Hand counting ballots is not the most trustworthy way to count votes. There have been numerous proven cases of election tampering with paper ballots occuring since at least the 1800's and paper ballot tampering is provably occurring in today's elections as well. (although it often can only be proven months or years after the election when the records or ballots become available for examination). We can do better than this.
It is probably against the U.S. constitution for the federal government to specify particular voting systems (in this case "hand-counting") for states. That is why Congress has never done so before, and in my opinion should not, and will not, do so now.
The voting system that would detect more errors and tampering and be the most accurate would combine both hand counts and electronic counts.
3. election night precinct hand-counting of ballots
This could open a can of worms and access to retail tampering if not done correctly with a huge amount of resources and care. Manual audits if sufficient, verifiable, and transparent, "may" be easier to establish chain of custody procedures to secure ballots. I am certainly not against election night precinct hand-counting, but I would hesitate to legislate such procedures, for possible security and manpower reasons and for the same reasons stated above in #2.
4. REQUEST is rife with factual innacuracies:
For instance, almost the entire section entitled "New information available since the original introduction of H.R. 550" includes information which is not new and has been repeated over and over by computer scientists such as the Open Voting Consortium, the scientists of Project ACCURATE and many others since at least the November 2000 election.
Gross misstatements such as the one that claims that "The EAC Certification Program has created a system in which every jurisdiction, beginning in 2007, must replace or use uncertified voting equipment." are flatly untrue. States have ultimate authority over their own certification and can certify voting equipment or not based on any criteria that they chose. The federal voluntary voting system guidelines are just that - voluntary. The only requirements that states must meet today are the Voting Rights act requirements, the requirement to provide devices for people with disabilities to vote privately and unassisted, and the requirement that voting equipment either warn voters of over-votes or provide public education on over-voting.
5. REQUEST neglects to mention key measures needed to ensure integrity of election outcomes, including that that fixed PROBABILITY manual audits are needed to detect outcome-altering levels of vote miscount for any race with 95% or 99% probability based on actual margins between candidates and the number of vote counts. The closer the margin between candidates, the larger the manual audit must be to detect the amount of miscount that could alter a close race.
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In sum, although supported by numerous election integrity activists, REQUEST is rife with misstatements, crucial omissions, and advice with questionable soundness and practicality.
I applaud those who signed REQUEST for recognizing the crucial need for timely freedom of access to detailed election data, documents, and information; and the inadequacies of the prior Holt proposal.
However, any particular method of counting ballots, including hand-counting or machine counting, cannot be made 100% secure and trustworthy, which is why it is crucial to subject all elections to scientific, transparent, verifiable, independent audits, just like every other major U.S. industry is subjected to scientific independent audits.
The provisions of REQUEST would return us to the days of retail, as opposed to wholesale, election tampering - a huge improvement over where we are today! However we can do better than that.
Founder and President of US Count Votes, dba The National Election Data Archive and volunteer for honest, accurately counted elections since 2003. Masters degree in mathematics with emphasis on computer science. Has written numerous academic and scientific papers with computer scientists, statisticians, and mathematicians on election integrity topics, inluding how to calculate minimum manual audit amounts necessary to ensure election outcome integrity.
You wrote: "Hand counting ballots is not the most trustworthy way to count votes. There have been numerous proven cases of election tampering with paper ballots occuring since at least the 1800's and paper ballot tampering is provably occurring in today's elections as well. (although it often can only be proven months or years after the election when the records or ballots become available for examination). We can do better than this."
The problems back then were party bosses counting the votes, votes being counted secretly, ballot boxes being "lost" or stuffed as they were being transported to central counting places, and the fact that the entire process was not open to public observation and oversight. The problems now are that elections officials have taken our our election processes and will not allow full public access and oversight.
You claim that subjecting hand-counted results to an independent, scientific audit would improve the system, when it would actually make it worse. There is no such thing as independent. Everyone has competing interests. Everyone has a price. The only way to ensure honesty is to allow all competing interests to keep an eye on each other so that nobody will let anyone else cheat.
As for "scientific" do you believe the Bush administration scientists about global warming, or do you believe the majority of the world's scientists who say it actually exists? Scientists too are human and have their price.
What you would really like to do, as I have gathered from studying your writings for some time here and elsewhere, is to retain some form of computerized or other machines in our elections process. Since machines are more complex than paper and pencil, and since they are not transparent to the public, they make a system more vulnerable to fraud, not less.
Whereas paper ballots may not be available for a recount immediately, machines cannot be audited by ordinary citizens, so people have to rely on experts, meaning that the audits are faith-based, not transparent to the public and amenable to public oversight.
Your critique of Nancy's Request is also rife with factual inaccuracies. The request does not require that paper ballots be used, just that they be in place in the event of so-called emergencies, and these emergencies would be defined by elections officials, not by voters.
I agree with you that the EAC should be allowed to expire.
Nancy Tobi's Request would let decisions be made by "elected" (until we get honest elections, we can't be sure if we actually elected them or not) officials, whereas your proposal would put election decisions in the hands of experts who could audit computerized machine counts and the courts in the event of disagreements between experts.
What I believe is preferable to both plans is to return the elections process entirely to We the People. There should be nothing in the elections process that ordinary citizen cannot understand fully and oversee completely. That means voting with paper and pencil, in precincts small enough that the ballots can be counted when the polls close with full public observation, as Dennis Kucinich proposes in HR6200.
