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| 4-8-06: Why the Rush Holt bill (H.B. ... |
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| Author |
Message |
    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4003
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 14 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, April 8, 2006 - 7:54 am: | 
|
There is a major push right now to pass H.B. 550, a bill put forth by Rep. Rush Holt to mandate a paper trail (along with a flimsy audit that no accountant would agree is adequate).
Election reform groups are split on whether they support H.B. 550. Black Box Voting normally does not weigh in on legislation, this time we will.
Like an antibiotic that's too weak, we belive that H.B. 550 will create a more resistant strain of election infection.
Like a placebo, people may think the election system is getting well when in fact, the medicine is only a sugar pill that makes everyone think it's better. For a minute.
Paul Lehto, an attorney who is a leader in the election reform movement and the plaintiff in a groundbreaking lawsuit related to electronic voting, has a unique clarity in public policy issues. Lehto says:
"[the] paper record requirement, combined with a worse than anemic audit feature, is so darn dangerous in terms of its ability to create false confidence...
"Putting into the Holt bill a provision specifying the method of EAC audit (2% or more precinct sampling) simply telegraphs to cheaters how to cheat and not get caught..."
Any major political movement has the inside game and the outside game
The inside game involves writing letters, lobbying, working with legislators, and in the case of a privatization issue like voting machines, meeting with vendors and working with regulatory groups.
The outside game involves investigative work, communications on subjects even when they are considered impolite, exposés, agitation, occasional civil disobedience, and an overwhelming push to give citizens power over those who govern them.
The inside game resists the outside game
Those who play the inside game tend to believe that the outside game is undisciplined, a bunch of mavericks, endangers the goal. The inside game is polite, conciliatory, respects authority and likes to tell others what to do.
"Support H.B. 550 it's good push this button send this email now."
Those who question and probe are painted as irresponsible.
There is no doubt that Black Box Voting usually plays the outside game. We know we'll be attacked from within the movement -- from the establishment-oriented inside game - for taking the position that H.B. 550 is will do more damage than good.
But here it is: Black Box Voting believes that H.B. 550 is unwise. It will not be effective to improve citizen oversight or election integrity. It is dangerous, because the weakness of the antibiotic will create a more resistant strain of election manipulation.
The likelihood is that, if H.B. 550 is passed, it will simply "prove" that electronic voting works "fine."
It was a "fine" election...
As another blogger noted, notice the frequency with which elected officials are now using that word. I suppose it's an improvement over a couple years ago, when they called us "terrorists", but I still scratch my head when I hear the new talking point: "We had a fine election." Not "we had an accurate election." Not "we had a fair election." We had a fine election. What do they mean by that?
Well, rest assured that electronic voting will look just "fine" under the Holt bill because, as Paul Lehto notes, the way the audits are set up they won't catch anything to make the election look "not fine." To solve the inadequate auditing provisions in the Holt bill will require drafting a whole new bill.
So if H.B. 550 is passed, everyone will pat themselves on the back and go home and not a damn thing will actually change, except that more taxpayer money will be expended for retrofitted machines.
The inside game people want the current kinds of technology to work
And -- note the players involved, like those involved in testing and setting standards -- many of them will have no role in this if they don't make the current kinds of technology work. Note the recent Calif. Senate/ITAs transcript, where Systest Labs refers to the meeting in Nov. 2005 -- you know, the one where all the industry perps showed up but the public, and even the chair of the California Senate Elections Committee were excluded. Systest reports that the academics seem to be heading toward creating an IV&V effort, another layer of testing and certifying.
More taxpayer money, more scientists, more paychecks, more layers of complexity, more people to point the finger at when elections turn out to be secret unsubstantiated messes.
The inside game has tolerance for a much longer timeline
You don't need to hurry if you don't think any crimes will be committed.
The inside game is addressing the problem by adding a "vvpat" and quibbling over just how to do a 2 percent audit, or layering test labs into the process, or ponderously altering standards in response to critical security failures, while grandfathering old systems in for years.
No major reform movement will survive without the outside game
The civil rights movement would not have gotten very far without the outside game. Rosa Parks was outside game. The Selma-to-Montgomery March was outside game. The civil rights workers -- some of whom were killed -- were outside game.
The anti-Viet Nam movement would have failed without the outside game. Viet Nam Vets Against the War were outside game. Burning draft cards was outside game.
The outside game knows it needs the inside game, because when the message is sufficiently focused and the goals are sufficiently clear and the people themselves are beginning to drive the train, it gets pitched to the inside game and changes are made to legislation.
But it isn't just legislation that is pushed down the tracks by the outside game. Media tends to gravitate towards coverage of the outside game. The message of the outside game sticks in the public's consciousness better then legislative bill numbers. After the outside game succeeds in pushing the message into the mainstream, embedding it in the public psyche, change becomes more durable.
The inside game doesn't necessarily think the outside game is necessary. Because the outside game pushes the envelope, opening up new frontiers, it pushes concepts into the mainstream that are -- by definition -- not really accepted yet. When you focus on the establishment to achieve your goals, it helps to distance yourself from the outside game. The smartest of the inside game strategizers recognize how the ecosystem works, though, and often provide discreet support and/or intelligence to the outside game.
Less savvy inside game strategists allow themselves to be persuaded that the outside game puts the agenda at risk, endangers the country.
This can be helped along by disruptors (posing as part of the movement) who are actually working for the opposition. In the civil rights movement, and in the anti-Viet Nam War movement, there were paid infiltrators who posed as activists, but those individuals persuaded many real activists over to a more controlled, less "dangerous" point of view. They also helped pit them against the outside game.
It's all part of the play book.
You don't catch criminals by passing a rule against it.
The outside game defines the problem a bit differently. Let me give you an analogy to show how the current inside game fails when one assumes there just might -- possibly -- be a criminal enterprise at work in certain election situations.
Let's say it's small, localized, and simply mercenary. For $40,000 a guy with inside access will make sure a developer-friendly commissioner gets in. To get the guy in, he arranges to exploit a known hole in voting machine security.
Now, the Rush Holt bill will have you wait a couple years before it even gets to the rules committee, where the lobbyists step in and gut the bill. So it won't protect 2006, because it wont be in effect by then, and it probably won't protect 2008 because even if it makes it to the rules committee, it will be weakened when it gets behind closed doors.
So the guy pockets his $40,000 and the commissioner gets into office. It will almost certainly never be discovered, because there are no audit provisions anywhere for electronic voting machines likely to catch this stuff, but let's say it does get caught.
If you're playing the inside game, you take this example of the $40,000 cheat and spend nine months discussing it into new standards, then a couple years to grandfather the old voting systems, and finally, around 2009, you address what the guy did for $40,000 back in 2006.
By this time, another guy is selling elections using a different back door. He builds a better hack, having learned from the NIST discussion what they ARE looking at. All he has to do is go where they are not looking.
If you're worried about national politics, listen up:
In a time-critical situation, the inside game runs out the clock.
Let's not call this dirty tricks or Rovian spin or pretend it is just the way hardball politics work. If we can't substantiate the data in our elections systems (both voter registration and votes) these weaknesses will attract people who want to manipulate elections. Subverting election-related data is a criminal act. If it involves more than one person, it is a criminal enterprise.
If criminal enterprises want to manipulate a national election by attacking the data, that criminal entity will be thrilled to see activists derailed into sincere actions that actually just run out the clock.
Efforts to steer everyone to the inside game is a bit insidious. Think for yourself.
The idea that you can solve election fraud by making standards, putting machines into testing labs, and doing poorly defined, weak, and statutorily limited audits came about because the inside game thought it was impolite to define the problem accurately.
It's not about a paper trail -- It's about banning SECRECY
If we want a trustworthy system, we need to be unafraid to entertain the idea that if you make any facet of elections secret (other than who a person votes for), it will attract criminals. Such a temptation may take place inside a voter registration database or voting machine vendor's operation. In the case of a rogue programmer, management need not even know (if the programmer is positioned correctly). It may exist inside an elections office, or with a pollworker, or through a political operative.
You won't stop it by passing a rule against it. We need to be lobbying to end secrecy and re-enable citizen oversight. Lobbying for anything else may give us "fine" elections but we'll never really know whether our vote was counted as we cast it.
Save your lobbying for something that eliminates secrecy. And if only a computer scientist can understand it or only an elections official can monitor it, it's still secret. H.B. 550 doesn't do much of anything to get at the core problem, which is secrecy.
PERMISSION TO REPRINT OR EXCERPT GRANTED. MUST LINK TO http://www.blackboxvoting.org. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4014
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 4 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 2:43 pm: |
|
Clarification and correction: The response to this post has been informative. My private e-mail is busy with support for this, the public forums are -- shall we say -- confused about this.
1. The core problem is secrecy. The dealbreaker problems in the Holt Bill lie in its audit provision. This bill can act to put a LID on our ability to count 100 percent of the ballots.
This is about our basic civil right to have transparency of the counting of all ballots, not just some.
If the audit provision is reworked to ensure that Americans will have the right to count ALL the ballots, the support by BBV would be a different story. We don't want to give away that right, and this legislation is dangerous in that it can achieve just that.
2. On Democratic Underground, some citizens assumed that this is an attack on VoteTrustUSA. It is not. That group does outstanding work in both lobbying and communications, with a more pro-establishment stance than we take here. The article here has no comment to make on any particular election reform group, but I will comment here that I believe VoteTrustUSA is doing great work, whether or not I agree with their stance on any particular bill. I adore Ion Sancho as well, and fully respect his choice to support H.B. 550.
This article, however, is an editorial about strategic actions and specifically about one bill.
At BBV we prohibit ascribing motivations to people and require that the discussion stay on the issue. This is a good reason why.
The issue is H.B. 550 and whether it is a wise thing to lobby for or not in its present form, which is the only form available. The other issue raised in this article is the strategic issue of whether to go with the inside game or the outside game or both.
I can tell you that BBV has no motivation other than discussion of these issues. We feel they are important. I suppose if you announce "Santa Claus's real motivation is to learn the burglary routes into every home in the world" enough times, some people will believe it. But it's more accurate to say "Santa Claus is entering the chimneys, and the two sides of this are as follows: You may get presents and have quality family time on Christmas morning, but on the other hand, you are giving Santa access to your valuables and the ability to scope out your home security system." You can then go on to say what you recommend based on that, and people will see that there are two sides to an issue, what they are, and what your opinion is.
That encourages people to do a little homework and think for themselves. My impression, especially after reading Thomas Jefferson, is that the intent of the founding fathers in creating this democracy was that we create an informed populace and then trust to the people to have enough innate common sense to choose a good path.
3. It is not an insult to work on the inside game. It is also not debatable that lobbying is an inside game strategy. Note also that the above article says that the outside game knows it needs the inside game, but the inside game often doesn't think it needs the outside game. History doesn't bear that position out, since the outside game was needed to pass the Voters Rights Act of 1965, the outside game was needed to pass the 19th Amendment (Women's Suffrage Amendment) and the outside game was needed to get us out of Viet Nam. All of the above also needed the inside game.
Ascribing motivations to simply posting information on how reform strategy works doesn't seem particularly constructive. Describing the inside game versus the outside game is not intended as either a compliment or an insult, but as a road map about strategy.
Now, because the inside game is not under attack (it usually isn't) but the outside game is pretty much always under attack, this article serves to point out the importance of having an outside game.
Black Box Voting isn't the only outside game in town. The hand counted paper ballots groups are outside game. There is an election reform group that was considering dumping voting machines into Boston Harbor -- that is an outside game. Brad Friedman's "Dieb-Throat" articles are outside game. Setting up public demonstrations of hacking a voting system are outside game. Lots of people are playing the outside game.
4. The most chilling part of watching the discussion at DU unfold is the "watch what you say" groupspeak attitude. I received an e-mail this weekend from someone who said she wants to post here but is afraid she'll be attacked on the other Internet sites if she does.
When someone tentatively posts a dissenting opinion on two of the popular political forums (Daily Kos and DU) which concurs with something Black Box Voting says, often they are attacked, demeaned, their motivations questioned, and those who are articulate are labeled "Bevbots."
Trying to intimidate people into a choice of silence or the company line is just as dangerous as trying to put a 2 percent cap on the amount of ballots we are allowed to verify.
Think for yourself. Black Box Voting encourages you to speak up whether you agree or disagree with the stance we just published. But read the bill itself, not just its sales literature, and put it in the context of what you've already seen in the field when you attempt to monitor elections.
I did make a slight correction in the article above, to adjust the tone. I replaced "cozy up to legislators" with "work with legislators."
If there is anything else in the tone that you think could be improved, or anything that should be clarified, please let us know.
|
Bruce Sims
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ubetchaiam
Post Number: 724
Registered: 06-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 8:17 pm: |
|
Finally got around to reading this and bravissimo 
Beautifully summed:
"It's not about a paper trail -- It's about banning SECRECY"
Glad to see the 'game' put in clear language and the 'tone' was fine to begin with; either people understand that this is a war about liberty or they are part of the inside game. |
Jim March
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jimmarch
Post Number: 144
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 5 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 9:40 pm: |
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Let's discuss how this works as political strategy.
Folks, we at Black Box Voting have all come to this from different angles. Let me show you why I support this position on the Holt bill as written now.
First, most of you know I come from California. That state has a 1% mandatory recount law that has been in place for some time now. It wasn't written clearly enough; it called for a 1% recount of all "precincts". Not "votes".
The worst of the county registrars took that language and twisted it around. They separated out their absentee ballots so that they were NOT sorted by "precinct", and hence avoided running them through the hand-counts.
The problem is that in the Diebold environment (optical scan or touchscreen precincts) the absentee votes are the most vulnerable to hacking. They can be "messed with" during the outgoing mail process, the incoming mail sort process and at the central tabulator. Other electronic systems share some of these vulnerabilities and absentee voters typically make up at least 40% of the total in California (it varies by county of course).
So the California recount bill left a huge loophole. The good news is that a bill by Bowen is trying to clear it up but only after several years...and while there are and still will be holes, California is generally handling election law much better than the Federal government. We see no reason to think there will be "cleanup and improvement" in follow-up, not when these most basic things in the Holt bill now have been stalled for years with no progress in sight.
Second:
Most of you know I have a history in another area of political activism, one in which I am familiar with the arguments and political tactics of both sides. I'm going to show you two examples of tactics and gameplans from the area of "anti gun" activism and show you one that worked for them, one that didn't, and why the Holt bill looks a lot like the one that didn't. (Where I can I'm going to show you how examples would work in the election reform movement.)
