Talk & Report About Your Voting Machines

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Touch-screen voting machines to be dropped for paper trail
(Tennessee news article)
http://columbiadailyherald.com/articles/2008/10/30/top_stories/01votingmachines.txt
When Maury County voters cast their ballots on Election Day, there will be no paper trail showing which candidates they favored.

In response to those concerns, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a law requiring counties by 2010 to switch to voting equipment that produces a paper trail. The change will likely result in the state discarding millions of dollars worth of relatively new electronic voting equipment to return to paper ballots that will be scanned by voters.

A verifiable paper trail, however, will not be implemented in time for the upcoming presidential election. Hamilton and Pickett counties are the only places in the state that will produce a paper record of votes for the 2008 presidential election, according to the Tennessee Division of Election’s Web site.
 
I'm taking the day off. Prince William is considered a battleground from its former staunch Republican roots because of its recent support for Webb, Nichols and other centralist Democrats, and may go either way. I am expecting a huge turnout, and don't feel like getting in the way of people who have to vote before or after they go to work, especially because us local Feds not being given extra time off to vote this year just because the polls are open until 7:00pm - hello, the commute is a hour to an hour and a half, why change it now?!:rolleyes: The process is slower than the old voting machines because we need to transfer a card with our information to the machine, that is cleared for the next person, and custody of the card has to go to you and from you to specific people.
 
I voted early today because I'll be out of the area on election day. My "voting machine" consisted of ink and paper. It seemed to work well. :laugh:

Lady
 
Is America Ready to Vote? - 10/16/08

State Preparations for Voting System Problems in 2008

On November 4, 2008 voting systems will fail somewhere in the United States in one or more jurisdictions in the country. Unfortunately, we don't know where. For this reason, it is imperative that every state prepare for system failures. We urge each state to take steps necessary to insure that inevitable voting machine problems do not undermine either the individual right to vote, or our ability to accurately count each vote cast.
Is America Ready to Vote? State Preparations for Voting Machine Problems in 2008 asks what steps each state has put into place to insure against disenfranchisement in the event of election system failures. These might include broken machines, damaged voting system cartridges, software glitches, misprogrammed tally servers, and a range of other likely troubles.
This report does not look at the steps that all states should take to minimize risk of mechanical failures. (most notably, we do not consider pre-election testing which helps insure that machines work properly. Thi subject has been explored by experts in the recent past (see links: here and here).
Rather, the report assumes that, even with the best voting protocols, occasional machine failures are inevitable.




The report looks at the laws, regulations and procedures of all 50 states and the District of Columbia in four key areas related to their preparedness for voting system failure. We have focused on four distinct areas:
  • Polling Place Contingency Plans: Repair of Machines and Emergency Paper Ballots Twenty-four states have some counties that use electronic voting machines or lever machines as their primary voting system on Election Day. If machines in these counties fail, as they have in the past, voters may have to wait in long lines as election workers scramble to repair mechanical troubles. The best prophalytic against injury thus caused is to equip each polling place with emergency paper ballots that can be distributed to voters while machines are out of commission.
  • Requirements for Sound Ballot Accounting and Vote Reconciliation. Ballot accounting and reconciliation practices help ensure that the number of ballots cast matches the number of voters who have voted, and that no votes are lost. By checking the number of people who signed in at the poll books against totals reported by the voting machines, by double checking that all absentee votes were counted and every machine’s total included in the statewide tally, and by accounting for all votes used and unused, jurisdictions can catch the kinds of glitches and failures that have resulted in incorrect totals in several past elections.
  • Use of a Voting System with a Voter Verifiable Paper Record. Nearly every state in the country counts its votes on some form of electronic voting system. But 19 states use machines that have no voter-verifiable paper record. These help guard against the possibility that corrupt software or programming errors will result in an incorrect machine total.
  • Conducts Post-Election Audit of Voter Verifiable Paper Record. Mandatory comparison of some percentage of the paper ballots to electronic totals is one of the best ways to ensure that the electronic totals reported by voting machines are accurate.
Six states received the best rankings (between "generally good" and "excellent") in all relevant categories: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, and Oregon. Ten states received the worst rankings ("needs improvement" or "inadequate") in three of four categories: Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia


Polling Place Contingency Plans: Repair of Machines and Emergency Paper Ballots

States that use direct recording electronic (DRE) machines or lever machines as a primary voting system on Election Day should require immediate repair or addition of machines, and provide emergency paper ballots to voters if long lines result from voting machine failure or insufficient machine allocation. States should also take steps to ensure that they emergency paper ballots are treated as regular ballots (rather than absentee or provisional ballots), and that there are sufficient numbers of emergency paper ballots to distribute in the event of long lines.
Of the twenty-four states that use voting machines (as opposed to paper ballots and optical scanners) as a primary voting system in at least some precincts, only California, Indiana and Ohio have state-mandated requirements which satisfy most of the best practices listed above. Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia have no state-mandated requirement for emergency paper ballots to be available in precincts that use voting machines.


