These recommendations are the result of detailed discussions with the foremost election integrity experts in the U.S., over a period of several months. They are complex and technical because counting votes is a complex process with many vulnerabilities. Protecting the vote count is not a simple matter.
In the interest of brevity, we have omitted many technical details. Below the list of recommendations are more detailed comments. A list of experts who can provide details and answer questions will be provided by December 12th.
Recommendations
1. Manual Audits: Require manual audits of machine vote counts sufficiently statistically valid to ensure that electronically-counted election outcomes are correct.
2. Voter Service Reports: Require states to submit timely reports of detailed election data that can be used to measure voter disenfranchisement and voter service levels.
3. Auditable Voting Systems: Provide funds for upgrading voting systems for jurisdictions that have un-auditable voting systems, but fund only "fully-auditable" voting systems where all able-bodied voters can directly record votes on a paper ballot that is voter-verified.
4. Fund Manual Audits and Voter Service Reports: Provide funds for conducting sufficiently statistically valid manual audits of machine vote counts and producing voter service reports in federal elections.
5. Teeth: Provide certain and swift penalties whenever an election jurisdiction fails in a transparency, auditing, or reporting obligation.
6. Public Election Records: Require election officials to make publicly available in original paper and electronic form all election data and election records that would reveal fraud or errors in elections or are necessary to verify voter service reports and manual audits, prior to certification of results.
7. Election Monitoring Website: Create a website containing a publicly accessible database for logging and tabulating voters' complaints in elections; and for publicly displaying the auditable, audit, and voter service reports from the states.
8. Submission of Reports: Require state election officials to submit auditable, audit and voter service reports to the US GAO prior to state certification of election results.
9. Public Disclosure of Voting System Software: Require public disclosure of voting equipment as a condition of any further contracting to enable post-election voting machine integrity verification.
10. Prohibit Certain Network Connections: Outlaw Wide Area Network connections to, and wireless capability in, voting equipment and prohibit voting through any network.
11. Qualifications for Technical Guidelines Development Committee: Require that members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) for voting systems have at least Masters-level academic credentials in a technical field.
12. Public Right to Observe: Require jurisdictions to allow citizens to observe all aspects of elections.
13. Vote Count Audit and Recount Committee: Create a U.S. Vote Count Audit and Recount Committee whose functions include approving state election audit and recount procedures and policies; and setting standards for state auditable, audit, and voter service reports.
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.
I consider the "foremost election integrity experts in the U.S." to be those who favor hand-counted paper ballots and oppose allowing any machines or software whatsoever to obfuscate elections processes. 99 out of 100 experts agree that we should leave things up to the experts. Experts who told us that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, that global warming didn't exist, and are now telling us that we need complex, technical processes in elections in order to ensure them a steady paycheck. Did it ever occur to you that they might have a bit of a conflict of interest? It is an indication of the damage that machines have already done to our democracy that ANY experts would come out against complex technical elections processes that require experts to audit, verify, and oversee.
1. With hand-counted paper ballots, you don't need audits of machine counts because you won't have machine counts.
2. We need laws to prevent voter disenfranchisement, not to measure it after it occurs. We've already proven that it has occurred in Florida, Ohio, and many other places. There is no need to waste time measuring it, just stop it.
3. Voters should be able to mark their votes on paper ballots with pen or pencil, and those ballots should be hand-counted in full public view at the precincts (precincts, as stipulated in H.R. 6200, should have no more than 500 voters each) on election night. When voters mark their ballots themselves, and then place them into a physical ballot box, they don't need to "verify" them. They verify them as they mark them, and if they make a mistake they can ask for a new ballot.
4. Without machines, you don't need taxpayer funds to audit machine counts. Why would you want to throw our hard-earned money away unnecessarily?
5. Transparency means that all election processes must be totally transparent to the public at all times. Not even experts can see what is going on inside a machine at the time it happens. So I agree that we need swift and certain penalties for any jurisdiction that uses machines of any type in any election, as that destroys the integrity of the election by eliminating public transparency.
6. With hand-counted paper ballots at the precincts, the papeer ballots themselves are the records, and we don't need experts to gain access to electronic records to search for fraud or errors. Since candidates are sometimes sworn in before election results are certified, it would be more useful to require Congress not to swear in Members prior to elections being certified, than to perform useless audits after a candidate has been sworn in and cannot be unseated.