In 1994, the Federal government passed the "Brady Bill" to limit firearms access across America. Pushed for by Jim and Sarah Brady, the bill banned certain features of certain rifles and put a limit of 10 rounds on all new and newly imported gun magazines (bullet holder thingies) for civilian-owned guns. It did not ban existing larger-capacity magazines.
At the time, anti-gun people didn't think this went far enough. A lot of larger magazines were already on the market; the bill drove prices up but anyone who wanted them could get them. The "features ban" was similarly useless; minor cosmetic changes to the existing product lines resulted and the guns thus altered were no more or less lethal than the "pre ban" variants. (In our election reform world, this would be equivalent to a bill that called for some recounts and auditing under some conditions, but didn't recount enough paper under enough conditions to make for worthwhile election reform. Once such a bill was passed, you STILL couldn't trust the election. We're talking about a bill that looks like something is getting done but doesn't actually change the core issue, just like the 1994 Brady gun ban.)
The anti-gunners playing the "inside political game" (mainly those connected to the Bradys) said "hey, at least it's a step in the right direction". The more radical wing (Violence Policy Center and others) said that it would make no difference in gun availability or violence levels. (In our case in election reform, many are saying that Holt's bill will either advance the agenda, actually reform elections or both while others say that it will slow down reform. This opinion says that it will lock in a bad reform plan at the very highest Federal level.)
In the world of gun control strategy, it was the VPC and the like that were correct in 1994. When the '94 Brady law was allowed to expire in 2004 without renewal, gun violence levels remained perfectly flat afterwards and VPC rightfully claimed they were correct all along. Sarah Brady and her organization have now come to the same conclusion. (This 1994 Brady bill is an example of a law that didn't do reform even from the point of view of the people pushing it. Rather than advance their agenda it stalled it for a decade and now the 1994 bill has sputtered and died.)
Much worse for the anti-gunners, while the law was in place for a decade it literally created new guns. Pro-gunners basically said "if we're going to be limited to 10 rounds they'd better be potent rounds" and average handgun power went up significantly, an "unintended consequence" of the law that made things worse from the point of view of anti-gunners - and after the ban sunsetted in '04, those improved handguns didn't go away. (Put in an election reform bill that doesn't go far enough and you'll see new and ingenious ways to cheat. Some may prove so ingenious that even if real reform ever happens, the advanced cheating technology created in the meantime might remain a nightmare.)
To me, the Holt bill looks like more of the same sort of gameplan: a "take what we can get" attitude at the Federal level that isn't effective, won't solve the problem and won't stir up the grassroots activism necessary to really fix this.
In another instance, a different group of anti-gunners followed a different gameplan and gained a lot more ground for their movement.
A strategy that worked.
The California cluster of gun-control activists weren't connected to the Bradys until very recently. While independent, they followed an interesting strategy whereby a particular gun control agenda item would be pushed for across multiple counties as county ordinances. One year it would be "ban gun shows", another "ban 50 caliber rifles", another "ban very small, very concealable handguns", etc. The county ordinances would be drafted identically or close to it across up to a dozen counties over a short one or two year period, and then once an apparent "groundswell" happened, a state-level bill cloning the county process would be pushed for - usually with success as there was an apparent "groundswell" behind each one. (Please don't read this as a comment for or against these proposals as policy - rather we're talking about the success of the political strategy used to push this agenda.)
We in the election reform movement could do that too at the county level, or get various state-level reforms working and then create a "groundswell" for the same thing rolling uphill to Washington DC. Either way, we end up creating a broad national movement with the size and energy of something like the NRA of today, Dr. King's civil rights movement of approximately 1962 or the Women's Christian Temperance Movement just before Prohibition passed. (Note on that last: we must give the latter credit for "success" in passing their measure while noting a lack of success in thinking out repercussions such as Al Capone!)
The other advantage of doing local reforms first across various states or even counties is that we could see what worked before trying a single unified national solution! Then when some states are running smoothly while others are careening towards electoral chaos, we can take the obvious best-case programs and put them together into a single national bill.
Whatever else we do, we must maintain an "outside game" consisting of exposure of what the voting machine industry and current oversight system is doing now, to highlight the need for MEANINGFUL reforms. Who pushes for the reforms isn't important. Somebody needs to do the "insider work" of snuggling up to the legistators and others in office to get the final drafts done but it won't happen without the media attention and grassroots activism created by people who don't mind being seen as "outsiders".
That latter includes Black Box Voting.
Understand: This discussion should NOT be construed as an insult the people who are successfully playing the "inside game". We know more than anyone that the "insiders" are necessary. In my review of various political movements, it is obvious to me that disagreements about inside vs. outside strategy in the same movement are common. It is vitally important that people understand this ecosystem, and how both insiders and outsiders are necessary and what their roles are. Both are needed!
One final note on the Holt bill: in my view, it's biggest weakness is that it does no work at all on local citizen oversight, inspection or access to election-related public records. It tries to use laws and bureaucracies to ensure fair elections. The problem is that any such reforms, even IF meaningful, will be rigid. Changing technologies among the cheaters will run circles around any such agency approach, in the same way drug dealers are constantly finding ways to evade the FBI/DEA/etc.
Citizen oversight powered by national information exchange over the Internet will be able to respond to new threats several orders of magnitude faster than any such bureaucratic approach and hence MUST be part of any complete election reform program. |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 45
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:02 pm: |
|
From Kathy Dopp:
Re: Many object to H.B. 550
I'm afraid I sent an email around in support of the Holt bill prior to
realizing what a horrible audit proposal it contained - although I
believe it would be a step forward nonetheless
I liked the orginal Holt bill (in early 2004) prior to adding this
unfortunate audit procedure (although I support audits). I can' t
imagine that it is even constitutional to federalize elections by
having Bush appoint the people (the US EAC) who will perform the vote
count audits! Insane idea
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudit-UT.pdf
Also, the idea that you would only check one precinct in any county is
ludricrous. Every county should be required to have the same high
probability of detecting errors. Election systems are maintained by
counties, so audits should be done on a county basis, not a state
basis.
Here is a far better proposal that was written by myself and Joycelynn
Straight - for how to audit vote counts using "independent auditors"
that are persons selected by all the candidates on the ballot, ensures
that a high probability of detecting any errors is achieved (and the
number could be modified that I've thrown in there), and is done
immediately after the election.
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudit-UT.pdf
Who came up with this Holt US EAC audit proposal!??
Although I wish all the people trying to push through the Holt bill
the best of luck, I believe that the state and federal legislatures
may already be too corrupted to obtain any real reform. HAVA only
passed because it was a boon to vote tamperers.
We need another plan.
Best,
Kathy Dopp
http://utahcountvotes.org
http://electionarchive.org
http://kathydopp.com |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 46
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:06 pm: |
|
From Jesse Burkhardt:
Bravo,
I love the poetry: "Like an antibiotic that's too weak, we belive that H.B. 550 will create a more resistant strain of election infection." And ... "'Putting into the Holt bill a provision specifying the method of EAC audit (2% or more precinct sampling) simply telegraphs to cheaters how to cheat and not get caught...'"
The Holt bill would serve as another HAVA style canard - though a canard it probably is not. The bill's supporters are probably sincere in their wishes for reform. One thing you could add to your admonition is the issue of tabulation hacking. All the avenues of vulnerability in
tabulation tampering are not at all addressed by Holt's 550.
And I concur with both yourself and Lynn Landes: "It's not about a paper trail -- It's about banning SECRECY." An open, visible ballot would do much to close windows of vulnerability, though many people are worried about discriminatory pressures this may cause. I would gladly invite political party based discrimination rather than have no chance to have a meaningful vote at all.
I fear that 2006 and 2008 will both still be lost. There is almost no grass roots movement in this country. We are a nation of political illiterates. There seems to be no outrage. The only thing we could hope for is a revival of polling - especially exit polling, or Landes's idea of conducting parallel voting on election days - to cast a big light upon fraudulent tabulations. For this to happen there must be swollen national sentiment of discontent that will not be able to be obscured by rigged elections.
Cheers. |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 47
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:08 pm: |
|
From Vicki Lovegren, Director of Ohio Vigilance:
This is phenomenal! You guys are the best!!!! What an inspiration! It gives me the confidence ... Thanks so much for your leadership and courage! |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 48
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:09 pm: |
|
From Jo Anne Karasek:
Personally, I think putting any election reform bill before the present Congress is a whole lot worse than opening up a can of worms--it's like falling into an ocean full of piranhas! Don't forget what happened in Ohio with H.B. 3.
Jo Anne |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 49
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:10 pm: |
|
From Sheila Parks - Massachusetts - HandCountedPaperBallots list
BRAVISSIMA. Again
You are an extraordinary writer and poet.
You make my heart sing.
I have sent this out to the world. |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 50
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:11 pm: |
|
From Jonathan Simon:
Bev/Kathleen--Brilliant, straightforward, thank you--Jonathan |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 51
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 9, 2006 - 10:41 pm: |
|
From Al Kolwicz:
The Colorado Voter blog's "No H.B. 550" is posted at http://www.coloradoVoter.blogspot.com
Paul Lehto's is pasted below.
Al Kolwicz
CAMBER - Citizens for Accurate Mail Ballot Election Results
2867 Tincup Circle
Boulder, CO 80305
http://www.coloradovoter.blogspot.com
CAMBER is a dedicated group of volunteers who are working to ensure that every voter gets to vote once, every vote is counted once, and that every ballot is secure and anonymous.
=========================
The Holt Bill (HR 550): Dangerously Undermining Audits of Elections And Other Critiques
By Paul R. Lehto, Attorney at law
The following is why I think the Holt Bill (HR 550) does much more harm than good. Regardless of whether or not you are a "paper ballot" person, I think my arguments below apply with equal force. Election systems act like kaleidoscopes, and amendments turn the kaleidoscope and force patterns to rearrange. These turns can be very damaging and unexpected.
Please Understand: I'm not trying to rain on anybody's lobbying parade and I support election protection completely: But in any case, I always recommend that we lobby for our VALUES not for specific bill language subjected to future word-smithing and changes anyway, and may or may not deliver the result intended....
My attack (if you will) on the Holt bill is on the notion that the bill accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish, and also whether "gold standard" is a fair description. The fact that more and more people are getting involved in the movement and asking for most or all of the right things does not at all tell us whether a particular bill actually delivers those promises.
The Holt bill has vetted its 2% audit requirement with "computer scientists" which is great, but it also needs to be vetted from statisticians for sure and perhaps even consumer fraud attorneys, and I think it fails in that regard. (My co-author Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman concurs as to the 2% opinions below, but isn't involved with the rest).
THE GENERAL PROBLEM SEEMS TO BE THAT ALTHOUGH MOST PEOPLE'S #1 GOAL IN PROTECTING ELECTIONS IS AN ANTI-FRAUD MOTIVATION, HOLT APPROACHES IT AS A QUESTION OF MAKING TECHNOLOGY WORK. This may be because we often don't want to insult the public officials, and it's hard for Congress to sit down and have a serious discussion about "how do we protect the people from the politicians and election crooks". But as Jon Roland said a wise man prepares for the probability of corrupt administration during a time of good administration, if that's what we have now. Plus, to make an analogy, I don't think security experts in banks stand for too much bullshit about "there's no risk of embezzlement from the inside, just bank robbery from the outside". Same with elections.
So please let me give some examples based on co-authoring a paper actually scientifically and statistically auditing an election result (I know others here have done so as well but I don't think everyone has), followed by some legalistic observations. With a little overlap, these are in addition to the 6 or so concerns I posted earlier, most of which I've not heard any response to. The first one below on the 2% audits is somewhat of a repeat and an expansion of the concern:
(1) SECTION 5 of Holt (Mandatory Manual "Audits"): The 2% audits on a precinct or polling location basis means that the samples are clustered, since all the votes in the entire precinct selected are counted. The problem with Holt is not the 2%; it is that it is 2% of precincts. One cannot do, with precinct-wide samples, what one must do with a true audit: establish a firm margin of error and a "tight" confidence level so that if the sample exceeds that, we can sound the alarms. So, it won't be possible or it will be very unlikely that even a cheating margin (in a reasonably close race at least) can come to a statistical conclusion that something was wrong. (Thanks to attorney and non-Ph.D. statistician Jonathan Simon for this) Press releases will issue, and it will simply be announced, or we will be forced to announce, that the results are 'within the margin of error' because the margin will be quite wide indeed.
Moreover, although the EAC can do more audits if "cause" appears for the same, when something is "within the margin of error" it is probably not "cause' for further investigation as a matter of law, so a court might well shut us down or shut the EAC down with the argument that UNDER ITS OWN STANDARDS AND RESULTS there is no cause to look further. The fact that citizens are invited to bid on the contracts in order to truly waste their time with a futile exercise (with the contract itself being a control mechanism and probably no access at all in any event to trade secret software) is not an improvement.
It gets worse. Section 5(b) requires at least one precinct in each (microscopic) county, which further forces small precincts to be selected, further making the 2% precinct selection problem even worse, though it the purpose of this provision appears to be to help spread the sample throughout the state, we simply have no rational interest in having statistics mimic the distortions of the US Senate, with 2 from each state regardless of size. Legislation simply does not alter the rules of statistics as to proper sampling, and should not attempt to do so...
In a nutshell, though an "official audit" be completed, nothing can be proven from it due to wide margins of errors created by precinct sampling, so that's the empty end result of the huge audit investigation, and anybody who continues to be unsatisfied is a wacko conspiracy theorist and attorneys will raise their prices and encourage you to reconsider your desire to check more. It will give audits a bad name, and the conspiracy theorists will be 100% correct: the audit proves nothing.
(2) Even if the audit could prove something, which it almost assuredly can not, all it proves is that there's a DIFFERENCE between paper and electronic, not where that difference comes from. It will be argued that the problems are with the paper, or in a real pinch even with the DRE printing an incorrect ballot that the voters (according to one claimed result in I believe an MIT study) don't really check any more than they check their paper receipts at the grocery store (a glance perhaps). Because the paper records under Holt are stored "in the same manner" as other paper records in the relevant jurisdiction, there's no improvement as to that (it may be good or bad with chain of custody issues).
In a nutshell, the audit is almost guaranteed to be within margins of error, and discrepancies (if any) can be blamed on the paper (with DREs, primarily). Although "inconsistent' results mean the paper prevails, the results will be very unlikely to be inconsistent, even in cases of actual substantial malfunction or fraud.
