If you don't have the easily hacked machines, Kathy,

then you don't need experts to devise complicated ways to fool the public into thinking that they can be audited.

There is no way to audit machines which can be infested with malicious computer code that can alter election results and then erase itself so as to be undetectable. Undetectable means that even experts can't find it, because it is no longer there.

If the votes are on paper ballots, and they are counted openly in full public view by people, rather than secretly inside optical scanners and central tabulators that count the votes invisibly and cannot be monitored in real time, then you don't have to be so concerned about whether the auditors are honest or are ENRON types.

--Mark

by Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 2:49:31 AM
 

Please read the above press release

Clearly my press release says that:

"Audits are hand-counts of all paper ballots associated with randomly selected machine counts."

and it never suggests trying to audit machines, but recommends auditing vote counts.

I suggest that you also look at the spreadsheet it links to.

by Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 49 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 10:45:32 AM
 

Wrong questions=wrong answers

The correct question to ask is, can any Republican manufactured voting machine, sold to Republicans to guarantee a Republican victory be trusted? The correct answer is NO. Here in California's fourth CD, we supposedly re-elected a good buddy of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay by a 3% margin, using Diebold election machines which counted the votes behind locked doors. In the debates, the only rebuttal to charges of corruption this weasel could come up with is that his opponent is a member of the A.C.L.U., which I also am a member of. There are races still being contested, and where there are recounts & revotes, the Democrats are winning. In every case of suspected tampering, it always favors the Republicans; I strongly suspect that if we had an open, honest election last November, It would have been a complete landslide.

by Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 12:05:11 PM
 

I agree. No voting machine should be trusted - so AUDIT

You make the case for sufficient manual audits (read that hand counts) because no voting device should ever be blindly trusted, no matter who owns it.

As my article states:

"For the public to have oversight over election integrity, the public needs to be allowed to fully observe all audit procedures, including the random selection and manual vote counts, and before the audit begins, a public report of all vote types and votes counted on each machine needs to be publicly released. Audits are hand-counts of all paper ballots associated with randomly selected machine counts."

Please take the time to play with the spreadsheet we've created for the lay person to be able to calculate sufficient audit amounts to verify the integrity of election results.

by Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 49 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 12:34:31 PM
 

Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Why not just get rid of the machines? We don't need no stinkin' machines to count the votes. Now that we have a new SoS, Debra Bowen, I think that we are going to see a lot less of Republican election machines. You need to listen to Dave Berman's speech, found at the top of OpEdNews.

by Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 1:13:41 PM
 

Vote Counts should be audited even if initially hand-counted

What possible reason could exist to exempt the elections industry from routine audits, no matter what the initial method of counting - even if the initial method is hand counts?

Plus Mathematically sufficient audits would result immediately in a huge increase in the number of hand counts of paper ballots, as compared to what is occuring today in all states.

I cannot imagine what rational reason would justify using only one counting method and neglecting to require routine independent checks (audits) of initial counts, in the elections industry which protects our way of life and all our other rights.

Electronic counts could be designed to detect ballot box stuffing and no voting method or any industry we want to be accurate should be exempt from independent audits.

It is shocking to me that people who claim to want election integrity so vociferously object to protecting the integrity of our elections with independent audits, and insist that there must only be ONE count of ballots and no audits to double-check the accuracy of vote counts! Honestly. I'm shocked.

It makes me very sad to wonder how we will ever achieve the integrity of US election outcomes with folks that claim to want integrity activists so vociferously attacking subjecting elections to indepedent, transparent, verifiable checks of the accuracy vote counts; or at best not supporting sufficient, transparent, verifiable audits.

Every other industry in America is subjected to independent audits! It is an emanently reasonable request to ask for election results to be subjected to audits, and could be passed if so many people claiming to support election integrity were not so against auditing elections.

Again, I'm flatly shocked and very dismayed at the anti-audit sentiment among people who say they want election integrity.

by Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 49 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 6:15:00 PM
 

What we're against, Kathy,

is having any secret vote-counting going on inside black box optical scanners or central tabulators that cannot be observed in real time by real people, and have to be audited afterwards when it may be too late, if audits are allowed at all and are not prohibitively priced.

What we're against isn't audits, but the necessity for audits.

If the votes are counted completely openly, by hand, by real people, in real time, in a way that is completely observable, and is not hidden inside a machine where nobody can see it or observe it, you can solve any disputes right then and there. If one person thinks that a ballot should not or cannot be counted, there are other people there who can either agree or disagree. They can reach an agreement. But if the vote count takes place secretly inside a machine, no audit may be permitted afterwards, or it may only be allowed after it is to late to unseat a wrongly-installed candidate.

We're not against audits, we're against secret vote-counting. Elections processes must be open, transparent, and observable to the public at all times. They must be auditable in real time as they occur, not afterwards when it is too late.

When a group of pollworkers performs a hand count of hand-marked paper ballots that have never seen the inside of an optical scanner or any other machine, but went directly from the hands of the voters who marked them, into publicly observable, locked ballot boxes, which were publicly emptied in full view, and then counted, a new group of pollworkers, such as the official observers (not the public observers who can fully observe both the count and the recount or "audit"), the recount is performed on election night when it can influence the outcome of the election, not later on when it cannot.