7. Several such websites already exist. I was a pollwatcher and posted my observations to three such websites.
8. See #6 above.
9. If we simply eliminate and prohibit software, we don't need to have it publicly disclosed or verified -- we don't even have to buy it in the first place. One jurisdiction that had voting machine software problems (was it Sarasota where 18,000 votes disappeared?) is complaining that after spending $17 million to purchase the machines and software, it cost them $14 to run a single election. And that not counting storing, maintaining, and upgrading machines between elections, or the costs of attempting to verify the results. The latter costs can be a total waste of money in cases where malicious code has altered the results and then erased itself, as Clint Curtis, who wrote such code himself for Congressman Tom Feeney, explained quite clearly. In such cases the errors and fraud are impossible to find, so paying people to look for them is a frivolous waste of taxpayer money.
10. I know of several jurisdictions where network connections are already prohibited but have been proven to exist anyway. By eliminating the machines, you eliminate the possibility of network connections.
11. Let's see. I believe that guy who hired some of the Diebold programmers, the guy who had been convicted and sentenced to prison in Canada for abusing a position of public trust by using sophisticated programming to fraudulently obtain millions of dollars, would have precisely those qualifications, or exceed them.
12. Agreed. But since nobody can observe what is going on inside a machine, we need to remove ALL machines from elections in order to make possible the public right to observe all aspects of elections.
13. The old jokes about forming committees are endless, so let's just say that forming a committee is a very common way to avoid doing anything. Are you going to pay the salaries of that committee or are we? Because if we are, we'd prefer not to have a committee and just go straight to hand-counted paper ballots instead.
14. There you go again, throwing our money away. If we eliminate the software, we don't need to fund a repository for it.
15. Agreed.
Kathy, if you have all those credentials and qualifications, what part of hand-counted paper ballots don't you understand? Somebody paraphrased an ad by saying: Pencil $0.26, Paper Ballot, $1.25, Election Integrity, Priceless. But we're not scrooges. We'd be willing to spend money for technology if it was more efficient or less error-prone than paper and pencil voting. In fact we did. And it wasn't. It was worse. So we'd prefer not to throw good money after bad, and we are very tired of credentialed experts trying to force us to do so.
My own city, San Diego, is in very poor financial shape. If we return to hand-counted paper ballots we can save millions of dollars. If we try to get new or better machines or software, and hire experts to verify the machines and software, it could throw us into bankruptcy. That may be what you and your experts want, but that is not what we want. Do we get a voice in this, or do you and your experts decide how to spend our money?
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 29 quicklinks, 76 diaries, 972 comments)
on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 3:16:28 AM
Most of your comments mischaracterize our recommendations
Most of your comments do not accurately reflect what is in our recommendations.
For instance, your comments:
"We need laws to prevent voter disenfranchisement, not to measure it after it occurs." neglect to mention that our recommendations do both.
"Voters should be able to mark their votes on paper ballots with pen or pencil," neglect to mention that we recommend exactly that, twice in our proposals.
"Transparency means that all election processes must be totally transparent to the public at all times." neglects to mention that our recommendations and definition of transparency do ensure that election outcomes are made transparently verifiable by anyone in the public.
-------------
You live on a different planet than I do if you think that:
1. Congress will prohibit or proscribe that states use particular voting technology or throw out all voting machinery, or that
2. returning to the old days of ballot substitution, ballot tampering, ballot absconding, and other vulnerabilities of a paper ballot only system is the best that we can do for our democracy.
Election rigging is an old American tradition - one we could virtually eliminate for good by modernizing our election industry by conducting audits.
Whatever the voting system you want, even the susceptible one of "hand-counted paper ballots only without any electronic checks" that would detect and prevent paper ballot tampering that you want, still needs to be independently audited.
Please stop attacking your own mischaracterizations of our proposals and read the definitions and detailed comments sections of it:
My goal is not to proscribe a particular voting system that I think best, but to ensure that election outcomes are correct. I would never sacrifice the integrity of our election outcomes to fight for a particular voting technology.
