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Tag(s): Election Reform; Election Theft; USA United States Of America
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March 22, 2007 at 14:37:10

Halting Holt Thoughts

by andi novick Page 1 of 4 page(s)

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Today I received an email from Doug Kellner, Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections, with his comments in response to Doug Lewis’s March 20, 2007 testimony regarding the Holt Bill. Doug Kellner’s comments were also posted at http://www.wheresthepaper.org/CommentDouglasAKellner.htm.

The Lewis testimony can be found at http://www.wheresthepaper.org/HouseAdminTestimonyDougLewis3_20_2007.pdf. Lately I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about who are these people who are my would-be allies, but support the Holt Bill, which I believe to be terribly damaging to our ability as a people to regain control over our democracy. Doug’s email came in the midst of my pondering. One particular comment, excerpted below, really moved me and provided me with needed insight:

I thought that you might be interested in my comments on Doug Lewis’s testimony regarding the Holt Bill (HR 811)… The comments have generated considerable debate, generally agreeing that HR 811 needs revision, particularly among advocates of verified voting.

……………………………………..

I am torn by my 14-year crusade to require a voter verifiable paper audit trail in all direct recording voting equipment and the new problems that would inevitably arise if HR 811 should be enacted in its current form.

That really struck me to think about what it must be like to have waged a battle for so long for something which may turn out not to be the solution you believed it would be. What strength it takes to struggle with oneself; how few people are willing to do that.

A few weeks ago I went to a forum at Rutgers Law School and listened to computer scientist Ed Felten (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) talk earnestly about the problems with DREs and how adding paper is better than not having paper, but it isn’t going to make the DRE secure. And yet he was supporting the Holt bill, still holding onto the machine with the paper and I thought, why? A couple of days after that I read that computer scientist Avi Rubin, who was traveling the same path Ed Felten was on, had testified about electronic voting and had changed his mind, rejecting DREs with paper as a solution. He wrote in his blog, http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com/2007/03/todays-congressional-hearing.html,

Another member of the committee gave me the best opening I think I've ever had. He asked me if I thought it was possible to have a trustworthy and secure election using paperless DREs. I replied "no". He then said, "Why?" It was a question I was hoping for. I explained that a software only system, especially one as complex as a DRE where all of the voter input and vote tabulation takes place in a closed box, cannot possibly be audited. There is no way to know for sure that the totals produced by the machines at the end of the election correspond to the votes that were cast by the voters.

Finally, I was asked if I thought that a DRE with a paper trail was an adequate voting system. I replied that when I first studied the Diebold DRE in 2003, I felt that a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) provided enough assurance. But, I continued, after four years of studying the issue, I now believe that a DRE with a VVPAT is not a reasonable voting system.

The other day I heard Ralph Neas of People for the American Way (PFAW) being interviewed by RFK Jr.. PFAW is a main supporter of the Holt bill and as I listened I kept thinking, why are groups like PFAW and Common Cause and Moveon all supporting the Holt Bill when it is going to make the current situation even worse.

And then I thought about this from an article by Bruce O’Dell, Holt's HR 811, A Deceptive Boondoggle -- 10 Blunders to Fix,:

In fact, there is a fascinating study from 2001 (interestingly enough, published shortly before HAVA was enacted) which concluded that not only were hand-counted paper ballots the most accurate of all vote counting methods, measuring by residual vote rate, but that every single technological "innovation" of the last century - lever machines, punch cards, optical scan, DRE - actually measurably decreased the accuracy of the voting process. Their conclusion:

These results are a stark warning of how difficult it is to implement new voting technologies. People worked hard to develop these new technologies. Election officials carefully evaluated the systems, with increasing attentiveness over the last decade. The result: our best efforts applying computer technology have decreased the accuracy of elections, to the point where the true outcomes of many races are unknowable.

We are a technological society. Technology has become part of our religion. And like other religious, some stop along the path to seek answers, to question, to revisit, while others just go on faith. It’s not my place to say what role critical thought and science should play in religion, but America is not supposed to be a religious society. It is time to revisit faith based voting. If a computer is counting your vote, there is simply no way for human beings to observe the count. If the count is being done by a machine- whether it’s a DRE or an OpScan- it is a secret count and we’re all going on faith that our vote was counted as cast. That’s not good enough for a country which was founded on a separation of church and state and whose founding documents jealously guard against the surrender of our rights. Our right to know that are votes were accurately counted is the right on which all others hinge. When we stop and think and question we see this:

(See Paul Lehto’s New York City Change To Optical Scan Elections: Not the answer, but getting closer).