When the count is done secretly inside a machine, it cannot be audited on election night, and therefore it cannot change the outcome of an election, even if the public can afford to pay for it and the elections officials and/or the courts permit it to take place. So that kind of an audit is useless.

Moreover, if optical scan machines or central tabulators are used, they can be subject to insider manipulation, such as inserting malicious code that can alter the results of an election, and it can then erase itself so as not to be detectable in any audit, even if an audit could be performed in time to be of any real use, which to my knowledge has never been the case.

What we're against, Kathy, isn't audits, if what you mean by audits is real people recounting hand-marked paper ballots that have been counted by real people in real time. What we're against is secret vote counting inside machines that cannot be audited in real time or in time to be of any real use. Those types of "audits" even if they could detect malicious code which has already erased itself and can no longer be detected, are of no real use to anyone except to the machine vendors, technicians, and computer experts who get paid to perform such useless functions.

We are not against real time audits by real people. We are against useless "audits" of invisible and unauditable machine counts, because such "audits" cannot detect self-erasing code and cannot be performed in real time on election night.

We don't want to have to take the word of independent and certified experts that our votes were counted, we want to KNOW that our votes are counted by watching them being counted in a way that we can observe as it happens.

As for all those American industries that you have so much faith in, they've been outsourcing our jobs, cutting our wages and benefits, selling us dangerous products (certified safe by the FDA until they've killed so many people that it is no longer possible to pretend that they're safe), deliberately manipulating the markets so as to be able to charge us more, and in many documented cases, cooking their books with the full cooperation of their auditors. You're welcome to continue to trust them, but we do not.

--Mark

by Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 9:45:47 PM
 

Yes I support "real" audits - as written in article above

You now say that

"What we're against, Kathy, isn't audits, if what you mean by audits is real people recounting hand-marked paper ballots that have been counted by real people in real time."

That is tough to tell from all your posts mischaracterizing my positions and motivations and attacking your own mischaracterizations that instantly show up whenever I post an article about some available solutions to ensure election outcome integrity, given the current state of US election systems.

Please take the time to read both the article above and the papers linked from it, which clearly recommend "real verifiable TRANSPARENT manual audits of paper ballot vote counts verified by voters" with "real people" hand counting hand-marked paper ballots".

Although, unlike you, if DRE voting machines are going to be used, I want the paper ballot record of vote counts created by them manually audited as well.

If you really believe, like I do, that DRE voting machine design is fundamentally flawed, and that it is ludricrous to spend the money to buy a computer for a task that takes an able-bodied voter ten minutes once a year, then you expect that lots of discrepancies will be detected when DRE vote counts are manually audited, just like they were when Diebold paper records were compared with electronic records in Cuyahoga County OH. The paper in Cuyahoga County didn't match the electronic records for a full 10% of total votes cast - I know that because I took the time to study the actual tables of data and add up the counts. Did you spend your time doing any similarly study of Cuyahoga County's audit, or did you call the counties in Nevada to see what method they really used to audit - it wasn't the one reported by the press or the NV SOS?

If you would carefully read any my articles or papers, you will understand that nowhere do I ever suggest inanely trying to audit voting machines because that is obviously impossible. To try to find evidence of vote fraud after an election on today's junky machines would be ludicrously unintelligent and I am not unintelligent. In fact I wrote one of the first articles on the Internet in early 2003 describing what process would be involved in attempting to "audit" voting machines. It is unlikely to ever occur and would be a complete waste of time given the utterly insecure, wide-open-to-tampering voting machines in use today.

Yet, three times now, despite my repeatedly informing you that I never suggested auditing voting machines, you continued to grossly mischaracterize what I say by wrongly accusing me of recommending auditing voting machines.

It is really an enormous waste of my time to respond to your repeated wrongful attacks because I am trying to work on a complex legal brief that is necessary to obtain access to election records here in Utah where the Lt. Governor's office in charge of elections is unbelievably dishonest and very powerful.

There is no excuse for swearing the wrong people into office no matter what particular flavor of voting system is in use.

As is stated in our 14 recommendations for election integrity that you so vociferously attacked earlier and seemingly also neglected to carefully read, It is obvious that independent audits of vote counts, require a voting system which create vote counts using independently auditable hand countable ballots, and to be 100% fully auditable, requires that all able-bodied voters must mark their own ballots as you would know if you read the Brennan Center report including its appendices like I did.

I would appreciate it very much if you would spend as much time reading and studying the short proposals and articles that I've researched, developed, and written as you spend attacking and mischaracterizing me and every article I write.

This is a good one for instance:

click here

but you would need to read the detailed proposals on all 4 pages.

There is always more than one right way to solve any problem and more solutions to every problem than there are problems, perhaps you could instead spend your time working on legislators or politicians or the press or persons to educate them as to the critical and immediate importance of this issue, rather than attacking hard working election integrity activists who devote their lives to the issue you claim to support.

We don't need the circular firing squads in the election integrity movement when theoretically at least we're all working for the same goal - the integrity of all our election outcomes.

by Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 49 comments) on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 10:48:41 PM