Thank you.
by
Kathy Dopp (31 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 50 comments)
on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 1:11:16 PM
Your recommendations appear to mischaracterize your goals.
If you prevent voter disenfrancisement, you don't have to measure it, as you won't have any to measure. But laws alone won't do it. We already have lots of laws, they just aren't enforced. We need teams of lawyers, exactly as Kerry proposed before SOMETHING happened that caused him to call them off.
When you say that you want to fund only "'fully auditable' voting systems where all able-bodied boters can directly record votes on a paper ballot that is voter-verified," you are using a lot more words than is necessary to say that voters should be able to mark them votes with pencil on a paper ballot. You are allowing for ballot-marking machines that the voter could "verify," rather than letting people mark their ballots themselves. If they mark them directly, they don't need to "verify" them, because as I said, they see what they're doing as they do it and can ask for a new ballot if they make a mistake. Only if there is a machine of some sort between the voter and their vote would they need to "verify" that the machine marked the ballot the way they wanted it marked, or would the machine need to be audited.
As I said, no machine is transparent to the public. Your definition of transparency allows for nontransparent systems that cannot be observed by the public in real time, and therefore must be "audited" afterwards. A transparent system does not have to be audited afterwards because it is transparent as it occurs. There's no software to audit.
And we do live on different planets if you thing that:
1. Congress will not prohibit or proscribe anything that was purchased due to HAVA and found to be uncertifiable and unreliable. Or that Congress will require states to throw good money after bad to buy new machines and software when there is a system that is thousands of times more inexpensive like paper and pencil. The people who pushed through HAVA are no longer powers in Congress and I doubt if other Congressmembers wish to be associated with the legislation of indicted or convicted felons.
2. Nobody said we had to return to the old days of election fraud. We know those techniques and how to guard against them. By insisting that ballots be counted in full public view, we can guard against almost all ballot tampering, by requiring that they be counted at the precincts, we can eliminate absconding with ballot boxes on the way to a central counting place, and by having transparent ballot boxes in full public view at the precints, we can avoid ballot substitution.
You can not eliminate election rigging by auditing the software after the election. That's too late. You have to prevent it by not allowing any software or any machines that use software. Audits, even when possible, cannot find code that has erased itself, or unseat candidates who have already been sworn in based on rigged machine counts.
The only independent audit we need is having the counting be open to the public so that everyone can watch what is going on. There is no other independent audit. Audits that have to be performed on software can only be done by software geeks, and even if the public could watch them, which is very unlikely, the public wouldn't know what they're doing. Plus, they can't find code that is no longer there, having erased itself after altering the results.
I didn't say you were fighting for a particular voting technology. All I'm saying is that you are insisting that more complex, and therefore more vulnerable and less transparent, systems, would make our elections more rather than less secure. You're wrong. And so are your experts.
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 29 quicklinks, 76 diaries, 972 comments)
on Friday, December 1, 2006 at 4:23:23 AM
You misunderstood my comments & mischaracterize my positions
Mark,
You seem to be having a conversation more with yourself than responding to anything in our proposals.
You misunderstood my comments, so let me clarify:
Unlike yourself whose sole aim seems to be HCPB "Hand counted paper ballots", I am not pushing for any particular voting technology. My goal is to ensure the integrity of the election outcomes regardless of the technology used.
Unlike yourself, I am not willing to sacrifice achieving the integrity of election outcomes, by insisting on my way or the highway as far as the voting technology.
If you really want to show how superior your HCPB only technology is, why don't you write some proposals yourself and show us how HCPB would work in a large city like LA and handle all the foreign language and disabled voters and how meet the current federal, state, and local legal requirements and how prevent ballot tampering, ballot substitution, ballot stuffing, ballot obsconding, etc. that goes on so ubiquitously today.
Unlike you, I believe that there are always many more solutions to problems than there are problems to solve and that there are multiple approaches that are all good and I applaud others who take different approaches. And unlike you, I do not spend my time attacking people trying to ensure the integrity of our democratic process, but spend my time working very hard, without any pay for the last three years, despite having no one to support me, finding solutions that will work and have the best chance of implementation given our current situation. Unlike you, if I attack people or positions, it is the positions of people who are dishonestly trying to hide the problems with US election systems or people who are pushing for measures that create more secretiveness and less integrity in our elections.