(3) Although in Section 5(a)(1) it says audits will be "random, unannounced, hand counts..." two paragraphs later the Holt bill provides that the EAC shall determine the precincts "and then *announce* the precincts in the State in which it will conduct the audits." Sec. 5(a)(2)(A). This does not seem "unannounced" it seems "announced".
Even if the unlikely audit-proven discrepancy can not be successfully blamed on the paper records, the Holt bill requires the precincts or polling locations to be "announced" "no later than 24 hours" after the state posts final results. Now, presume that the elections officials have engaged in election fraud, since they are the ones with the access and if anyone in the past has been successful at hacking, they or their friends are now the insiders. Given as little as 4 hours I'm sure they can make paper match computers for certain precincts. This game was allegedly played in Ohio just recently. Maybe the officials aren't even guilty, they just are curious to see if they will pass the audit, so they check the ballots themselves, are horrified by getting caught seemingly with their pants down, and so they do the human thing and pull their pants back up, even though someone else caused the problem? Here again, paper matches result though the officials are innocent, at least of the fraud or irregularity, though not of the cover-up.
If a crime has taken place, nobody announces in advance what the search warrant will be looking for. My Dad was an IRS auditor for 32 years and he'd be laughing his ass off at this procedure in a criminal matter. So, I can only assume that this bill does not consider either insider election fraud or insider CYA maneuvers to be a serious risk. I think that's deeply mistaken. Or perhaps "announce" has a meaning that I'm not getting, in the context.
(4) So we do all these audits, and they discover nothing because they are not designed to be rigorous enough. Now the whole idea of auditing gets a bad name and some people start rallying for the elimination of audits as a taxpayer waste. We are stuck with educating the public about statistics. Who wins? Even if audits aren't thereby eliminated, the elections are looking a lot cleaner than they are, artificially.
(5) Now, let's say that we somehow, against all odds, have the whiff of a smoking electronic gun. The public and the media are DEMANDING a recount! People are up in arms about these electronic machines. We're unlikely to get any electronic information because Holt provides in section (B)(iv) that the paper records "shall be used as the official records for purposes of any recount or audit conducted with respect to any election for Federal office in which the voting system is used." I'd still like to see those electronic ballots, though! While not saying that electronic records can't be accessed, the trade secrecy claims and the largest law firms in the nation will defend that territory if need be.
(6) The part about prohibiting wireless, power-line or concealed communications devices is GREAT. But then the next paragraph takes it away by saying these must be "certified" by the EAC according to EAC "standards". One of the central election fraud concerns is that people get elected President (or whatever) then "pull up the ladder behind them" by changing the election rules or cheating, or that for any other reason holes are left in EAC standards.
Let's say activists are really smart and spot a hole in the EAC standards, just like 30 "certifiers" failed to spot the Hursti hole, so it just might happen again. The EAC "certification" is nevertheless argued to preclude any suit. As they did in my case, they argue all day long that these certifications mean that the technology can't be questioned, except through the Secretary of State or the EAC's minimal and deficient comment process or litigation from there. This argument I would hope would not win, but it is a major barrier they erect. It is not without legal support. The "strength" of this argument specifically in elections cases has been that the government "estops" or prevents citizens from litigating under some circumstances because the issue has already been decided (i.e. by the certification and comment process). If the government is deemed to represent the people's rights, it is just as if the citizen had personally litigated and lost when the government did it, they can not do it again. Perhaps the Holt bill has planned around this legal authority, I don't know.
(7) The Holt bill basically says appearances of conflicts of interest. 247(11)(B)(iv). That's good. But you can make an office nonpartisan or make a manufacturer shut up, but that does not mean that we don't have partisans in nonpartisan office or at the manufacturers. The local auditor I basically sued though not by name, was a Democrat in nonpartisan clothing. Requirements like this are not disqualifications, they just force partisans into disguise.
(8) Holt says no component of any voting DEVICE upon which votes are CAST shall be connected to the internet. 247(c)(12) The headings use the word "system" but headings are usually ignored in statutory construction at least in Washington state. This language appears to mean DREs can't be connected to the internet, but tabulators can be. It might be different if it said "voting system" instead of "voting device".
(9) Holt says that manufacturers must disclose anyone convicted of election fraud. 247(11)(B)(ii) That's good, but what about a criminal background check? You mean a conviction for computer fraud, perjury, computer crimes and bribery need not be disclosed so long as it's not "election fraud"? Public school teachers have background checks, do they check only for "child molestation" and leave it at that?
(10) Providing all election codes to the Election Assistance Commission. 247(11)(B)(iii): the manufacturer must provide all codes to the EAC and not change them until recertified. I don't think anything like this should be centralized, it gives anyone who breaks into or is inside the EAC access to the entire nation's software. Decentralization makes things harder.
(11) Laboratories doing certification are not supposed to have a financial interest in "the manufacture, sale or distribution of voting system hardware and software". 231(b)(A)(i) They can, and do, have a financial interest in
approval or disapproval of systems, and could even have a bonus in their contract for doing, let's say, "fast work", and this would not be prohibited.
(12) Section 401 is amended at (b)(1) to allow aggrieved citizens to "file a written, signed, notarized complaint with the Attorney General describing the violation". Let's say that hypothetically Bush cheated to get into office in 2000 or 2004, our remedy is then to file a complaint with John Ashcroft! (or any cheating person of the same party as this or any other AG, it's not a good remedy) And, let's say we have serious evidence of a democracy-stealing election fraud crime, that complaint will be rejected for insufficient notarization if you want to be an anonymous whistleblower. Stand up and be counted like the guy in Tiananmen Square with the tanks. Don't forget the notarization so we can be sure who you are. There's not a single jurisdiction in this country where even a multimillion dollar lawsuit requires notarization. This needlessly deters complaints.
(13) The 2% audit may well preempt the efforts of any state, or the right already existing though not codified, of the public to audit. Granted this right is rarely honored, but the newspapers were able to recount Florida. Will this now be prohibited to citizens or media? I call this concern "locating the audit power". If the audit power is located in a private entity or even a public entity it will be difficult to impossible to insure integrity.
(14) Disclosing the source code, as featured in the Holt bill: I've been saying for some time though not often that this may result in a big lawsuit by vendors who assert that their trade secret "property" has been "taken" by an act of Congress, for which "just compensation" is required under the constitution. See Reilly v. Phillip Morris (ingredients in cigarettes can't be forced to be disclosed without a takings claim even though Massachusetts has a compelling interest in public health). The approach of my lawsuit (link below) has been to seek the contracts be
declared void, in order to avoid this and related problems. It is in the nature of contracts themselves that they are fairly well protected against SUBSEQUENT acts of congress or legislatures because of the impairment of contracts clause in the Constitution. Thus, this provision might also impair contracts in addition to being a taking, unless it is declared void and nonexistent in the first place because it is an illegal contract that attempts to revolutionize our elections simply by the government and a vendor signing a contract, even though contracts are not supposed to affect the rights of those who have never signed.
(15) The Holt bill's status as "The gold standard". The Holt bill tries to do well but doesn't succeed. Nothing about the Holt bill prevents the "Hursti hack" (which changed the result of an election without leaving any evidence). Holt reinforces computers in our elections (which necessarily creates invisible vote counting, and then secret vote counting when combined with trade secrecy claims). If Holt is the "gold standard" we will have problems when we "come back for more" in future years.
(16) Preemption generally. One advantage of the current system is its decentralization, at least until it reaches centralized state-level computers. This makes it harder to rig. To the extent things are federalized more, it makes it easier to rig nationally.
(17) The EAC. The federal Election Assistance Commission was created by HAVA in 2002 to advise on best standards. It has failed the public in doing so, and become a largely captured regulatory body, controlled by vendors. Holt would make the EAC permanent, otherwise it expires at the end of Fiscal Year 2005-06.
Democracy for New Hampshire is another group with a critique of Holt at this link: http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/2243
I don't think one can fairly use the terms "floor" or "bulwark" or "first steps" to describe the Holt bill, at least not without any major qualification, as some pro-Holt groups are saying. We should lobby for our Values, not for specific bills, so that we are clear in what we want, and our investments in education retain value over time instead of changing names and details with each congressional session.
Paul R Lehto
Attorney at Law
www.votersunite.org/info/lehtolawsuit.asp (link to my lawsuit and pleadings for it, as well as the Snohomish election irregularities lawsuit) |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 52
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 5 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 12:32 am: |
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From Rebecca Mercuri:
Bev --
Your opposition statement to Rush Holt' bill is completely deluded. I'm fairly convinced that you've never read his bill, based on the numerous erroneous remarks that you made. You really need to spend some time with it.
Here's a link to Rush's webpage:
http://www.holt.house.gov/display2.cfm?id=1086&type=Legislation
Type in H.R. 550 in the "look up current legislation" box.
By the way, I'm not attacking you "from within the movement" since, as you well know, I never was "in the movement." Nevertheless, you have a serious misunderstanding about what the bill is, what it intends to do, and why it is important. So I hope you'll take the time to entirely read Rush's bill, and also hope you can consider issuing a retraction. If, after reading the bill, you would like to discuss your position on it with me, feel free to give me a call.
In the meanwhile, I would urge the others cc'd on this note to stop circulating Bev's misinformation and also take the time to thoroughly read Rush's bill, so that you too can understand why it is a valuable legislative effort in many respects.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Mercuri |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4015
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 12:36 am: |
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Rebecca,
I have read his bill in detail. The issue is the audits. I do not recommend that citizens enable a federal law that will put a 2 percent cap on the right to audit, and worse -- hand the right to audit over to the EAC, an organization led by political appointees and populated with some of the worst of the elections industry perps who got us into this mess in the first place.
I see the hand of computer scientists in designing the audits, and I see the hand of politicians, but what I do not see is two things:
1) CPAs -- especially forensic CPAs -- and statisticians. Can you provide the name of any forensic CPA or statistician (not person who has taken statistics; what I'm looking for here is a real statistician) who believes the "audit" in
the Holt bill is meaningful?
And even if such were found and corroborated your belief that the audit is meaninful, we're still missing the second item:
2) The preservation of our civil right to count ALL the ballots.
Turning the right to "audit" over to the EAC does not enable citizen oversight. The position of Black Box Voting is that citizen oversight is what counts.
The Holt bill simply does not provide a meaningful audit in an area where there will be a high probability of a sophisticated theft attempt, and computer scientists are not qualified to determine what a meaningful audit would be.
If one uses the premise that computerized voting systems should "at least, be no worse than hand counted paper ballots" in terms of the citizenry's ability to oversee the count, the Holt bill fails. It makes computerized voting significantly worse than hand counts because citizens still will not be able to oversee the count.
3) We can have opinions that differ. Having a different opinion doesn't mean that one is "deluded" or spreading misinformation. A discussion of the issues will be welcomed, and in fact you can do that right at our site or in e-mail.
I believe it will help the dialog immensely when scientists recognize that citizens of many backgrounds have insights of value to contribute, and that in a real democracy, a computer scientist will be on exactly equal footing with a history teacher, an accountant, a journalist, a carpenter and the UPS delivery
man.
Let's not underestimate the innate common sense and intellect of the citizenry that owns our elections. None of us plan to turn decisionmaking over to either political appointees or computer scientists any time soon, but you are welcome to join us at the table as we all make mutually agreed upon decisions. |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 53
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 7:23 am: |
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From D.M. in Vermont:
The position of this declared Congressional candidate (with "standing to sue") and a supportive Vermont Constitution re citizens rights to have their votes counted in this state, is as follows:
We have a right to run and a right to vote and a right to have have our votes counted, thus a right to count the votes--ourselves. You can stuff your vote machines and your 2% audits where the sun don't shine.
And BTW, the writer is a retired successfull businessman and a Republican running for Congress here. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4018
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 8:03 am: |
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For a primer on how bills get gutted after citizen input, I very much recommend looking at this following article, on the house of horrors.
Basically, after we have our hands on it, if it gets to the next level, the lobbyists and a couple congressional cronies get a chance to carve it up. What comes out need not resemble what goes in. Sending a bill into committee when the dealbreaker core issues are weak to begin with -- especially if you call it the "gold standard" -- is pretty much guaranteed to make you cry when you see what comes out.
Calling it the "gold standard," as they have done, will effectively block a chance to get a second bite at the apple.
Article on how the legislative sausage factory works:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/9655.html |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2047
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 8:49 am: |
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Thanks for again recommending that outstanding article by Matt Taibbi. (Hint--you have to scroll midway down the page to get to the link--but what comes before it is useful synthesis.)
Taibbi's piece is one of the most instructive pieces of journalism I've ever read in relation to the reality of how legislation is really made. |
From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 54
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 9:59 am: |
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From Nancy Tobi, Democracy for New Hampshire http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com:
I would also add that the question of audits, recounts, and results has not been fully addressed. In their rebuttals to me, proponents of the bill have stated that I don't know the difference between audits and recounts. But I contend that they have not fully played out the
implications of auditing:
What happens when an audit generates a new outcome? Bev and others suggest expanding the audit. Is this, then, considered a recount? What becomes the count of record?
What happens when a candidate contests the audit results?
If we are handing over auditing to outside interests, who are they? What constitutes an independent entity? What authority do they have over state and local entities? Is this another usurpation of state and local authority as constitutionally guaranteed?
What procedures, methodologies, and management practices will be employed for the manual counts?
Timeline for certifying results: how many audits are conducted before certification of results is enabled to meet constitutional requirements? What happens if resolution is not defined prior to constitutionally defined certification requirements?
What about the complaint procedure? 550 revises HAVA complaint procedures to enable persons to file complaints based on audits and audit results. Again, how does this square with constitutionally defined requirements for certification ofelection results?
```````````````````
What all this is saying is: THIS STUFF HAS NOT BEEN THOUGHT THROUGH IN TERMS OF HOW IT WILL ACTUALLY WORK ON THE GROUND.
Nancy
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From the Mailbag
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mailbag
Post Number: 55
Registered: 10-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 10:15 am: |
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From Bruce O'Dell, Director, Election Audit Institute
http://www.electionauditinstitute.org
Two points:
Thanks so much for speaking out on the Holt audit. We must implement in-precinct HCPB as soon as possible, but if done properly, the right audit could help in the short term. And the wrong audit would be catastrophic in giving the unwarranted illusion of security...While there is some theoretical mathematical underpinning for Holt approach (in the ideal world), in the real world, for a host of reasons, it's totally ludicrous.
