20% is sufficient amount of vote counts to audit to ensure integrity of outcomes in almost all federal elections for most election systems, although it would fall short of ensuring election integrity in small close local races. CT's new proposed audit amount is a vast improvement in the sufficiency of manual audits. This is a terrific step forward by Susan Bysiewicz who also had the smarts to select optical scan voting systems (no DREs) for CT! I am not familiar with the audit procedures being proposed for CT however. It is important that audit procedures be transparent, verifiable, and independent. --------------------------------
01/12/2007 Secretary of the state would make Conn. national model for election security By Keith M. Phaneuf , Journal Inquirer
HARTFORD - Hoping to make Connecticut a national model for safe elections, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz unveiled a proposal this week calling for mandatory annual audits of one-fifth of all polling places.
"We owe it to the voters to allow them to always feel confident that they have an fair and transparent election process," Bysiewicz said during an interview in her Capitol office.
And while an ongoing debate on Capitol Hill includes a proposed national standard of audits in at least 2 percent of each state's voting precincts, Bysiewicz says she's looking at a much tougher standard.
The secretary said Thursday she is submitting a proposal to the state legislature's Government Administration and Elections Committee that would require audits in at least 20 percent of the state's 769 voting precincts, to be selected randomly.
Connecticut conducted a pilot program in 25 communities this fall. Two post-election analyses found no mistakes made by the new machines - which read ballots that voters mark by filling in ovals next to candidates' names.
But unlike the outgoing metal lever machines, they easily allow each ballot to be re-examined, both visually and electronically. Local election officials normally can complete an audit within one day.
"We have the capacity to do it, and I want the taxpayers to know that we've spent money on machines that work," Bysiewicz said. "I think it's very clear we made the right decision as to voting tech, but this would make us a national leader.
AOT 2007 (c)Journal Inquirer 2007
(Go to link for rest of article)
-- forwarded by ---- Kathy Dopp http://electionarchive.org National Election Data Archive Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections
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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.
are the most easily hacked and impossible to audit. Anyone who has access to an op-scan machine for a minute can introduce malicious code that can alter an election and then erase itself so that it is completely undetectable.
And no audit short of a 100% hand count will ensure that our votes are counted correctly.
This sort of incrementalism may make the voting machine vendors extremely happy, but it will not satisfy voters who want a fully transparent election process that doesn't rely on machines or audits.
The solution, which is currently being used in Canada and many other countries, is hand-counted paper ballots at the precincts. Allowing machines to record and count the votes, and then auditing a fifth of the precincts, means that four-fifths of the precincts are still open to fraud. We've had no success whatsoever to date in ensuring that precincts are selected at random for audits. Here in San Diego the precincts are apparently selected "at random" by a randomizing program on the same Diebold central tabulator that counts the votes, which can be easily programmed to ignore precincts where tampering took place, and select only precincts where there was no tampering.
The goal is honest elections, Kathy. Not "a little less crooked" elections, not "a tad less easily rigged" elections, and not "somewhat more auditable elections."
The emphasis on restoring voter confidence is a confidence game, as elections attorney Paul Lehto has often pointed out. We don't need to have confidence or trust in elections processes if they are fully transparent to and overseeable by the public. With hand-counted paper ballots at the precincts, we don't have to rely on experts assuring us, long after the wrong candidate has been sworn in and cannot be unseated, that they were unable to detect any malicious code (because it had already erased itself) in the machine software. We can stand right behind the pollworkers and watch the votes being counted ourselves.
Our elections belong to us, not to elections officials and the machine vendors they are beholden to.
The best model for national elections is New Hampshire, which already has hand-counted paper ballots at the precincts. That's the cheapest, most reliable, and most transparent voting system in the world -- why pay more and settle for less?
--Mark
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Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 29 quicklinks, 77 diaries, 978 comments)
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 10:58:39 AM
CT is doing election integrity audits - not machine audits
While we all know that today's generation of optical scan voting machines are easy to undetectably hack, contrary to your comments, CT's SOS is "not" auditing the opscan machines themselves, she is manually counting more paper ballots than any other US state.
It seems you are against having any more than zero paper ballots counted by hand to ensure that election results are accurate - in contrast to all your posts, you claim that you want 100% handcounts.
We all know that you prefer zero handcounts to 20% hand counts or anything that approaches your stated goal from your numerous posts that attack any article that recommends increasing the amount of verified paper ballots that are hand counted.
It would be nice if you would be more honest than to always attack by grossly mischaracterizing others' positions like you have here again. Your instant attacks and mischaracterizations against all articles on OpEdNews that recommend increasing the amount of paper ballots that are handcounted makes us wonder what your real goals are.