If you want to know my positions on issues, rather than inventing them and then responding to your own inventions, then I suggest you read some of the dozens of papers I've written on the subject of voting and election systems since 2003 by going to:
Mark Smith writes:
"I consider the 'foremost election integrity experts in the U.S.' to be those who favor hand-counted paper ballots and oppose allowing any machines or software whatsoever to obfuscate elections processes."
Yes, the only real experts are the ones who agree with you.
Mark Smith writes:
"99 out of 100 experts agree that we should leave things up to the experts."
That's just like 76.5432% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Mark Smith writes:
"Experts who told us that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, that global warming didn't exist, and are now telling us that we need complex, technical processes in elections in order to ensure them a steady paycheck."
Interesting claim. Do you know of a single expert who has done all three? The only experts who told us cigarettes didn't cause cancer were funded by the tobacco companies. Similarly, it is only experts funded by energy companies who claim global warming doesn't exist. In either case, industry (primarily energy and tobacco) fund the disinformation campaign. And a news media whose idea of fairness is presenting opposing viewpoints that makes such bogus arguments seem as plausible as that from mainstream scientists.
There are many experts who support appropriate use of technology in an open and secure manner with audits and safeguards in combination with human procedures, and who receive no funding from voting machine vendors.
Most of the members and supporters of the Open Voting Consortium (www.openvoting.org) are volunteers who devote a significant amount of time to the promotion of openness in voting systems and processes, and the consortium is funded by donations.
Mark Smith writes:
"Did it ever occur to you that they might have a bit of a conflict of interest?"
Quite an insinuation there. Everyone *might* have a conflict of interest. The question is who really does. I, for one, have been an unpaid volunteer for several years promoting open, secure, and reliable technology. I've travelled to conferences and meetings at my own expense.
Mark Smith writes:
"It is an indication of the damage that machines have already done to our democracy that ANY experts would come out against complex technical elections processes that require experts to audit, verify, and oversee."
I didn't know there was an expert's union. Even if no computers are used (and I think even you would allow the use of some sort of computer to store the results from the various precincts), there will always be complex technical elections processes that require experts to audit, verify, and oversee.
So the question is not whether experts are needed. The question is whether the process is open to inspection, and whether any of us can arrange for the expert(s) of our choosing to perform that inspection.
It is clear that not everyone will have the time and stamina to observe election processes, and the expertise to properly interpret what they are observing. And having untrained observers is insufficient to prevent errors and fraud.
It is not clear that hand counted paper ballots are more reliable than precinct-based optical scan of paper ballots with appropriate safeguards.
For example, Andrew Reeves reports as follows. Can we trust him, since he is an "expert"? Do you have a reason to believe he has a conflict of interest?
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 12:39:23 -0500
From: "Andrew Reeves"
Subject: [Votingtech] Re:Hand Counted Paper Ballots vs. Machine Counted Ballots
To: "Philip James"
Cc: votingtech@hss.caltech.edu
Stephen Ansolabehere and I have a paper on the accuracy of hand
counted vs machine counted ballots. It is available here:
click here
Here is the abstract:
We examine a new measure of accuracy for counting votes - the
discrepancy between
initial counts and recounts of ballots in contested elections. We term
this the tabulation
invalidation rate. In an analysis of all recounts in New Hampshire
from 1946 to 1962, we
establish a historical tabulation invalidation rate of .8 percent for
hand counted ballots. We
then examine New Hampshire recounts from the 2000, 2002, and 2004
elections and establish invalidation rates for hand counted (1.7
percent) and optically scanned ballots (.7 percent). Controlling for
the total town vote, total candidate vote, and the office of the race,
we find that the tabulation invalidation rate is approximately
eight-tenths of one percentage point lower in towns using scanners
than in towns using hand-counted paper ballots.
Any comments are greatly welcome. We are currently revising and a new
draft should be along shortly at the same url.
Best,
Andrew Reeves
--
Andrew Reeves
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Government, Harvard University
http://www.AndrewReeves.com
by
Arthur Keller (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Friday, December 1, 2006 at 5:53:12 AM