Votes are far more valuable than dollars; but just try to suggest a 2% audit standard to the FDIC or SEC.
You'll find the overwhelming majority of my colleagues, especially on the systems security and IT audit and controls side of the house, agree wholeheartedly with you. The vast majority of IT real-world practitioners - not the academics! - are all too familiar with the messy realities of confusion and complexity, limited budgets, management egos, power politics
and spin management. We deal with that every day in the corporate arena in order to get our jobs done at all...
BBV note: Bruce O'Dell and Jonathan Simon are currently completing a white paper which simulates and evaluates various election auditing methods in terms of their ability to catch fraud. |
Mac Hathaway
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mac_hathaway
Post Number: 36
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 5:51 pm: |
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Very interesting discussion. Thanks, Bev, for your insights (and thanks to ALL the other forum contributors, in agreement or not). I admit I haven't read the Holt bill, and the "gold standard" bit had me convinced for quite a while. Now, perhaps not... The issue of audits, and "Is an audit a recount?", and "In the case of a discrepancy, which count wins?", all of these are problematic, to say the least.
Initially, and generally, I've thought that it's better for the Federal govt. to promulgate and handle this stuff, as otherwise the more backward states will never get it right.... Just now I'm thinking, maybe it's better (and easier) to just relie on activists in each state getting good laws in place...
Audits and recounts certainly should be statistically sound, and if the Holt bill doesn't get us there, then it shouldn't be supported...
Has anybody taken this up with Mr. Holt, or his co-sponsors? Is it too late to change H.R. 550 to make it better? H.R. 550-mkII, perhaps?
Mac |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2049
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 2:25 am: |
|
Mac,
Like you, after reading this discussion I've come to the conclusion that it would be ill-advised to have this bill move forward with its current wording.
In the states that have established good audits, this bill would actually be a major set-back. And it would be very difficult to undo.
Right now it's probably more likely to be successful to push for good changes at the local level, as Jim pointed out, to create a groundswell by lots of similar actions at county level.
Also, this makes it harder for others to tinker with the process without public scrutiny. |
Bob Fleischer
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Rjf7r
Post Number: 54
Registered: 09-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 8:12 am: |
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I fear that we may be in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position with respect to the Holt bill. I have no doubt that the passage of this bill in this form will do more harm than good. On the other hand, a successful campaign against this bill on the part of voting activists will also be used against voting reform in the future. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4027
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 10:03 am: |
|
There need not be a "campaign against." All there needs to be is a thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons, communicated throughout the election reform ecosystem.
Based on the e-mails I have received which have not gone public, various people at very high levels and in every part of the election reform constituency have expressed general agreement that the Holt Bill audit provisions are inadequate and may cause real problems (perhaps making things worse.) There are also many who are coming to share the conclusion that secrecy is the core issue.
Since Black Box Voting is not a lobbying group, there is no reason for us to lobby against the bill, but in our role as a watchdog group we should make sure the problems and pitfalls are at least given sunlight. Those who speak out against the bill should be encouraged to do so, and we defend the right to do so without being ridiculed, name-called, harassed, or shunned.
Elections are about offering a variety of solutions and letting people choose for themselves. Elections are also about vigorous debate as to any problems, pros and cons.
As a watchdog for elections, Black Box Voting is encouraging those who espouse election reform to follow the basic philosophy of elections themselves -- rather than name-calling, harassing, shunning, or trying to shut up dissenting opinion, such differences of style and opinion should be welcomed and people should be encouraged to think for themselves as to which position they will take on any particular bill, which groups they enjoy participating with, and which strategies they want to select.
|
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 235
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 1:23 pm: |
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Bob,
What both the BBV editorial and Paul Lehto's analysis of the Holt bill contend is that any compromise regarding transparency and citizen oversight in the election process is unacceptable. When the Holt Bill handed the auditing provisions over to the EAC, it effectively took oversight away from the citizens and gave it to the federal government.
The fact that this bill is being viewed as the "gold standard" for election reform is intended to send the message that "it doesn't get much better than this" to the general public, therefore, your work is finished and you can go home now.
By speaking out against the audit provisions of this bill, the citizens send a message to our legislators that they are not willing to compromise on citizen oversight rights. It also shows they are willing to stay in this fight for the long haul, if necessary, in order to eliminate the secrecy that surrounds our election process. We need to put citizens back in charge. Is any compromise worth sacrificing this right for?
Kathleen
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
Bob Fleischer
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Rjf7r
Post Number: 56
Registered: 09-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 6:39 pm: |
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Perhaps I wasn't clear, but I'm in no way in favor of the Holt bill. I was simply pointing out that a failure to support it would be used against the efforts of activists in the future. This is a dilemma with no obvious way out.
I believe that certain groups in this country like to put their opposition in such binds. |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 237
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 8:42 pm: |
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Bob,
With all due respect, I don't agree that failure to support this bill would be used against election reform efforts in the future.
The positive response to the BBV editorial is indicative of citizens wanting to hold on to the principle that any bill that doesn't require citizen oversight and transparency in every phase of the election process, is simply not in the best interest of a well-living republic.
Without these requirements, citizens will have already lost.
Kathleen
(Message edited by admin_ii on April 11, 2006)
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
Jo Anne Karasek
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jo_anne_karasek
Post Number: 112
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 9:28 pm: |
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I agree with Kathleen. Just because a bill is labeled "voting reform" doesn't mean we should support it.
The Holt Bill is dangerous and harmful to the voters. We should not support it, no matter what the label.
We stand for nothing if we do not stand for the voters. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2059
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 1:57 am: |
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Yes--HAVA was also supposedly about "voting reform".
I'm sure many that supported it at the time have changed their point of view. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4036
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 8:37 am: |
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I understand what Bob is saying.
Some of the arguments and counter-arguments:
1. "If election reform groups criticize this bill, it will be their fault if it doesn't pass."
- In fact, it is the responsibility of those who set the lobbying strategy to identify the key consituencies and communicate persuasively.
It isn't the responsibility of every grass roots group in America to chase down every bill in America and ask to be persuaded. Lobbying strategy starts with identifying the key constituencies to open a dialog, and this is something that should be done very early in the game.
2. "It's a start."
- If that's the case, it must be framed as "It's a start."
A critical blunder was made when a decision was made to frame the issue as "the gold standard." If you ask for 2 percent and call it the gold standard, you'll get little support when you come back to ask for 5 percent.
That frame is one of the dealbreakers for supporting this bill.
3. "Anyone who has a problem with this should have brought it up a long time ago."
It is up to those who set strategy to identify key constituencies and open a dialog. Apparently this wasn't done.
One can argue somewhat more persuasively: Those who set the lobbying strategy should have opened a dialog with the key communicators and constituencies to identify any sticking points. (Which should probably have been done a long time ago)
4. (My personal favorite) "Black Box Voting is dividing the movement by attacking those of us who are lobbying for the bill."
- Not true. Black Box Voting is not attacking the people or the groups who are lobbying for the bill. We are discussing the merits of the bill and having a discussion about strategy.
A robust dialog is the American way. I feel strongly about this. Trying to get dissenting opinions to shut up is unAmerican.
An inside game is a strategy, not a person. The term "inside game" comes from the sports world (hey, better than the war world, right?). It refers to a strategy and the players within that strategy are interchangable.
- Next: Flip this sentence --
"Black Box Voting is dividing the movement by attacking those of us who are lobbying for the bill."
"Those who are lobbying for the bill are dividing the movement by attacking Black Box Voting."
Making the statement itself divides.
5. "At least we are educating people about this."
- By putting a civil right in peril.
The dealbreakers
- The frame: Black Box Voting cannot advocate for this bill if it is framed as the gold standard. That frame would need to be changed to "It's a start, but will need to be made much more robust."
- The federalization and/or privatization: Auditing provisions must be implemented by the jurisdictions (by the public officials in each jurisdiction in cooperation with local citizens). Never by the federal government and not by any private "audit contractor" who goes out for bid on the project.
The reason for this is simple: We're talking about fraud protections here. If you keep auditing in the local jurisdictions with citizen oversight, you'd have to corrupt thousands of jurisdictions. But if you put auditing in the hands of 3 people at the EAC who choose private contractors, you can corrupt the system by getting at just a handful of people.
In the audits, local control, citizen oversight, and transparency are the key. For example, in Cuyahoga County Ohio, an audit was performed by local officials under the eyes of citizen watchdogs. When they removed transparency and counted the votes in secret first, citizens noticed, a confession was captured on videotape (by Kathleen Wynne, of Black Box Voting), and three people (so far!) have been indicted. So, even if a local jurisdiction is problematic, having the citizen oversight provides some checks and balances.
And as for this: "This doesn't do anything to take away local right to do more robust auditing" -- In fact, those of us who live in states that have a percent audit requirement have seen that it becomes the ceiling. Here in Washington, the one-half percent audit of just one race has now been interpreted by the secretary of state as the ceiling. Julie Anne Kempf, former supervisor of elections for King County, reports that Secretary of State Sam Reed prohibited her from broadening an audit, saying that to do more than the statute says is doing an unauthorized recount.
Marsha Wharff, who runs elections in Mendocino County Calif., when asked by an NPR talk show host on a show we were both on recently, said she couldn't expand the audit over the 1 percent required in California without seeking an opinion from county counsel as to whether that is legal. (And she's one of the good ones!)
In practice, expanding the audit will involve some cost, and in many jurisdictions approval of cost items must be obtained from the county commissioners, some of whom will be on the ballot. It is highly unlikely that county commissioners who feel they have won will authorize funds to do an expanded audit of their results.
The comments in this thread underline the strategic importance for lobbyists to dialog with diverse parts of the constituency very early in the process.
What does it mean to "open a dialog"
If you're trying to persuade people to support your position, opening a dialog means opening an effective dialog.
I received an e-mail yesterday saying "Call me so I can explain to you that you are wrong." Making statements like "You are deluded and don't know what you're talking about" might be a way to open a dialog, but it's not effective.
If this bill doesn't pass in its current form, it's because those who planned the lobbying effort made a strategic blunder. The hand counted paper ballots people were shunned and ridiculed, some of the statisticians were shunned and attacked, and entire components of the election reform ecosystem were never contacted at all.
The result is a bill that contains sticking points, framed in a way that is unacceptable to key parts of the election reform constituency. Any blame for its failure to pass needs to go back to those who strategized the effort, especially those who made the decision to call it "the gold standard" and -- even more so -- those who made the decision to ignore, shun, ridicule and attack key constuencies within the base of support for election reform.
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John Gideon
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Johngideon
Post Number: 216
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 10:22 am: |
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http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2006/04/remarkable-turn-in-paper-trail-deb ate.html
You now have a great ally in Dan Tokaji who is a strident opponent of vvpat. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2063
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 11:01 am: |
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What a bizarre piece! Tokaji completely misrepresents the BBV concerns about the bill. He claims BBV is opposed to VVPAT, when the BBV concerns were about the restricted audit rules.
Tokaji also interprets BBV opposition to secrecy as meaning a preference for an open source solution.
Fascinating to see how things get twisted.
Thanks for that link, John G. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2064
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 12:06 pm: |
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I just sent the following to Dan Tokaji. It really bothers me to see someone misstate Bev Harris's position. Note that his article was in response to Bev's article here which mentioned the concern about audit requirements but didn't go into detail about them.
-------------------------------------------
Dan,
In "A Remarkable Turn in the Paper Trail Debate" I believe your comments misrepresent what Bev Harris posted in the Online Journal article raising concerns about the Rush-Holt bill.
You state,
"Now, in this opinion piece, Black Box Voting has announced its opposition to the latest version of the Holt Bill (HB 550), which would mandate a "voter verified paper audit trail" or VVPAT. This would essentially require that electronic voting machines produce a contemporaneous paper record ("CPR") that voters could view before casting their votes. The idea behind it is that, in theory, the paper record could be used in the event of an audit or manual recount."
You imply here that Bev Harris is opposed to VVPAT, which is misleading and untrue from anything I have read her to say. You do not mention that the concerns raised are related to the inadequate and restrictive audit rules. The audit problems in the bill were stated up at the top of the article in the quotes of Paul Lehto, but you seem to have flown right past them.
I agree with you that in and of itself, paper does not necessarily equal election security. Audit requirements that allow for citizen oversight at the local level of a hand recount of all ballots is something that I personally would see as crucial.
Paper ballots are worthless if they cannot be counted, or if the counting/auditing/recounting is turned over to a private enterprise and that process is controlled by the EAC. That's why those audit rules are so important.
You appear to see the secrecy issue as meaning an open source solution. ("The voting system vendors have maintained that their software is a trade secret. Others have criticized this "security through obscurity" approach, and I think that open source solutions ought to be considered.") Personally if I had to have computers involved I'd rather there be an open source code than one which is held to be a trade secret. But that is only one small part of the secrecy issue; open source does not equal security.
These are some of the more important issues regarding secrecy vs. transparency and local citizen oversight:
* Having the EAC control audits is a giant step away from openness, transparency and local citizen oversight.
* Having private companies be subcontracted to carry out audits is another giant step away from openness, transparency and local citizen oversight.
* Even open source software is a giant step away from openness and transparency because there's no way Citizen Q can "observe" the computerized processing of electronic signals inside a voting machine and judge for themselves whether or not the results are accurate or not. Local citizen oversight is impossible, unless there is a piece of paper that ordinary human beings can read and interpret.
You might find it informative to read this thread at BBV for more insight into the discussion of this issue:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/show.cgi?tpc=1954&post=19592#POST19592
The entire thread deserves a read, as there are a number of posts from Bev Harris and others further downstream from the original post. I think this thread makes the concerns about the audit quite clear, and nowhere is there any opposition to VVPAT (in fact, the opposite is expressed).
I think you ought to update or amend your article so that you do not read into Bev Harris's position something that she didn't say. As you point out the election reform movement is far from monolithic; different groups and individuals may agree on some things and disagree on others. But at least you should represent other points of view accurately when you comment on them.
Regards,
Catherine Ansbro |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4039
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 12:07 pm: |
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Catherine, sorry I wasn't quick enough on the trigger finger to beat you to this post.
Actually, although I've always been on the opposite side of the fence as Tokaji when I've heard him speak, I don't think he misrepresents our stance.
I'm hoping that he won't mind reprinting his article in full, so that you can see it in context. Dan-- if you're out there and wish to have the article removed to stay only on your site, let me know and I'll be happy to comply with those wishes.