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Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 50 comments)
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 12:01:38 PM
Mark is right to demand 100% hand counted ballots.
There was a time when we had only hand counted ballots at each precinct, which is why precincts were created in the first place. If we need more and smaller precincts to hand count the ballots, then so be it. Stop using machines - there are plenty of volunteers who would be only too happy to prevent a repeat of the last three "elections" (read: outright theft)so, Kathy Dopp, stop trying to enforce stolen elections. You are wrong, and Nancy Tobi is right.
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Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments)
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 2:18:18 PM
Nancy Tobi and I both want to ensure election integrity
Inventing obviously false allegations against someone who has devoted her life, at great personal cost, since June 2004, to the accuracy and integrity of vote counts, is childish.
Nancy Tobi and I have been having email conversations with each other today as a matter of fact, and she and I share the same goal and agree about most things regarding election integrity.
Inventing fictions about what you imagine motivates other people, reveals a lot more about what goes on inside your mind, then anyone else's.
Do some reality checking when you start imagining things.
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Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 50 comments)
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 5:00:10 PM
Ms. Dopp, I invented nothing; you're the one who thinks that 20% manual audits is perfectly hunky dory, and I'm pretty sure that Nancy Tobi doesn't think that that's hunky dory at all. You might want to check with her to see if you have your facts right. Maybe since you're a computer expert, you just can't stand the thought of citizens counting votes without the help of machines.
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Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments)
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 6:27:24 PM
Once again your delusional insistance that you know what other people think informs us a lot about you. Your insistance that you can read minds is reminiscent of GW who, in every speech he makes, delusionally tells us what motivates the same world leaders that he refuses to speak with.
There is a large difference between the inventions inside all our heads and reality. Those of us who love the truth and are working hard to deal with reality and achieve election integrity, recognize the difference between our imagination and reality, and make an effort to check our assumptions.
Sign our Request By Voters to Congress to amend the Holt Bill: WeThePatriots.org
I want to thank Diogenes above for alerting me to this debate so I can respond publicly.
This is pretty cosmic, really! I had just today written to Kathy for some of her expert advice on auditing, because she has done some of the best work on this subject.
I was hoping that maybe she would have been consulted by those insiders drawing up the Holt Bill legislation, but unfortunately she has not. No big surprise, as the inside circle of Holtinistas have a pretty narrow margin for divergence of opinion (like none).
So while she couldn't answer questions on that subject for me right now, she was able to provide valuable opinion on our proposal for parallel hand counts on election night.
I think that Kathy and the WeThePatriots group are pretty much in sync with our ultimate goal of election integrity, but are taking different tacks on the issue. This is not a bad thing, it is a necessary thing. We all have something to offer in our work for democracy.
The fact is, while some of us believe that we need to kill the opscans along with the DREs, this is just not a feasible option in the immediate term. Even in NH, we have one town that has 19,000 voters and only one polling place! Hand counting there would be quite difficult, and if we broke up the polling place for manageable hand counts, it would mean creating at least 10 polling places, each with an estimated cost of $1,000 to run each hand count election.
That is $10K for each election, which is a fiscal note that we have to acknowledge for a small state like NH. It is not impossible by any means, but it will take some doing.
So in the meantime, they use opscans and we need to find a way to ensure the integrity of the election.
That is what Kathy is working on. Situations like this. It is important work, and she is pretty diligent with her methods to ensure integrity of her results. We couldn't ask for more, really. The fact she is doing this does not mean she endorses the crappy opscans we have in our elections. It just means she is trying to work with the situation at hand.
She has a pretty good summary of actions to take here:
Thanks, NancyT, for your diplomacy & obvious SANITY
"Masters Degree in mathematics with emphasis on computer science." - but not a computer expert. Okay, I'm going to leave that odoriferous pile right where it lays, because I completely lack any diplomatic skills whatsoever. I see another circular firing squad forming up and I don't want any part of it. Thanks again Nancy; New Hampshire is lucky to have you. Keep up the good fight.
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Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments)
on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 8:36:31 PM
Interesting that you support hand counting LESS than 20%
The proposal you so avidly support by Nancy T. is for randomly selecting one race per precinct to hand count all the ballots in. This is far LESS than the hand counts of 20% of vote counts that you so vociferously attack to the point where you delusionally invent fictions about my motivations to shoot me down.
It seems that you support manually counting FEWER than 20% of votes cast even though that is less likely to ensure the integrity of election outcomes.
Interesting.
Please do some reading on the mathematics of how to calculate audit sizes that are SUFFICIENT to ensure the integrity of election outcomes, if your aim is to ensure that the will of the people is done in US elections.
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Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 50 comments)
on Monday, January 15, 2007 at 7:25:12 PM