It’s not easy to give up our machines, but what if it’s true that: “our best efforts applying computer technology have decreased the accuracy of elections, to the point where the true outcomes of many races are unknowable.” None of us should be willing to accept not knowing the outcomes of our elections because we choose machines over doing it ourselves. No one would voluntarily surrender the right of the people to control their ability to choose their representatives and yet, we hold onto our machines.

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Andi Novick Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media www.re-media.org

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5 comments

Graduate of MIT and Stevens; 50 years as systems engineer on cutting edge projects, civilian and military; Fifth Air Force, WWII; sworn defender of the Constitution
abacusGraduate of MIT and Stevens; 50 years as systems engineer on cutting edge projects, civilian and military; Fifth Air Force, WWII; sworn defender of the Constitution

Hand Count Works!

Hand count works!

The contrary is simply indefensible. The data and the record are absolutely clear. Those who think not must be classified as either [a] vastly uninformed or [b] working as hired guns for interested parties - whose interests are NOT honest elections.

Let’s first just look at what working on the recount of a major, high-profile real-life hotly-contested governor’s election was like.

Then we should note: a CalTech-MIT study; and a little common sense.

Washington State election for Governor, 2004

In 2004 here in Washington State we had an election for Governor which made headlines everywhere for the extraordinarily close result. The election was conducted with hand-marked paper ballots and opscan machines. [primarily; [1]] State-wide, Gregoire won by about 130 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots. It was finally settled in Court. [2]

Here is how it looked in King County, in which Seattle is located.

We had 594,000 absentees’ ballots and 305,000 polling place ballots, about 900,000 total here.

—Begin clips [3]

My team of three sorted and counted 5,544 votes during a nine-hourshift. We agreed unanimously - the Republican, the Democrat and I, the county worker - about who should get every one of those votes.

Each ballot was counted by the Republican appointee: McClellan, 21, a recent University of Washington grad who applied to be the Rossi family nanny and got this job because her brother-in-law works for the campaign.

Then the same stacks were counted by the Democratic appointee: John Reese, 53, a Seattle pro-Palestinian activist who said he was "way left of liberal; I guess I'd call myself a radical."

They kept their counts secret and gave them to me. If the numbers matched, we reported the results and resealed the box. If they differed, we started over. If the second counts still didn't agree, we were instructed to return the box to be given to a new team.

The system of checks and double-checks didn't stop there. If our tallies for a precinct varied by even one vote from the machine recount, another team would later reopen the box and count the entire precinct by hand again.

...With all the recent news about uncounted votes and ballots being found in the side pockets of precinct machines, I expected a slipshod operation. I was completely wrong.

I am now convinced that in the counting of votes, humans are unquestionably superior to machines.

..."I'm so impressed with this system," McClellan said. "It's near impossible to corrupt, and it seems much more sensitive than a machine count. All the criticisms I hear about what we're doing are wrong."

Reese agreed. "I don't have much faith in the American political system, but I have faith in what we're doing here," he said. "I would put people counting over machine counting any time."

...those critics who are blasting the manual recount on the face of it don't know what they're talking about. Such as former Gov. Dan Evans: "Can you imagine 300 newly hired, ill-trained, overworked people counting by hand with people looking over their shoulders and getting accurate counts? It's ludicrous."

I can do more than imagine it, governor. I saw it with my own eyes.

===End of clips

CalTech-MIT

Clip
“The central finding of this investigation is that manually counted paper ballots have the lowest average incidence of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots, followed closely by lever machines and optically scanned ballots. Punchcard methods and systems using direct recording electronic devices (DREs) had significantly higher average rates of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots than any of the other systems.” [4]

Common Sense

People count paper currency world-wide to the satisfaction of all concerned [aside from occasional disputes over poker ...].

Canada, Sweden and other nations, all around the globe, hand count paper ballots routinely.

Canada’s Paper Ballot System [5]

Summary numbers:
Registered voters - 21,243,473
Number of polling stations - 60,728
Average of registered voters per station (minimum of 250 per precinct)-350
Total ballots cast - 12,997,185
Average ballots cast per polling station - 214
Ballots rejected - 139,412 or 1.1% -
Voter turn-out - 61.2%

Within four hours after the last polls closed in Canada's parliamentary election, officials had hand-counted virtually every one of nearly 13 million paper ballots.

Sources; Notes

[1] Three counties had DREs as well as opscan systems used for both polling place and absentee voting. Some aspects of the results were interesting; and there was a court case. But none of this is really relevant to our present concerns.