Here's what he wrote:
quote:A Remarkable Turn in the Paper Trail Debate
Black Box Voting has long been one of the most vocal critics of electronic voting technology. Led by Bev Harris, the organization has been sharply critical of the lack of security and transparency that it believes to exist with the present generation of electronic voting equipment. It has also sought to expose and publicize problems with paper-based technology, most recently through the Harri Hursti study of Diebold's optical-scan system.
Now, in this opinion piece, Black Box Voting has announced its opposition to the latest version of the Holt Bill (HB 550), which would mandate a "voter verified paper audit trail" or VVPAT. This would essentially require that electronic voting machines produce a contemporaneous paper record ("CPR") that voters could view before casting their votes. The idea behind it is that, in theory, the paper record could be used in the event of an audit or manual recount. Here are some excerpts from Harris' piece:
Election reform groups are split on whether they support H.B. 550. Black Box Voting normally does not weigh in on legislation, this time we will. Citizens need to be informed of the dangers as well as the benefits when being urged to support legislation.
Like an antibiotic that's too weak, we believe that H.B. 550 will create a more resistant strain of election infection.
Like a placebo, people may think the election system is getting well when in fact, the medicine is only a sugar pill that makes everyone think it's better. For a minute.
.... Black Box Voting believes that H.B. 550 is unwise. It will not be effective to improve citizen oversight or election integrity. It is dangerous, because the weakness of the antibiotic will create a more resistant strain of election manipulation....
Now, I've occasionally been critical of Black Box Voting's tactics, most recently here. But I think that Harris is right on target in referring to the VVPAT as a "placebo." In fact, I've been critical of laws to require a VVPAT, including past versions of the Holt Bill, for quite a long time. I've even used the word "placebo" to describe its defects. The VVPAT may make some voters feel more comfortable about using electronic equipment, at least in the short term. But will it really make our election system more secure and transparent? It's doubtful at best.
Because I've discussed the practical problems with VVPAT several times, most comprehensively in this law review article, I'll just briefly summarize here. Even putting aside the mechanical problems such as paper jams that have emerged in testing of current VVPAT systems, the scant available evidence that exists suggests that few voters actually check the paper record. To make matters worse, the Holt Bill doesn't provide for counting enough ballot copies to provide a statistically adequate level of confidence in election results, at least in smaller elections, a problem that I noted in testimony available here. This difficulty is compounded by the length of time that it would actually take to count the curled-up strips of paper tape that VVPAT models would generate. According to electionline.org's annual report, it took about four hours to count a single strip of paper trail records, containing just 64 votes.
What this means is that Harris is dead-on right to label the current VVPAT bill a "placebo." Yet amazingly, Representative Holt and his allies continue to advance the idea that the VVPAT is a cure-all, despite the complete absence of any research to support their position. There is of course research to suggest that electronic voting is vulnerable to fraud and error, at least without the proper procedural safeguards. But there's none -- and I don't think this is an overstatement -- to support the conclusion that the VVPAT provides a workable and effective solution ot these vulnerabilities. Is there any research, for example, to show that voters actually check these strips of paper? That the present VVPAT systems are user-friendly? How long will it take to count the strips of paper generated by current VVPAT models? And most important of all, where are the statistical analyses showing the percentage of ballots ought to be recounted to provide an acceptable level of confidence? As far as I can tell, they don't exist.
Harris is also right, I think, to suggest that greater transparency is a more promising way forward:
It's Not About a Paper Trail; it's About Banning SECRECY
If we want a trustworthy system, we need to be unafraid to entertain the idea that if you make any facet of elections secret (other than who a person votes for), it will attract criminals. Such a temptation may take place inside a voter registration database or voting machine vendor's operation. In the case of a rogue programmer, management need not even know (if the programmer is positioned correctly). It may exist inside an elections office, or with a poll worker, or through a political operative....
Save your lobbying for something that eliminates secrecy. And if only a computer scientist can understand it or only an elections official can monitor it, it's still secret. H.B. 550 doesn't do much of anything to get at the core problem, which is secrecy.
Here again, I think she's pointing in the right direction. The voting system vendors have maintained that their software is a trade secret. Others have criticized this "security through obscurity" approach, and I think that open source solutions ought to be considered.
One of the things that's most remarkable to me about Black Box Voting piece is that it suggests some convergence of views among electronic voting skeptics and those of us who've been skeptical of the VVPAT. I've noticed that e-voting skeptics have become increasingly aware of the problems that exist with at least some of the VVPAT devices now being marketed -- and in fact being used in some jurisdictions in this year's election. On the other hand, at least some longtime VVPAT skeptics, myself included, have increasingly come to appreciate the security and transparency concerns that really do exist with the present generation of voting technology.
Although some continue desperately cling to the idea that the VVPAT is the answer, the debate appears to be moving beyond the simplistic "PAPER=SECURITY" slogans that have mostly dominated the public discourse. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I take this to be an encouraging sign.
By the way, he does miss the boat on what I mean by banning secrecy. I believe banning secrecy means letting citizens view and confirm every step of the voting process. Not the computer code. The process, the ballots, everything.
Folks, there are some crooks out there. There are also people who came to their particular point of view following a different road.
That's why it's so important to address the issue instead of the messenger. If we discipline ourselves to discuss issues instead of people and personalities, we may find that the discussion leads us to points of agreement.
I learned of Daniel Tokaji's article from Ion Sancho, who just called me to let me know that he believes there is room for many different opinions and styles. He called to let me know that he supports my decision to write this editorial, and I told him I support his decision to advocate HR 550.
Sancho mentioned that Dr. Dill gave a nod to concepts in the editorial. In private correspondence I have learned that David Jefferson liked the "inside vs. outside" discussion (though he thought that I was criticizing those who have chosen the inside game); he mentions that he has been subject to the friction between inside and outside, and it's good to get the map to inside vs. outside out in the open.
Jefferson also wrote that he has come to agree that removing secrecy is likely to be a more productive approach than focusing on making security perfect or even concentrating on audits.
Black Box Voting does take the position that you must have a voter verified paper ballot of record. We do not see the DRE "VVPAT" toilet paper roll solution as particularly viable.
So, if the Black Box Voting editorial does nothing more than cut down on stereotyping each other, encouraging us to get the areas where we agree and don't agree out in the open, it has been helpful.
I agree with Tokaji's statement that finding areas of agreement is important. In the past, the focus has sometimes been on trying to eliminate people or groups, sometimes escalating to harassment.
If we can switch gears to put all voices forward, flesh out the election reform issues to get at the core, and find areas of agreement, I believe we'll ultimately get farther and have a better result. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2065
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 12:42 pm: |
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It's the 2nd paragraph, 1st sentence that disturbs me. I feel it's worded in a way that implies BBV is opposed to VVPAT, when that's not the case.
In the same breath as stating (correctly) that BBV has concerns about Rush Holt, Dan stated (correctly but incompletely) that Rush-Holt is about having a mandatory VVPAT.
The close juxtaposition of words to the effect of "BBV opposed" and "Bill that mandates VVPAT" is misleading IMO--or at the very least, it's unfortunate. It's too easy to take this out of context and come up with 2 + 2 = 5.
Just my opinion. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2066
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 1:04 pm: |
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I got a nice response from Dan Tokaji. (He agrees with Bev's point of view.)
I hope that all these articles and discussions will give people something to think about. It brings to mind the saying, "Be careful what you ask for . . ." |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4042
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 3:12 pm: |
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Rush Holt answer to Black Box Voting editorial:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_688.shtml
An open letter to voters clarifying H.R. 550
From Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ)
Apr 12, 2006, 01:12
I would like to thank Bev Harris for her work to improve the integrity of elections. In fact, it was through Bev Harris’ work that I first became aware of the virtual monopoly that only a few voting system vendors have over the vote count in the United States. Her work, and that of many others in the grassroots community, played an important role in my development of a solution to the problem of an increasingly privatized vote count.
I would like to correct, however, a few misrepresentations about my legislation included in her recent article.
First, my legislation calls for a minimum (not a maximum) unannounced manual audit of “at least 2 percent” of the precincts in each state, and the sample must include “at least one precinct” in each county. Precincts must be selected “on an entirely random basis using a uniform distribution in which all precincts in a state have an equal chance of being selected.” This provision is calculated to provide a high level of assurance that any irregularity will be caught, but importantly, nothing in the bill prevents states from passing additional state-based audit requirements. Those who believe the federal 2 percent minimum audit requirement should be higher should join me in getting the House Administration Committee to act on my bill, and then push for an amendment to increase the percentage. Working to defeat H.R. 550 at this critical juncture is tactic that will only cement the status quo.
Second, my legislation does not call for simply “adding a ‘vvpat’” to touch screen (DRE) voting machines. It mandates that there be a “voter-verified paper record” for every vote cast, and explicitly lists as examples “a paper ballot prepared by the voter for the purpose of being read by an optical scanner, a paper ballot prepared by the voter to be mailed to an election official (whether from a domestic or overseas location), a paper ballot created through the use of a ballot marking device.” H.R. 550 allows the use of DREs only if they print out a paper record that the voter can verify, and that serves as the actual ballot of record.
Finally, my legislation is not calling for anyone to “wait a couple years” before it gets committee action. My first bill demanding voter verified paper records was introduced in May 2003, and it had a November 2004 deadline. My current bill was introduced in February 2005, and it has a first-election-in-2006 deadline. Not only are there no delays built into my legislation, but its sound, reasonable audit requirement is helping it gain yet more bipartisan support. Thanks to the continued involvement of many thousands of people from across the country, H.R. 550 is gaining steam every day. Since hundreds of citizen advocates came to Washington, D.C., last week, almost a dozen more representatives have become co-sponsors.
I agree with Ms. Harris that we must demand an end to voting system secrecy while still protecting the secret ballot. My legislation will accomplish this by requiring voter-verified paper records of every vote, requiring audits, and banning undisclosed software and the use of wireless devices. We also agree on the need for increased citizen oversight, which my legislation facilitates by removing HAVA’s exemption of the EAC from the public bidding process, thus enabling established citizen groups to bid to conduct the audits themselves.
As it has been from the beginning, H.R. 550 continues to be the product of an immense amount of thought, work, and advocacy by concerned citizens, voting experts, and computer scientists. I remain open to constructive advice and fair criticism. Further, I encourage all parties to ask the Committee on House Administration and state legislatures to take action on this critical issue now.
Sincerely,
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2068
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 3:25 pm: |
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This is a very encouraging statement from Rep. Holt.
Does an article like this from a bill's sponsor, expressing a bill's intent that 2% be a minimum not a maximum, mean that it will have to be interpreted that way in a court of law?
That would be very positive if this is so.
Same for Holt's reassurance that states are free to enact laws requiring audits of a higher percentage. Is there anything in the language of the bill that contradicts this, given that Holt, as one of the Bill's sponsors, is stating the legislation's intent that states be able to have stricter audits if they wish? Does a sponsor's public expression of legislative intent make it more likely that this interpretation will stand up in a court of law?
This would also be very positive if this is the case.
Mentioning that beneficial amendments will be welcomed for consideration also frames this more productively as a work-in-progress (and not the ultimate last word).
This is also significant and helpful for all election reformers. |
Admin
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4043
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 4:34 pm: |
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Black Box Voting response to Rush Holt:
Dear Rep. Holt,
Thank you for your reply and your kind words. Black Box Voting is the entity where the position paper appears. Black Box Voting is an organization with three full time employees and a six-member board.
Your answer refers to "Bev Harris" rather than to Black Box Voting. Bev posted the piece, but this particular position paper reflects the whole group.
We appreciate your point by point explanations. However, we still have concerns.
quote:1) minimum (not a maximum) unannounced manual audit of "at least 2 percent"
We realize this is a minimum. However our work in the field indicates that in practice, the minimum will be interpreted as a ceiling.
This is based on our experience with county elections officials in states that have minimum audit provisions already in place.
This minimal 2 percent audit has been referred to as "the gold standard." Therefore, it will be difficult to go back and increase it through legislation later.
Increasing the audit size on a local basis will involve approval of additional local budgetary expenditures (with the approval for such coming from people who will often be on the ballot).
quote:Precincts must be selected "on an entirely random basis...This provision is calculated to provide a high level of assurance that any irregularity will be caught
The statisticians and auditing experts we have worked with say this selection technique is unlikely to catch most irregularities.
quote:Those who believe the federal 2 percent minimum audit requirement should be higher should join me in getting the House Administration Committee to act on my bill, and then push for an amendment to increase the percentage.
We don't trust the current federal legislature to improve this bill. We feel it's more likely that the bill will be damaged further in committee.
quote:Working to defeat H.R. 550 at this critical juncture is tactic that will only cement the status quo.
We do not believe that to be the case, particularly in light of the upcoming publication of findings in Emery County, Utah. We believe there will be a rather urgent impetus for change.
quote:Second, my legislation does not call for simply "adding a 'vvpat'" to touch screen (DRE) voting machines.
We welcome HR 550's flexibility on systems other than DRE. However, it does allow the DRE "vvpat" which so far has been implemented in a damaged fashion, i.e. the 'toilet paper roll' which is hazardous to the privacy of the vote and nearly impossible to hand recount -- and almost as difficult for the voter to verify as it is to recount.
quote:Finally, my legislation is not calling for anyone to "wait a couple years" before it gets committee action. ... My current bill was introduced in February 2005, and it has a first-election-in-2006 deadline.
The first federal primaries in 2006 are already upon us. It will be impossible to put the voting machine-related requirements in place for those.
There is no provision for what happens if vendors decline to provide the source code. There is also no provision to include the customized Windows CE operating system. What happens if vendors simply go to court instead of comply? If vendors don't comply this bill will put local elections officials in a terrible spot, because they must conduct a legal election whether the vendors comply or not.
quote:I agree with Ms. Harris that we must demand an end to voting system secrecy while still protecting the secret ballot. My legislation will accomplish this by requiring voter-verified paper records of every vote, requiring audits, and banning undisclosed software and the use of wireless devices.
This does not address the issue of removing secrecy in a meaningful way.
1) Citizen oversight must be a part of the process. In most states, the public has no right to watch the vote being counted, no right to examine the voting machines, no right to timely public records after an election, limited right to public records at all, no right to even know which people have been privately contracted to run their democracy.
2) By removing secrecy, we mean the ability to examine all ballots, not just two percent of the ballots. We mean the right for any citizen to do so. Not just as the winner of an EAC "bid" but as a basic civil right.
quote: enabling established citizen groups to bid to conduct the audits themselves.