Summary of Best Practices for Ballot Accounting and Reconciliation

There are four basic ways to ensure that all ballots are accounted for after the polls have closed: accounting for all ballots, votes and voters at the polling place (including counting and recording the total number of votes cast); reconciling vote and ballot totals at the polling place (including checking the number of votes recorded against the number of voters who have signed the polling books); reconciling redundancies as votes from each precinct are totaled at the county level (including ensuring that all absentee ballots and every voting machine total is accounted for in the county totals); and making all results public, so that candidates and members of the public can double-check all totals. A detailed checklist appears on page 44-45 of the report.
As indicated on the map above, all states do some form of ballot accounting and reconciliation that nine states (Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia) have requirements that fall far short of our recommended best practices, and are therefore rated "needs improvement." Eight states require enough in the way of ballot accounting and reconciliation to substantially comply with our best practices, and we rate their requirements "good."


Best Practices on Voter-Verifiable Paper Records.

There is widespread agreement among security experts that some form of independent voter-verified record is critical for voting system security; voter verified records also provide a a check against potential electronic miscounts. Currently, only optical scan ballots, which are filled out by the voter and read by a scanner, and "paper trails" which are printed and used with touch-screen machines, offer such a record. Touch screen machines with paper trails give voters the opportunity to review a paper record of their vote before casting it.
States that have software independent voter-verifiable paper records for all voters received a "good" ranking. Those that did not received an "inadequate" ranking.


Summary of Best Practices for Post-Election Audits of Voter-Verifiable Paper Records

In the last several years, public debate on electronic voting has laregely focused on the question of whether voting machines should include a voter-verifiable paper record. As detailed above, in much of the country, that debate is over. Thirty-two states now have either voter-verifiable paper ballots, or voter-verifiable paper record printers to voting machines statewide. Four states (Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Tennessee) have laws that take effect in 2009 or 2010 that require voter-verified paper ballots or records. Arkansas, Colorado and Mississippi have paper in most counties. The District of Columbia and Florida have paper ballot systems in all counties, along with paperless DREs, and Florida will eliminate paperless systems altogether by 2012.
Unfortunately, the widespread adoption of voter-verifiable paper records does not mean jurisdictions will catch software problems that can cause lost or mis-tallied votes. To the contrary, as the Brennan Center noted in its June 2006 comprehensive study of electronic voting system security The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World,[1] voter-verifiable paper records by themselves are "of questionable security value." Paper records will not prevent programming errors, software bugs or the introduction of malicious software into voting systems. If paper is to maximize the security and reliability of voting systems, it must be used to check, or "audit," the voting system's electronic records.

The above is a summary of this 190 page report: http://brennan.3cdn.net/c2a379f28e594231c1_ekm6v46t2.pdf
 

Table of Contents
A. Requirements for legitimate, democratic elections.
B. Can computers serve the requirements for legitimate, democratic elections?
C. What is an audit?
D. Will audits ever be done?
E. Surprise random counts of small percentages of VVPAT do not prove evote accuracy.
F. When technicians handle systems for non-technical staff, this opens the door to fraud.
G. More problems with electronic voting and vote-tabulating systems.
H. Voters with disabilities.
I. The alternatives are better: Lever machines.
J. The alternatives are better: Paper ballots and precinct-count optical scanners.
K Computerized elections are a political problem.
L. Uniform technology and national standards or control cannot create election integrity.
M. Best sources of news and information.
 
It was my intention in starting this thread that members report on the status of their States’ Voting Machines. However, I became interested in the subject and have been reading for about a week now all about the different types of machines available and all the problems that they all have. It truly is a mess out there and criminal I think that in the year of 2008 there are no verifiable voting systems that ensure everyone’s votes are accurately submitted and counted. The issues are not easily understood and one has to read a lot to begin to understand what the problems are. It’s hard to believe we consider ourselves a democracy when considering the lack of verifiable voting systems.

I’ll post two good places to begin to understand the issues in my following two posts.
I know it’s a lot to read but I think it’s really important and will shock you to learn what a disgrace our current voting systems are.
 
Miss_Piggy

Miss_Piggy

Member
Electoral apocalypse? E-voting woes remain as election nears
By Julian Sanchez Published: September 21, 2008 - 04:45PM CT

As state election officials scurry to prepare for projected record turnout rates in November, two reports issued this week suggest that efforts to modernize the American election system since the notoriously fraught presidential vote in 2000 are falling short.