[2] “Tedious hand recount begins,”
Seattle Post-intelligencer 12/9/04
click here

“Counter for a day finds few bugs in recount process”
Seattle Times 12/18/04 Danny Westneat
click here />click here />
[D. Westneat is a very well-regarded long-time staffer for the Seattle Times.]

[3] “Judge upholds Gregoire's election; Rossi won't appeal”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 6/6/05
click here />

[4] “Residual Votes Attributable to Technology - An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment”
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 3/30/01
click here />
[5] “Voting Inside-Outside the Box”
League of Women Voters of Washington State Committee - telecon with Pierre Blain, a spokesman for Elections Canada.
click here />http://www.elections.ca/loi/ref/CEA-LEC_e.pdf />

by abacus (2 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 58 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 12:12:53 AM

Andi Novick
Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media
www.re-media.org
andi novickAndi Novick
Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media
www.re-media.org

cal tech study

I was very interested in following up on some of your links- the cal tech study link doesn't seem to work

I thought one of the most powerful things you said was describing people's reactions to the experience of hand counting- I remember reading a Thom Hartmann article about how Germans experience the week they take to count votes- in a very positive, pro- participatory democracy way

I think that's a good way to have this conversation that people can perhaps hear rather than just thinking and talking about HCPBs in the abstract

thanks

andi

by andi novick (52 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 14 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 1:08:11 PM

CalTech-MIT Link

Sorry; of course I should have checked it.

Here's another link, but to a secondary document not the original. If I can find one to the original I'll send it.

BTW: thanks for a great piece.

by abacus (2 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 58 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 4:36:31 PM

digital programmer turned thought specialist, sorta: rocket surgeon.
meremarkdigital programmer turned thought specialist, sorta: rocket surgeon.

Less talk, more walk.

In New York, and beyond, think outside the box, and in your thinking shift the paradigm.

Have paper ballots on which each voter writes the name of the candidate being voted for. Period. Simplicity everyone understands. Write the name -- Pencil. Paper. Write who you vote for.

But some voters can't spell, or some have handwriting that is difficult to read. So what? And your point is? In a new paradigm, give voters your credence in abilities and voters can, and mostly will, extend ourselves to perform to our expectations of each other. Ask yourself, could you write the name of who you are voting for? Surely, you can. Well, so can everyone else.

But handwritten names would take so long to count. So what? Employ more counters.

But handwritten names is not the way we have always voted. So what? It is the easiest to understand and explain. It is the way voting began. It it universal and uniform. It is fair. It is just.

But it would upset the existing power structure to change over to the new system. So what? And your point is? The new handwritten voting system works better, simplicity is more reliable.

But there are so many names to write. So what? Write your candidates in advance and take those notes with you. Better yet, using Oregon's Vote-by-Mail method, registered voters receive their ballots and have two weeks to consider, decide, and mark their votes.

I claim that young voters would be attracted to handwritten voting, for trusting it more, and so more young voters would vote. Let's ask several of them and see what they say. After all, they are the ones who have to live the most with whatever system is instituted.

Technology's 'automatic'-ness was supposed to make our lives easy. Instead, it has made our lives hasty. As good drivers know: Slow down and live. I claim that haste has made waste of our lives today, and wasting has made our lives hard.

Just saying, outside the (ballot) box, perhaps we can think of what we can do, instead of thinking of what can be done for us and getting what is done to us.

by meremark (1 articles, 3 quicklinks, 25 diaries, 494 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 12:52:12 PM

In 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists. Focused mainly on elections, her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a legal investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor. She currently serves as a senior editor at OpEdNews.

All material offered here is the property of Rady A...

to see more of bio, click on member name
Rady AnandaIn 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists. Focused mainly on elections, her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a legal investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor. She currently serves as a senior editor at OpEdNews.

All material offered here is the property of Rady A...

to see more of bio, click on member name

Better Link for Annotated Bib of 15 Expert Reports

Annotated Bibliography: Electronic Voting and Fair Vote Counts. http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rady_ana_070117_annotated_bibliograp.htm
Annotated bibliography of 15 Expert Reports on electronic voting and fair vote counts -- summarized and sourced for your reference.

Andi - this article is very comprehensive and well-researched. I appreciate the new sources you provided - especially the GAO's March 07 report.

Above I provide the link to the updated annotated bibliography which you mentioned at the end of your article.

by Rady Ananda (109 articles, 257 quicklinks, 23 diaries, 843 comments) on Saturday, March 24, 2007 at 10:51:04 AM