All citizens must have the equal rights in elections oversight. This is not a process we are willing to "bid out."
There are also no provisions in the bill to ensure that the results of any audit is even available to the general public.
quote:As it has been from the beginning, H.R. 550 continues to be the product of an immense amount of thought, work, and advocacy by concerned citizens, voting experts, and computer scientists.
Congressman Holt, we applaud your activism in this field. However, we think you've made a strategic mistake. One shared by a faction of the activist community. We at Black Box Voting believe that true reform will not happen until the full dysfunctionality of the current voting industry and oversight is revealed more completely.
Black Box Voting has been reviled as boat-rockers for pushing for this exposure. The history of American political reform is that it does not happen until the public truly sees where the system broke down in the first place.
1) Food safety did not happen until Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle.
2) Civil rights didn't happen until the unmentionable behavior that no one talked about was revealed to the American public on the evening news.
3) We will send you the transcript of the Mar. 29 2006 California Senate Elections Committee hearing on certification run by Senator Debra Bowen. In this hearing, the federal certifiers admit that they did not understand what they were certifying, that the vendors misrepresented their products, and in some cases, the labs themselves misrepresented key facts to the senate. Only two of the three labs chose to appear and none of the vendors showed up, with one testing lab (Ciber) and one vendor (Diebold) formally declining to appear at all, ever.
Before passing corrective legislation, a more complete investigative hearing with testimony under oath and subpoenad witnesses must occur at the federal level. This will be difficult, since at least two key witnesses are based outside the borders of the U.S.
As Paul Lehto says, when someone sticks a hand in your pocket, and partway down your pants, this is not the time to negotiate taking it half-way out. You have to take it all the way out and confront the misconduct.
Congressman Holt, you are not confronting the misconduct. True reform cannot happen until you do.
Thank you for your initial activism in this area. We look forward to working with your office to take the next appropriate steps.
Wishing you the very best,
Bev Harris
Kathleen Wynne
Jim March
Vickie Karp
David H. Dudley III
Rev. Alphonse Meadows Jr.
Gail Thomas
Thalia Dudley
Agrippa Williams
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Jim March
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jimmarch
Post Number: 146
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 5:14 pm: |
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It appears Congressman Holt and others are looking for a convenient scapegoat should the bill fail.
Let me comment as a former lobbyist for a sec:
Holt himself says that he has been trying to pass legislation on this since 2003. What he doesn't say in this latest letter is that the new version of his bill is more radical than the prior cut. Not a lot more, in many ways not enough more, but it does cover publication of source code (which in and of itself is a good thing).
Well folks, guess what? If the less radical version of a bill fails to get out of committee, and the legislature hasn't changed since, and the political climate hasn't changed, there's no way a more radical version will sprout wings and fly.
Snowball. Blast furnace. Are we clear here?
Instead of trying to find an excuse for failure of this bill, let's get to the bottom of this nightmare once and for all. Sen. Bowen has made a good start (wait until y'all see the rest of the testimony from that hearing!!!) and proven that it's possible. When a full-scale hearing including subpoenas and oaths happens, it will be absolutely necessary to rebuild the entire voting system process because the credibility of the existing system will be shredded.
That's what Congressman Holt needs to help with next. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2070
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 2:20 am: |
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Jim,
Thanks for providing a broader context of the legislative process. I don't have experience in this area so it helps to have a broader strategic viewpoint.
You're saying--
* Milder previous forms of Holt's bill didn't have enough support to get out of committee, despite attempts since 2003.
* So there's no way the current version--a more radical bill than the previous unsuccessful drafts--will get out of committee, since neither the legislature nor the political cimate have changed substantially
* BBV is being set up to take the blame when H.R.550 inevitably fails to get enough support to get it out of committee
* We should all focus on digging deeper into the real problems
I'm torn about your 3rd point above. I'd like to think the political climate is changing. The problems are so widespread that they are getting at least local media coverage and the beginnings of national coverage; more members of the public are informed of the issues; and there is more pressure on legislators to do something to improve elections. When I look at the big picture, though, I have to agree with you.
Just look at how the MD Senate recently killed a bill which would have required a paper trail, despite unanimous support in the House: http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1180&Itemi d=113
I do not see a groundswell of state or federal legislators speaking out in support of making deep, effective changes to our election system or even admitting that the existing system is broken. There is lots of lip service at the higher levels of government, but little more.
It's possible that some of the support for H.R.550 could be from legislators who want to be seen to be doing something, and they can accomplish this easily by supporting a doomed bill. Or am I being too cynical here? I'd love to hear opinions from those with more knowledge of political strategy.
It seems accurate to say that while awareness about the various issues is growing, it is not yet broad or deep enough to put effective pressure on enough legislators to bring a strong bill through the legislative process.
In a previous post in this thread, you suggest that a more successful strategy would be to create reform at the town/municipal/county level first. The process you outlined in the post here described how this strategy has been used effectively by others.
As for your final point, I can only hope that the final installment of the Bowen hearing transcripts will be out soon. I also hope that the 2 reports about the Utah investigations in Emery County will be out soon.
Is there an Estimated Time of Arrival for these reports? What is causing the delay?
(Message edited by catherine_a on April 13, 2006) |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 4046
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 4:26 am: |
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As to delay on reports -- remember the first Hursti report timing. The original hack was May 26, report came out July 4. That's five weeks.
I'm impatient too. The final transcript will be out today, and the delay on that was me, since I'm the one doing the transcript. Had planned to finish it this weekend when the phone wasn't ringing every two minutes, but didn't do it. |
Bob Fleischer
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Rjf7r
Post Number: 59
Registered: 09-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 6:26 am: |
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re "I feel it's worded in a way that implies BBV is opposed to VVPAT, when that's not the case."
Opposition to VVPAT is the right position to take -- it is in no way an adequate substitute for an original record of voter intention.
(It's not every day that when you get painted with a broad brush that the paint is really good!)
Bob |
Bob Fleischer
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Rjf7r
Post Number: 60
Registered: 09-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 6:44 am: |
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Re "There is lots of lip service at the higher levels of government, but little more…It's possible that some of the support for H.R.550 could be from legislators who want to be seen to be doing something…"
That is certainly the experience of our little group working for legislative reform in Massachusetts. We'll probably get some sort of bill, but it will be very weak -- an audit requirement in our proposal was cut out entirely. We repeatedly have been given the subtle message that that is all we can get at this time -- although they really want to do something about voting! |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2078
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 7:36 am: |
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I don't think BBV is opposed to using paper! That's the point I was trying to make regarding Dan's statement.
In any case, it is misleading to frame BBV's point of view as being about paper at all, which is what I think you're getting at. And you're right, Bob, that how one frames the issue is more important than my nit-picking about the wording of one sentence.
BBV has made it clear that unobserved paper is just as bad as unobservable electrons--or maybe worse, because of the false sense of security. That's why it's a fatal mistake for legislation to mandate paper without mandating observability--or, at the very least, without imposing impediments or limitations to observability.
H.B.550 would give us paper--but it's mostly unobservable paper. In fact it seems to mandate that almost all of the paper will be unobservable! Therein lies the problem.
I see how important it is to focus on the point that secrecy is not acceptable in any aspect of vote processing or counting. It's not about paper; it's about secrecy.
Does H.B.550 do anything to reduce secrecy? The answer is, "No!."
It would be fine to have step-by-step legislation, if each new bill only did away with one aspect of secrecy. But to have a bill that makes one advance (paper is theoretically more observable than electrons), but mandates a large degree of secrecy due to the audit/recount procedure that would be enshrined into federal law, could give an end result worse than the status quo--even if that's not what the legislators say they intended. |
Nathanael Nerode
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Neroden
Post Number: 1
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 8:43 am: |
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'Holt provides in section (B)(iv) that the paper records "shall be used as the official records for purposes of any recount or audit conducted with respect to any election for Federal office in which the voting system is used."'
I'm not sure you understand how critically important this is. This element alone is worth all the other problems with HR 550. This is the point which has been attacked hardest by the supporters of unverifiable elections: Ohio and Florida have state laws prohibiting the paper from being counted.
"mandates a large degree of secrecy due to the audit/recount procedure that would be enshrined into federal law,"
HR 550 does not require that the 'federal 2% audit' be the only audit or recount. It does not restrict additional audits or recounts. It is supposed to be setting a minimum, not a maximum.
If there is a danger of it being misinterpreted as setting a maximum -- and I agree that there is such a danger -- contact Rush Holt. Ask him to explicitly add to his bill a statement that HR 550 does *NOT* preempt any state audit or recount rights. I know this is his intention, so he should be happy to add it.
---
The perfect is the enemy of the good. HR 550 is good; it will eliminate the single biggest hurdle in getting honest elections. Yes, there are other hurdles.
However, at this point, with Ohio having a state law *prohibiting* the paper ballots from their DREs from being counted, and *guaranteeing* that the electronic results from unverifiable machines will be used for elections, the requirements of HR 550 -- which will overturn this -- are needed *now* in order to get any sort of honest elections at all. |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 238
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 9:17 am: |
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Nathanael,
You stated:
"However, at this point, with Ohio having a state law *prohibiting* the paper ballots from their DREs from being counted, and *guaranteeing* that the electronic results from unverifiable machines will be used for elections, the requirements of HR 550 -- which will overturn this -- are needed *now* in order to get any sort of honest elections at all."
Are you aware that Ohio's HB 3 cancels your right to challenge federal election results? That effectively cuts out any audits at least in federal elections, doesn't it?
I assure you that no one opposes this bill because it's not perfect. We all know that's not possible for any bill.
We are saying, however, that by the fact they are referring to this bill as "the gold standard" for election reform, it does limit our ability in the future to demand changes that will make it more robust than it is now. As Bev said, this bill should be viewed as "just a start". Without that caveat, legislators will, more likely than not, consider this matter resolved.
Another factor in the bill we strongly oppose is that it places auditing of elections totally in the hands of the EAC. It negates any citizen oversight whatsoever in the auditing process. That is unacceptable.
Also, you may not have read Paul Lehto's post above analyzing what the bill says about audits. Paul, being a lawyer, focuses on the details in how the bill is written and explains it so that laymen can understand how legal wording can easily be interpreted in other ways. Any good bill worth its salt should be at least "air tight" in how it is framed, so that it doesn't leave an open door for legal loopholes which could be used to weaken its intended purpose. In other words, what you see, isn't necessarily what you get.
Paul's excellent analysis clarifying how one could interprete the use of audits in this bill are as follows:
(1) SECTION 5 of Holt (Mandatory Manual "Audits"): The 2% audits on a precinct or polling location basis means that the samples are clustered, since all the votes in the entire precinct selected are counted. The problem with Holt is not the 2%; it is that it is 2% of precincts. One cannot do, with precinct-wide samples, what one must do with a true audit: establish a firm margin of error and a "tight" confidence level so that if the sample exceeds that, we can sound the alarms. So, it won't be possible or it will be very unlikely that even a cheating margin (in a reasonably close race at least) can come to a statistical conclusion that something was wrong. (Thanks to attorney and non-Ph.D. statistician Jonathan Simon for this) Press releases will issue, and it will simply be announced, or we will be forced to announce, that the results are 'within the margin of error' because the margin will be quite wide indeed.
Moreover, although the EAC can do more audits if "cause" appears for the same, when something is "within the margin of error" it is probably not "cause' for further investigation as a matter of law, so a court might well shut us down or shut the EAC down with the argument that UNDER ITS OWN STANDARDS AND RESULTS there is no cause to look further. The fact that citizens are invited to bid on the contracts in order to truly waste their time with a futile exercise (with the contract itself being a control mechanism and probably no access at all in any event to trade secret software) is not an improvement.
It gets worse. Section 5(b) requires at least one precinct in each (microscopic) county, which further forces small precincts to be selected, further making the 2% precinct selection problem even worse, though it the purpose of this provision appears to be to help spread the sample throughout the state, we simply have no rational interest in having statistics mimic the distortions of the US Senate, with 2 from each state regardless of size. Legislation simply does not alter the rules of statistics as to proper sampling, and should not attempt to do so...
In a nutshell, though an "official audit" be completed, nothing can be proven from it due to wide margins of errors created by precinct sampling, so that's the empty end result of the huge audit investigation, and anybody who continues to be unsatisfied is a wacko conspiracy theorist and attorneys will raise their prices and encourage you to reconsider your desire to check more. It will give audits a bad name, and the conspiracy theorists will be 100% correct: the audit proves nothing.
(2) Even if the audit could prove something, which it almost assuredly can not, all it proves is that there's a DIFFERENCE between paper and electronic, not where that difference comes from. It will be argued that the problems are with the paper, or in a real pinch even with the DRE printing an incorrect ballot that the voters (according to one claimed result in I believe an MIT study) don't really check any more than they check their paper receipts at the grocery store (a glance perhaps). Because the paper records under Holt are stored "in the same manner" as other paper records in the relevant jurisdiction, there's no improvement as to that (it may be good or bad with chain of custody issues).
In a nutshell, the audit is almost guaranteed to be within margins of error, and discrepancies (if any) can be blamed on the paper (with DREs, primarily). Although "inconsistent' results mean the paper prevails, the results will be very unlikely to be inconsistent, even in cases of actual substantial malfunction or fraud."
Kathleen Wynne
(Message edited by admin_ii on April 13, 2006)
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
Bruce Sims
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ubetchaiam
Post Number: 731
Registered: 06-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 10:00 am: |
|
First, a response to Catherine's "It's possible that some of the support for H.R.550 could be from legislators who want to be seen to be doing something, and they can accomplish this easily by supporting a doomed bill. Or am I being too cynical here? I'd love to hear opinions from those with more knowledge of political strategy. "; NO, you are NOT being 'too cynical'; just look at HAVA.
Second,for Kathleen,Ohio's HB3 will not stand a court challenge re "your right to challenge federal election results? "; that's the Fed's territory and they want even more territory; 'State's rights' arguments will get nowhere when it comes to Federal Elections. I'm surprised that papers haven't already been filed challenging that provision.
Third, Nathanael, there's a saying "If you can't find the time to do the job right the first time, why do you think you'll find the time to fix it later?"; this is especially true when it comes to legislation; just look at the tax code morass.