Coming up short, too late to fix

A report issued by the Government Accountability Office Tuesday summarized the findings of a year-long performance audit of the Election Assistance Commission, established by the Help America Vote Act of 2000 to aid states in upgrading their voting systems. The Commission is supposed to act both as an information clearinghouse and as a certification and oversight body for voting machine manufacturers. On both counts, the report found significant problems with the agency’s efforts to date.

The EAC is supposed to provide a federal-level certification process for voting systems, and though it currently has 12 certifications pending, it has yet to complete any—meaning states must rely on their own procedures. One reason for this, GAO found, is that EAC had failed to “define its approach for testing and certifying electronic voting systems in sufficient detail to ensure that its certification activities are performed thoroughly and consistently.”

The need to reconcile differing interpretations of the commission’s vague guidelines had “contributed to delays in certifying systems that several states were planning on using in the 2008 elections... forcing states to either not require EAC certification or rely on an alternative system.”

This problem of vague criteria and procedures appears to plague EAC in a number of areas. EAC is responsible for responding to any problems or defects discovered after the fact in systems it certifies. Unfortunately, “it has yet to specify how this broadly defined approach will be executed, including what steps will be followed, what criteria will be used to reach decisions, how it will know if system problems have been corrected, and how it will use the information to improve its testing and certification program.”

The agency is empowered to conduct periodic inspections of manufacturing facilities to ensure that the production process is up to snuff, but there don’t appear to be any concrete guidelines specifying who is to conduct these inspections or what criteria they are to use in making their assessments. The EAC manual “does not include procedures or criteria for determining the credibility of reported defects, or any other aspect of the inquiry or investigation, such as how EAC will gain access to systems once they are purchased and fielded by states and local jurisdictions.”

Moreover, the commission “has not established an effective and efficient repository for certified versions of voting system software, or related procedures and tools, for states and local jurisdictions to use in verifying that their acquired voting systems are identical to what EAC has certified.” There doesn’t appear to be any long-term plan to remedy this problem, but the commission’s interim solution is distinctly low-tech: it told GAO that it will “maintain copies of certified versions in file cabinets and mail copies of these versions upon their request by states and local jurisdictions.” There is no mention of whether anyone has introduced officials at EAC to the concept of a “hash.”

The problem of ensuring that certified software is the same as that installed on the machines used on election day is not a hypothetical one. In numerous cases, voting machine manufacturers have shipped out systems with software different from the version certified for use in state elections. Last year, for example, Election Systems & Software was found to have sold almost 1,000 uncertified machines to five California counties.

EAC blames most of its shortfalls on lack of resources. The commission told investigators that the testing and certification program had only three staff, all of whom had other responsibilities, and all of whom were expert consultants limited to working half the year at most.

Any solution the commission did implement to fix these problems would not come in time to affect the election in November, GAO concluded.

Lag: it’s not just a problem for video games

A second study issued Monday by the Century Foundation and the advocacy group, Common Cause, examined a broad range of potential electoral problems in 10 key swing states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Much of that report focused on longstanding, low-tech problems, such as poor poll worker training, the use of deceptive practices by partisan activists, insufficient allocation of voting machines or ballots to polling places, and restrictive voter ID requirements. But technological changes have presented new difficulties—often going beyond the familiar security and reliability concerns with electronic voting systems, on which Ars has frequently reported.

In an electoral dry-run conducted in Colorado earlier this year, for example, officials discovered “on-going problems with lag and connectivity” in the centralized voter registration system used to “check in” voters at their local polling station. While the problems did not rise to the level of “disasters,” officials were moved to make backup plans in the event of a crash or excessive delays.

Even when machines function properly, the Common Cause study found that user confusion with new electronic systems could create a problem if states have not taken adequate steps to familiarize voters with the new machines. For example, some systems implement a “straight ticket” option, which automatically selects all the candidates from a voter’s self-declared party at the outset of the voting process. A voter who then clicks on a specific candidate of that party may inadvertently deselect the candidate—and higher rates of “under-voting” (failure to select any candidate for one or more races) in counties with this option suggest that at least some voters do make this error.

Florida, whose electoral fiasco in 2000 prompted the drive to modernize state voting systems, was ranked “unsatisfactory” on 11 of 24 dimensions that the report evaluated.

Copyright © 1998-2008 Ars Technica, LLC http://tinyurl.com/5opgfx


ELECTIONS Federal Program for Certifying Voting Systems Needs to Be Further Defined, Fully Implemented, and Expanded: GAO report 9/08 referenced http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08814.pdf

Election Reform: Common Cause: http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=191150
 
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