A piece of legislation that might be appropriate at the federal level would be something to put teeth into the Voting Rights Act. If I were to write something like that, let's see, I'm going to try to do this off the top of my head here, I'd say something like:
(Note: I define treason as giving aid and comfort to our enemies, which is what attempts to subvert our democracy really are.)
AN ACT TO ENSURE HONESTY IN ELECTIONS
1. Any elections official or other citizen who attempts in any way to prevent any eligible citizen from voting, shall be charged with treason against the United State of America and sentenced, upon conviction, to no less than twenty years in the prison with the worst human rights record in their state.
2. Any legislator who hears of such treason and fails to act to prevent or stop it, shall be charged with negligence in the furtherance of treason and sentenced, upon conviction, to no less than ten years in the prison with the worst human rights record in their state.
3. Any election official or citizen who tries to prevent the public from observing any part of an election (such as by introducing a machine that cannot be internally observed by humans as it operates, or by preventing anyone from observing a hand count), shall be charged with plotting treason and, upon conviction, sentenced to no less than five years in the prison with the worse human rights record in their state.
Okay, them's my thoughts on the matter. Having written them, I now formally announce that I am submitting them here and now for peer review and welcome all comments and criticisms.
--Mark
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Friday, January 5, 2007 at 5:47:29 PM
....that you posted this text (which I have copied and am about to paste) above:
"However, any particular method of counting ballots, including hand-counting or machine counting, cannot be made 100% secure and trustworthy, which is why it is crucial to subject all elections to scientific, transparent, verifiable, independent audits, just like every other major U.S. industry is subjected to scientific independent audits."
Maybe everybody else who read your post also imagined and mischaracterized what you wrote?
A basic difference between us is that you would allow machine counts, and I would not.
Paper ballots counted by hand can be recounted by people. Right then and there, if there is any question.
Machine counts cannot be audited by people. They have to be audited by machine experts. That cannot be done on election night, so it allows time for the wrong candidate to be sworn into office, after which no audit may be permitted and there may be no possible remedy. We know there were major irregularities in the 2000 and 2004 elections, sufficient to overturn the outcome, but Bush is still in office last I checked.
Whether such audits are "scientific" is entirely up to who selects the experts. Crooked elections officials and machine vendors will insist that their experts' methods are scientific, but other equally or even better-qualified experts might disagree. Right now the U.S. Forest Service is barred from telling anyone the age of the Grand Canyon because religious beliefs favored by the Bush administration have prohibited the acknowledgement of scientific facts. In the rare cases where elections officials permit audits, they will be the ones to decide what constitutes "science."
Machine counts are NOT "transparent" to the average voter and cannot be made transparent to the average voter or to any human being for that matter. What goes on inside a machine is not visible to any human being.
Machine counts are not "verifiable" by the average voter, and they are not verifiable on election night.
And there is no such thing as an "independent" audit. Are you familiar with the name ENRON? They were audited by independent auditors. Some of them are now in jail and the auditing company had to change its name to stay in business.
Your proposal would allow for elections to be taken out of the hands of We the People and put into the hands of the election equivalent of Arthur Anderson.
If I mischaracterized anything you wrote, Kathy, please point to the specific thing that I mischaracterized and state how I mischaracterized it. If I have mischaracterized anything, I will apologize. But I'd have to know what it is that you believe I mischaracterized, so that I can see if I actually did mischaracterize something, or if you are making a baseless and unfounded accusation.
--Mark
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Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Friday, January 5, 2007 at 7:58:43 PM
You say you want hand-counts of ballots but fight against it
I'm always amazed at how people who say that they support hand counts of paper ballots attack the only practical way to achieve what they "claim" is their own goal.
You are always the first to attack any posts of any election integrity activists on OpEd and always quickly attack the only practical means to obtain handcounts of paper ballots - that would most probably lead to 100% hand counts:
Sufficient manual audits to with 95% to 99% probability detect any machine miscounts that would alter election outcomes,
because as jurisdictions found that they must manually count 25%, 50%, 75%, or 90% of machine counts by hand to detect possible outcome-altering miscount, doing the scientific random selections to select the large amounts of vote counts in close races, would probably lead jurisdictions to find that it is just simpler to hand count 100% of vote counts routinely.
The best system for accurately counting votes (or anything) is of course a 100% manual and 100% electronic count, just like the very top banks do.
You vociferously attack a plan to begin by obtaining the minimal amount of manual counts needed to ensure the integrity of election outcomes.
You claim you want integrity of election outomes, yet you continue to shoot the effort to obtain your stated goal in the foot rather than support the only practical means to obtain what you "claim" you want.
Congress will never in a million years legislate the particular voting system (not even the best one) that you want, so folks like you do everything possible to prevent Congress from legislating sufficient manual audits to ensure that correctly elected candidates are sworn into office.
I wonder if you like your role as complainer and outside agitator so much that you want to keep it lifelong rather than achieve your alleged stated goals.
Or, seeing all your attacking posts against any election integrity activists on oped makes one wonder what your goals really are.
by
Kathy Dopp (33 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 49 comments)
on Saturday, January 6, 2007 at 1:49:30 PM
Here's my theory on getting a fair election.
Take one 38 cal bullet load it into a revolver, flip a coin and who ever gets tails goes first in a game of Russian Roulette.
This way you have a true winner undeniably and a true loser.
by
Fred F (1 articles, 1 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 361 comments)
on Friday, January 5, 2007 at 10:54:02 PM
5 comments
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