Lastly, kudos to all BBV 'staffers' for their efforts on this and other projects. If all 'activists' put forth 1/32nd the effort BBV does, we probably wouldn't be having this thread. |
Marian Beddill
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Uu7thprinciple
Post Number: 27
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 5:47 pm: |
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Bob Fleischer wrote:
"...Opposition to VVPAT is the right position to take -- it is in no way an adequate substitute for an original record of voter intention...."
I have a different definition from what Bob is probably using.
If Bob means by "VVPAT" - the paper printout from a DRE, which may not be a valid representation of the votes and adequate for later audits and recounts, then I agree.
But my definition of "VVPAT" (used by many), "voter-verifiable paper audit trail", is an audit trail that starts from the generation of the marks on the ballot by the voter, capable of being verified by the voter at the time of marking, and delivered and archived at the elections center, thus suitable for later audits and recounts. For example, OpScan ballots in a VBM system (all postal) or the more common absentee voting, are satisfactory for that purpose, so long as their chain-of-custody is okay.
Only those generated by low-quality machines are objectionable, as I understand the situation.
Marian |
Michael W Mather
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Gypsy
Post Number: 31
Registered: 07-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 7:57 pm: |
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Bruce: "Ohio's HB3 will not stand a court challenge re "your right to challenge federal election results? "; that's the Fed's territory and they want even more territory; 'State's rights' arguments will get nowhere when it comes to Federal Elections."
Can I get some more detailed information? In one sense, there are no "Federal Elections" in the USA; all elections are run by the states and their subdivisions. That's why we have at least 51 different sets of election laws, regulations and procedures. We do not vote for officials of the Federal Government (we do vote for state representatives to the Fed. Govt, e.g. Congresspeople and Presidential Electors). (And remember, Justice Scalia ruled that there is no Federal "right to vote".) So I believe Ohio can enact whatever election laws they want, so long as they don't violate a specific provision of their Constitution, the US Constitution, or US Code. So can I ask what specific Articles or statutes the Ohio law violates? |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 239
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 8:18 pm: |
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Michael,
CaseOhio of Columbus, Ohio has done extensive research and analysis of HB3.
I would suggest you visit that site "CaseOhio.org" where you can find the entire bill posted, as well as CaseOhio's main talking points about the bill's flaws, and testimony given by citizens before the State Senate speaking against the bill, which is featured on the homepage of their site.
A large number of Ohioans protested passionately against the passage of this bill because it would undermine their basic civil rights in elections, but, sadly, they were ignored by their legislators.
Kathleen Wynne
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
Edward Robles
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Tedeger
Post Number: 39
Registered: 11-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 5:34 pm: |
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It is looking more and more like what we need is a "Full Court Press" in EVERY STATE to return to hand-marked paper ballots and a groundswell to toss out the touch-scrren machines until such time as they have
1) verifiable paper trails and
2) open source codes and examinable software.
Then, we need FEDERAL legislation providing that
1) NO person with authority over voting procedures may be at all involved in campaigns (with heavy fines and jail terms for violators) and
2) Prosecution of ANY person found to be guilty of attempting to disenfranchise anyone on the basis of race, color, creed, or previous condition of servitude - but with heavy penalties for non-citizens attempting to vote.
The main problem is the rats in the walls. If we can only get them out, maybe we can have some honest elections. After three stolen elections I think it has gotten to be a habit, but it's one that MUST be broken if we are to return any confidence of the American People in our system of choosing our representatives and Executives. |
Hamilton Richards
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hamrichards
Post Number: 2
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 7:21 pm: |
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Many of the critiques of VVPAT as a placebo have merit, but they are often aimed at a particular implementation (for example, the hilariously named "toilet paper trail"). No doubt curled strips of printed ballot records would be exceedingly slow and unpleasant to audit, not to mention recount. But that's not the only possible implementation.
Consider an alternative implementation. This one, an instance of which has been designed by the Open Voting Consortium [1], prints each ballot on a sheet of letter-size paper. This is easy for the voter to handle, and allows for printing in a font size that's easy to read. After inspecting the ballot, the voter drops it into an old-fashioned ballot box, just as in the days before DREs.
In the purest version of this scheme, the electronic voting station would not even keep a record of votes cast-- the printed ballots would be not only the official record but the only record. The voting station's role would be reduced to that of ballot printer, and the ballots --100% of them-- would be counted by precinct or centralized optical scanners, or even by hand.
So what's the point of the electronic voting station? Why not go all the way back to paper ballots marked by hand? Because the electronic ballot printer has significant advantages:
• it eliminates the need to print blank ballots, and to guard them against theft, counterfeiting, and chain voting
• it caters for voters with disabilities and minority languages
• it can prevent overvotes and warn of undervotes
• it eliminates stray marks, which can cause ballots to be disqualified (sometimes maliciously)
• it eliminates the corruptible human judgment involved in determining "voter intent"
The OVC electronic voting station employs open-source software, which is advertised as a great improvement in transparency. I suppose it is, but no amount of inspection can guarantee to find all of a program's bugs (especially if they've been hidden deliberately). Not that it matters-- if the ballots it prints are easy for voters to inspect, the motives for software fraud, and the chances that it could succeed, are practically eliminated.
Open-source software's main contribution is to enable election-equipment purchasers to avoid being captured by vendors of proprietary systems, and thereby to reduce the systems' cost. Further reductions result from the use of commodity PCs (refurbished ones would be adequate) and inexpensive printers (people talk about printers raising DREs' cost by $500-$1000, but my HP LaserJet, which cost $200 retail, has never failed).
Wouldn't it be great if HR 550 could be amended to require that if electronic voting stations are used at all, they be restricted to simply printing letter-size voter-verified ballots?
Regards,
--Ham
1. http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
------------------------------------------------------
Hamilton Richards, PhD
Senior Lecturer (retired)
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ham/richards
------------------------------------------------------
(Message edited by HamRichards on April 21, 2006) |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 255
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 9:08 pm: |
|
Ham,
Welcome to Black Box Voting. I'd appreciate your insights to some of my concerns regarding technical solutions to our existing voting system crisis.
First, I'm not a techie. So, can you explain to me exactly how a non-techie citizen will have real oversight in the election process, if we use open source software?
(2) Since the manufacturer of the open source software will have to sign a licensing agreement with the vendor who manufacturers the hardware in which the software functions (and since there are several types available), which kind of licensing agreement will ensure that the software cannot be overriden and manipulated in any way by the hardware?
(3) Using open source software will require us to depend on technical experts to recommend changes to the software. Who will be qualified to do this?
(4) Who will make the final decision on what changes should be made to the software and on what basis is that decsion arrived at?
(5) How will we be able to guarantee those changes have been implemented everywhere they are supposed to be?
(6) Will these changes be tested first? If so, where and who will be involved in the testing?
(7) Who oversees and tracks whether these changes bring about the desired result? What will be the procedure, if they don't?
Despite all the arguments against hand counting paper ballots at the precinct level and the fact that there have not been any viable solutions offered yet that make hand counting our ballots a feasible alternative to the present system at this time; on the other hand, I find that those electronic voting solutions being offered create even more potential problems than solutions, in my mind.
The consensus of more and more people is that we've already been down this road of having to depend on technical expertise to keep us properly informed on the state of our election systems. What we found to our dismay, and through citizen intervention, was that devastating security vulnerabilities existed in the very voting machines we were assured by the experts, didn't exist.
I hope you understand my sketicism of any system I can't oversee and understand through my own ability. The findings in Leon County, Florida regarding optical scan machines, as discussed in the Hursti Report found on our site, and the soon to be released second Hursti report regarding what was discovered in the touchscreen voting machines of Emery County, Utah, combined with the recent testimony given by 2 of the 3 testing labs that test and recommended certification of these extremely flawed voting machines, support my concerns. Don't get me wrong. Despite my misgivings, I'm still open to technical solution ideas, and would appreciate any answers you give to my questions above would make sense to a non-technical mind. In any event, any technical solution offered by anyone must guarantee citizen oversight and transparency of the kind that will be apparent to the average citizen and not be totally dependent on expert opinion as to its veracity. Anything less, IMO, would violate the basic civil rights of the majority of American citizens.
Kathleen Wynne
(Message edited by admin_ii on April 21, 2006)
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
Hamilton Richards
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hamrichards
Post Number: 3
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 10:16 pm: |
|
Welcome to Black Box Voting.
Thanks, Kathleen.
I'd appreciate your insights to some of my concerns regarding technical solutions to our existing voting system crisis.
First, I'm not a techie. So, can you explain to me exactly how a non-techie citizen will have real oversight if we use open source software? Since the manufacturer of the open source software will have to sign a licensing agreement with the vendor who manufacturers the hardware in which the software functions, and since there are several types available, which kind of licensing agreement would ensure that the software cannot be overriden and manipulated in any way by the hardware?
There's no way to be sure the software has been overwritten, but that's not a problem. The software's only job is to print a ballot representing the voter's choices, and the voter gets to look it over to make sure it's correct. If the software screws up, the voter rejects the ballot and gets another try.
A very good way to deal with a hard problem is not to solve it but to find a way around it. The ballot printer makes an end run around the problem of trusting the software. As David Dill put it, given ballot printers, it doesn't matter if the software is written by Satan himself. It's a wonderful simplification, and allows us to leave a great many problems --the competence and motivations of the programmers, the security of the machines, etc., etc.-- unsolved.
Since open source software still requires us to depend on technical experts to maintain and recommend changes to the software, who will be qualified to do this? Who will make the final decision on what changes should be made to the software and on what basis is that decsion arrived at? How will we be able to guarantee those changes have been implemented everywhere they are supposed to be? Will these changes be tested first? Where and who will be involved in the testing? Who oversees and tracks whether these changes bring about the desired result? What will be the procedure, if they don't?
Good questions, and I can't give you detailed answers. But there are precedents for this kind of software. Two of the best known open-source examples are the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. Linux has by now branched into several versions, and there are companies (such as RedHat) which make their living maintaining their version and offering various services to customers who use it. Apache was created by a foundation, which I believe still maintains it, and it's used by something like 80% of the world's web servers. In both cases, there are thousands of programmers the world over poring over the software, discovering flaws and offering improvements; one of the functions of the companies or foundations is to coordinate and evaluate these contributions. And it's all carried out in broad dayloight.
The Open Voting Consortium is seeking funding to develop open-source voting-station software, running on top of Linux.
Despite all the problems cited about there being viable solutions for hand counting paper ballots at the precinct level; as it stands now, the electronic voting solutions offered so far have created even more potential problems, in my mind.
The first-generation electronic voting stations have been a complete disaster, but hand counting is not without its problems. Over the years, techniques for distorting the hand count of paper ballots have been developed to a high art. For example, since ballots with overvotes are generally disqualified, vote counters have been known to hide bits of pencil lead under their fingernails to make disqualifying marks on ballots they don't like (incidentally, ballot printers would make this practice unworkable).
We've been down this road already having to depend on technical expertise to keep us properly informed on the state of our election systems and found, through citizen efforts, devastating security vulnerabilities existed in the very voting machines we were assured by the experts, didn't exist.
True enough, but the decisions to buy DREs were too far along to stop before most of the real technical experts got wind of what was happening. And the "experts" who issued all those assurances were mostly of the trade-school variety, more interested in making or defending a sale than in adhering to the truth.
I hope you understand my sketicism of any system I can't oversee and understand through my own ability. My concerns are buttressed by our findings in Leon County, Florida regarding optical scan machines, as discussed in the Hursti Report found on our site, and the soon to be released second Hursti report regarding what was discovered in the touchscreen voting machines of Emery County, Utah. Don't get me wrong. Despite my misgivings, I'm still open to technical solution ideas, but I would appreciate answers to my questions above that make sense to me.
These are all valid concerns, but I think it helps to realize that there are always trade-offs. Even if ballots are counted entirely by hand, unless you count them all personally yourself, you have to rely on other people to count them on your behalf. That does NOT require you to trust those people. Instead, we've learned over the years how to set up the system so that no one individual has to be trusted-- counting is performed and observed by representatives of all parties involved in the election, chains of custody are established to make sure that the ballots are never in the presence of a single person (it's always zero or at least two), and so forth.
None of these systems and procedures is perfect, but they can be designed to raise the cost of fraud to as high a level as we like.
Most importantly, any technical solution must guarantee citizen oversight and transparency of the kind that will be apparent to the average citizen and not be totally dependent on expert opinion as to its veracity. Anything less, IMO, would violate the basic civil rights of the majority of American citizens.
Dividing the problem into two smaller problems, namely, (1) printing the ballots and (2) counting the ballots, makes the solutions easier.
1. Every voter can inspect her/his printed ballot to make sure it's correct. Even if the software is not open-source, what counts is the result it produces, and that's completely transparent.
2. The paper ballots can be counted as many times, in as many different ways, as the voters demand. Again, the process is transparent, at least to the extent that counting of ballots has ever been transparent.
The beauty of this idea is that understanding it takes no technical expertise at all. That's why, even though I'm a technologist, I really like it.
All the best,
--Ham
---------------------------------------
Hamilton Richards, PhD
Senior Lecturer (retired)
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ham/richards
} |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 257
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 11:47 pm: |
|
Ham,
There's no way to be sure the software has been overwritten, but that's not a problem. The software's only job is to print a ballot representing the voter's choices, and the voter gets to look it over to make sure it's correct. If the software screws up, the voter rejects the ballot and gets another try.
The key here is where do these ballots go, once they have been verified by the voter? If they go in a locked box, not to be opened again unless a certain legal requirement is met, they will remain in that locked box for 22 months and then destroyed. There are no random recounts allowed. The Sec. of State must authorize a recount. This is not as easy to achieve as most think due to the costs, extra work and time involved for the elections officials in completing a successful recount. Otherwise, these ballots serve no purpose as an auditing tool as a check against the software's counting of the votes.
Good questions, and I can't give you detailed answers. But there are precedents for this kind of software. Two of the best known open-source examples are the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. Linux has by now branched into several versions, and there are companies (such as RedHat) which make their living maintaining their version and offering various services to customers who use it. Apache was created by a foundation, which I believe still maintains it, and it's used by something like 80% of the world's web servers. In both cases, there are thousands of programmers the world over poring over the software, discovering flaws and offering improvements; one of the functions of the companies or foundations is to coordinate and evaluate these contributions. And it's all carried out in broad dayloight.
