much would administration costs be increased to recruit, screen, train, supervise, manage, etc. this increase in personnel?
How do you handle ranked choice?
Some urban areas have some not-so-nice areas. Are there new liability issues for a jurisdiction? For example, what if a counter leaving a poll site late at night is mugged or raped or robbed, or something like that?
What equipment cost saving could be expected going HCPB?
The number of counters needed could vary quite a bit. Joyce says CA will have “more than 55 contests” but I think that is rare. I’ve seen 40 – 45 contests quite a bit. The number of candidates is a big variable. We could see 150 candidates in 50 contests in a primary (CA has six political parties). Some general elections might have only 30 contests and 80 candidates. Local elections (odd year) often have far fewer. Some experts have estimated an average of “two teams of ten” would be needed.
I think the hourly rate needed would also vary quite a bit. Fifteen dollars per hour might work in Bakersfield, but would likely be double that in San Francisco.
Equipment savings may not amount to much. You still need the very expensive machine for disable access. Other costs will be the same as for optical scan (for example, the type of system mainly used in CA). You save the cost of the optical scan machine but those machines typically last anywhere from 10 to 20 years — amortizing the cost over these years.
I think HCPB would cost a lot of money to do it right. Doing it wrong is not an option. You might be able to make the case that it makes sense to hire people from the local community (strongly suggest using people from their own precincts) and keep the money local (as opposed to sending to a voting machine company far away). In order to make the case, you need to come up with credible numbers that address the issues with HCPB.
Breitbart said he saw Oscar the Grouch running the electronic voting machines in NY-23.
Alan Dechert –
First, readers should understand that you, as a developer of a touch-screen e-voting system have a dog in this particular hunt. That’s fine, of course, but readers should know that.
Secondly, the case I have made in “Democracy’s Gold Standard” is not for hand-counting, but for hand-counting pilot programs in which many of the questions you raise would need to be explored and answered as data was gathered to determine the feasibility of hand-counting in any particular jurisdiction.
Unlike the voting machine companies, I am not willing to simply announce “This system works! Trust me! It should be implemented immediately!”
But it is quite clear that e-voting, as implemented by the existing voting machines companies, and schemes such as the one you’re attempting to see used by jurisdictions, does not meet the basic criteria for transparency required in our democracy. It also fails, time and again, on both the accuracy and confidence fronts. And, additionally, schemes such as yours specifically (the touch-screen computer ballot printer model) also fails in that when machines fail to work, voters are unable to vote. (Your model further fails in that it does not allow for voter verification of votes to be counted, but rather bar codes are used to tally votes instead of voters actual choices).
Nonetheless, the points you raise are legitimate, even as many of them are raised in biased support of e-voiting, which is fine. All such questions should be answered, and it’s time America gets started doing just that.
As to the general cost assertions underlying many of your questions, I’d respond that the money saved on e-voting systems that don’t work would more than amply cover costs of hand-counters for a few hours after the close of polls. Where it doesn’t (if it doesn’t), the money required to pay such costs would be well worth spending. I’m not sure there is a price to high to pay for democracy in which every voter in the country can have full confidence.
Forget not the scene in 2006 in Saratoga County, FL, where 18,000 votes were lost and the Republican sworn in until the issue could be resolved, which never happened.
Forget not Al Franken’s sinuous path to representing Minnesota, leaving his state 50% unrepresented for months.
I don’t think we’re close to an accurate electoral system, even if we vote on paper ballots and witness chosen volunteers counting them. But that’s the closest we’ll ever get to a fair count until we evolve into a more ethical species.
Brad, I appreciate that in responding to the polemic offered by Alan Deschert, a touch screen developer, you suggest limiting paper ballot/hand-counting to “pilot programs,” but I wonder whether it is really necessary.
For starters, hand marked ballots and hand counting of ballots in the U.S. dates back at least to the time of the American Revolution. E-voting, on the other hand, is a late 20th/early 21st Century change.
The burden should have been on the advocates of E-voting to demonstrate both accuracy and transparency of their “new” systems before the fate of our democracy was placed in their hands.
As revealed in the article previously cited by you piece, German High Court: E-Voting Unconstitutional,
and:
A limitation of paper ballots/hand counting to a “pilot program” not only shifts the burden to a system that existed at the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted but subjects all precincts that are not a part of the “pilot project” to “blind-faith” voting pending the findings from the “pilot project.”
I am wondering, and you would know better than I, whether the answers to the questions posed by Mr. Deschert can already be found by studying the Dutch and German electoral systems now that E-voting has been rejected by their more enlightened courts.
Ernie Canning said:
Not really. For the last hundred years or so, much of the U.S. has been voting on lever machines or, later, punchcard machines.
The introduction of mechanical lever machines in the early part of the last century, then paved the way for longer and longer ballots with more candidates and then initiatives, etc.
In short, it’s been a LONG time since most jurisdictions, certainly the large ones, have done hand counting at all. Ballots themselves have changed a lot since then (lots of races, some with options to vote for multiple candidates, etc., plus the initiatives, etc.)
I’d not personally make the same mistake the machine companies made, to say “Trust us! Hand-counting will work great! What could possibly go wrong?!” Rather, I’d like to see it re-introduced slowly, proving (or disproving, as the case may be) its efficacy, efficiency, accuracy, etc.
The last thing you’d want is enemies of hand-counting jamming things up, in a “forced hand-count” situation, in such a way that they’re also able to discredit hand-counting forever more (sort of the way they were able to discredit paper ballots, for so many years, by what they did in FL in 2000).
Let’s re-learn how to do it and to do it transparently. That last part — transparently — may be new *entirely* in many places where public, transparent hand-counts were *never* done! (Versus officials, party insiders counting behind closed doors, etc.)