This doesn't answer my question of where is there citizen oversight in this process? When you say thousands of programmers are reviewing the software and offering improvements, this is exactly what I view as THE problem we're having to deal with now involving experts. How are all these improvements tracked? Who decides which improvements to implement? How does a citizen oversee this, much less participate? Again, citizens are being summarily dismissed from one of the most important parts of the election process. They are being forced to depend on experts to oversee a process that is their civil right. Why should citizens give up that right for convenience and expendiency that ultimately jeopardizes transparency and oversight?
The first-generation electronic voting stations have been a complete disaster, but hand counting is not without its problems. Over the years, techniques for distorting the hand count of paper ballots have been developed to a high art. For example, since ballots with overvotes are generally disqualified, vote counters have been known to hide bits of pencil lead under their fingernails to make disqualifying marks on ballots they don't like (incidentally, ballot printers would make this practice unworkable).
What you are referring to by pointing out the differences between machine counts and hand counts could also be defined as:
"Retail Fraud": Actions that affect a small number of votes each. If your neighbor dies and you vote on their absentee ballot, that's "retail fraud". Requires a large political machine such as Tammany Hall in NYC or the worst years of the Chicago machine to scale up the risk.
vs.
"Wholesale Fraud": When a small number of people (or just one person) is able to alter large number of votes at once. Examples include tampering with voting machines, improper purging of the voter registration database, the addition of a large bloc of bogus voters to a voter registration database, or wholesale access to the absentee ballot process.
The difference is the size and scale of fraud in each situation. Machines are the greater risk based on this difference.
True enough, but the decisions to buy DREs were too far along to stop before most of the real technical experts got wind of what was happening. And the "experts" who issued all those assurances were mostly of the trade-school variety, more interested in making or defending a sale than in adhering to the truth.
Could you explain who the "real experts" are? Are the "trade school" variety those at the testing labs? It was my understanding that the real experts were well aware of process used by the labs in testing these voting systems. The process has been around for 15-20 years now. Surely, someone looked!
Curious. Have you read the testimony given by 2 of the 3 testing labs that tested and recommended these horribly flawed voting systems for certification? If not, I urge you to do so. Here's the link:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/27280.html
It's a devastating report of the total failure of these "trade school" experts. It's also one of the main reasons I cannot compromise on citizen oversight and transparency in every phase of the election process.
1. Every voter can inspect her/his printed ballot to make sure it's correct. Even if the software is not open-source, what counts is the result it produces, and that's completely transparent.
2. The paper ballots can be counted as many times, in as many different ways, as the voters demand. Again, the process is transparent, at least to the extent that counting of ballots has ever been transparent.
1. Could you explain to me whether the reports and poll tapes generated by the open source software, is done in the same way as the Diebold optical scan and touchscreen machines? If so, how do we know that the ballot verified by the voter was registered accurately inside the open source software? Please refer to the Hursti Report to find out how this was done. Is what Mr. Hursti did in altering the reports and poll tapes generated in the Diebold optical scan system possible with the open source software? What's different?
2. I disagree that the ballots can be counted as many times as the voters want. Please refer back to my response to your first answer.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Such dialog is healthy and helps us all learn from each other.
Kathleen
(Message edited by admin_ii on April 22, 2006)
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
Hamilton Richards
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hamrichards
Post Number: 4
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, April 22, 2006 - 3:26 pm: |
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Hi, Kathleen--
Ham: There's no way to be sure the software has not [sorry, that was omitted in my original post] been overwritten, but that's not a problem. The software's only job is to print a ballot representing the voter's choices, and the voter gets to look it over to make sure it's correct. If the software screws up, the voter rejects the ballot and gets another try.
Kathleen: The key here is where do these ballots go, once they have been verified by the voter? If they go in a locked box, not to be opened again unless a certain legal requirement is met, they will remain in that locked box for 22 months and then destroyed.
Sorry, I didn't explain clearly. Those ballots are not an audit trail. They are the only record of the vote, exactly as if they had been marked by hand. They are taken out and counted immediately after the polls close, just like paper ballots in the days before DREs.
Kathleen: There are no random recounts allowed. The Sec. of State must authorize a recount. This is not as easy to achieve as most think due to the costs, extra work and time involved for the elections officials in completing a successful recount.
I don't know what "random recount" would mean, even if it were permitted. Let's clarify the difference between recount and audit:
A recount is undertaken to determine who won the election; all the
votes are counted again.
An audit is undertaken to determine whether the machines
are counting properly.
So a random audit compares the machine's count with a manual count, for a sample of the total population of machines. The size of the sample is a tradeoff between cost (the smaller the cheaper) and reliability (the larger the better), where reliability means the probability that the sample has the same values of the relevant properties as the whole population.
In the ballot-printer system I've described, the voting station would never be audited, because it records no voting results, and so there's nothing to compare. If the ballots are counted by optical scanners, the scanners would be audited, just as they are when they're used for counting ballots marked by hand.
Kathleen: Otherwise, these ballots serve no purpose as an auditing tool as a check against the software's counting of the votes.
That reference to "the software's counting of the votes" is part of the same misunderstanding. In the system I'm describing, the software in the voting stations doesn't count any votes. Its only job is to print the ballots.
Kathleen: This doesn't answer my question of where is there citizen oversight in this process? ... Why should citizens give up that right for convenience and expendiency that ultimately jeopardizes transparency and oversight?
Are transparency and oversight ends in themselves, or are they a means to ensure that votes are counted accurately?
If they are ends in themselves, then there's probably not much point in this conversation. I have a hard time imagining the entire citizenry engaged in counting ballots, which seems to be that position's ultimate outcome.
If the real goal, however, is accuracy in vote counting, then please consider the possibility that complete transparency, and citizen oversight of every detail, are not the only means to that end.
Here's a familiar analogy. I have no idea how my credit union keeps track of my checking account, and I doubt very much that the software it uses is open-source. But I don't lose any sleep over this lack of transparency, because I can check the results. The credit union sends me monthly statements which I check for accuracy; provided the statement matches my records, I have no reason to care how it was produced.
The same reasoning applies to the voting-station-as-ballot-printer idea. I don't need to know the workings of the software that produces my printed ballot, as long as the ballot is accurate.
When it comes to counting the ballots produced by the ballot-printing voting stations, there's no reason they couldn't be counted by hand, involving as many citizens as can spare the time. These machine printed ballots would be considerably easier to count than hand-marked ones, because the printing would be consistently legible, and there would be no overvotes or disqualifying stray marks.
Ham: The first-generation electronic voting stations have been a complete disaster, but hand counting is not without its problems. ...
Kathleen: What you are referring to by pointing out the differences between machine counts and hand counts could also be defined as:
"Retail Fraud": Actions that affect a small number of votes each. If your neighbor dies and you vote on their absentee ballot, that's "retail fraud". Requires a large political machine such as Tammany Hall in NYC or the worst years of the Chicago machine to scale up the risk.
vs.
"Wholesale Fraud": When a small number of people (or just one person) is able to alter large number of votes at once. Examples include tampering with voting machines, improper purging of the voter registration database, the addition of a large bloc of bogus voters to a voter registration database, or wholesale access to the absentee ballot process.
The difference is the size and scale of fraud in each situation. Machines are the greater risk based on this difference.
Wholesale fraud is certainly a problem when the machines count the votes, but in the system I'm describing, the machines DO NOT count the votes.
Ham: ... the decisions to buy DREs were too far along to stop before most of the real technical experts got wind of what was happening. And the "experts" who issued all those assurances were mostly of the trade-school variety, more interested in making or defending a sale than in adhering to the truth.
Kathleen: Could you explain who the "real experts" are? Are the "trade school" variety those at the testing labs? It was my understanding that the real experts were well aware of process used by the labs in testing these voting systems. The process has been around for 15-20 years now. Surely, someone looked!
There is, sadly, quite a disconnect between computer science and computing practice. Computer scientists know full well that testing software can establish the presence of bugs, but can never prove their absence. Yet computing practice continues to spend vast amounts of resources on testing software, and of course the testers feel they have to defend that expenditure.
A realistic approach would test software to determine whether it performs the functions required by the customer in a way that the customer finds satisfactory, but would humbly concede that even after the most exhaustive testing, bugs --accidental or deliberate-- may still remain.
It's this humble recognition that's behind computer scientists' call for permanent (i.e., paper) voter-verified records of every vote. If the DRE vendors and "independent" testing authorities have no darker motives, their contention that testing assures accurate vote counts can only be ascribed to some combination of ignorance and hubris.
Kathleen: Curious. Have you read the testimony given by 2 of the 3 testing labs that tested and recommended these horribly flawed voting systems for certification? If not, I urge you to do so. Here's the link:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/27280.html
It's a devastating report of the total failure of these "trade school" experts. It's also one of the main reasons I cannot compromise on citizen oversight and transparency in every phase of the election process.
I must admit that I haven't read it all the way through, but I readily agree that it's devastating.
On the question of "citizen oversight and transparency in every phase of the election process", let me refer you back to the credit-union example.
Ham: 1. Every voter can inspect her/his printed ballot to make sure it's correct. Even if the software is not open-source, what counts is the result it produces, and that's completely transparent.
2. The paper ballots can be counted as many times, in as many different ways, as the voters demand. Again, the process is transparent, at least to the extent that counting of ballots has ever been transparent.
Kathleen: 1. Could you explain to me whether the reports and poll tapes generated by the open source software, is done in the same way as the Diebold optical scan and touchscreen machines? ... What's different?
What's different is that in the system I'm describing, the software counts no votes.
Kathleen: 2. I disagree that the ballots can be counted as many times as the voters want. Please refer back to my response to your first answer.
OK, but that response ( "There are no random recounts allowed. The Sec. of State must authorize a recount.") refers to the laws and regulations as they are now. I've been assuming that we're discussing how the laws and regulations ought to be changed (it all started, after all, as a discussion of HR 550).
Kathleen: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Such dialog is healthy and helps us all learn from each other.
Well, we certainly agree on that!
I hope we also agree that in the system I'm describing (whatever its merits may be) the voting station counts no votes, but simply produces a printed ballot.
Cheers,
--Ham
---------------------------------------
Hamilton Richards, PhD
Senior Lecturer (retired)
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ham/richards |
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 66
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, April 22, 2006 - 4:51 pm: |
|
Ham,
If I may chip in....
Do you have an idea on how to round up these hand counters of ballots? I know there are a variety of ideas out there, but I'm interested in yours.
Some precincts in my county had in excess of 2000 ballots cast in them. Some precincts only stopped casting ballots at 1AM in November 2004. I know that is an obscene precinct size, but it was mandated by law because of a unique series of events. How do you propose to have a board of citizens BEGIN to count 2000+ ballots at 1AM, after they've all been there since 6:30AM the previous morning?
I know that this is an extreme example, but it is the real-world extremes that test any system, after all. |
Hamilton Richards
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hamrichards
Post Number: 5
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, April 22, 2006 - 8:22 pm: |
|
Kurt--
Welcome to the discussion.
Do you have an idea on how to round up these hand counters of ballots? I know there are a variety of ideas out there, but I'm interested in yours.
Sorry, I really haven't a clue. (I'm a technologist ;-)
It does seem doable, however, seeing as how paper ballots were counted by hand in the US from 1888 until optical scanners came on the scene. Moreover, I understand that many other countries still count all of their ballots by hand.
By the way, the best introductions to elections and vote counting I've run across are the tutorials by Doug Jones:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/pictures
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/paper.html
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/counting.html
Regards,
--Ham |
Michael W Mather
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Gypsy
Post Number: 36
Registered: 07-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, April 23, 2006 - 8:03 pm: |
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Hamilton: 'Are transparency and oversight ends in themselves, or are they a means to ensure that votes are counted accurately?'
Beyond promoting accuracy, transparency and oversight are necessary for confidence. If voters and candidates don't have confidence in the accuracy of the count, you have a recipe for varying degrees of 'incivility' in society, and in fact, risk losing democracy itself. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 517
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 7:43 am: |
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Oversight is necessary to have any reason to believe there is accuracy, no? Unfortunately oversight of this process can't be universal (every voter can't go through and count the votes, insufficient time). |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 259
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 8:15 am: |
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Brant,
No one said every voter has to be a part of the counting of the votes. I was voicing my concern to Ham that what he is suggesting requires people with specific expertise and knowledge to oversee the use of this software. He says that thousands of programmers would be allowed to weigh in on what changes need to be made to the software to make it better. What he doesn't explain to my understanding and satisfaction is how this can be accomplished, while at the same time maintaining citzien oversight and participation in the process. The only thing it sounds like the voter actually does in this process is verify their own vote.
The devil has always been in the details and it needs to be clearly explained as to who would be in charge of tracking and maintaining these suggested changes being submitted by thousands of programmers. Despite Ham's explanation that the software will only print the ballots, I don't understand why would we would need thousands of programmers submitting suggested changes to the software. Changes for what exactly? As I asked Ham in my post above, will it be a small group of programmers who oversee this process? How will they be chosen and what are the requisite qualifications for these chosen few? How will they decide which changes to make to the open source software? How will these changes be implemented everywhere the software is in use?
The most important question that hasn't been properly addressed with any technical solution offered so far is how can average citizens oversee such a process, especially since it relies on a specific group of people, who would need certain knowledge and expertise to run it, (which the majority of citizens don't have)? I have no confidence in putting my trust in the hands of a few, when it comes to voting software. Been there, done that.
Kathleen
(Message edited by admin_ii on April 24, 2006)
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 73
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 9:11 am: |
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Kathleen,
It is important to remember that in Ham's system, no software participates in counting, so it doesn't matter who does the programming. If all it does is make ballots, the programming could be done by Lucifer himself.
Right now, where paper ballots are used, they are created in software, even if it is only at a commercial printer's shop.
I fear that this movement has gotten so into distrust of software generally that when someone suggests a system that uses software for truly benign purposes, we can lose sight of that, and get all tied up in a "these things are evil" place emotionally. Printing a ballot is as benign as it gets.
It only gets dicey when computers count votes and tabulate. Ham is suggesting neither. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2162
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 9:45 am: |
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"Printing a ballot is as benign as it gets. "
Well, sort of. Think of the butterfly ballot.
Several folks here have had interesting things to say in relation to presentation fraud or errors (and in fact there are lots of serious problems emerging with ballot printing at the moment right across the country). No idea what's causing so many major problems. (no time, sloppiness, desire to show that "paper is bad"?)
Presentation fraud (I think that was the term used) occurs when there are subtle differences that make it easier or harder for a voter to vote for one person rather than another. (E.g., having a name in bold or a font size or style that's easier or harder to read, omitting party affiliation, etc.) |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 260
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 9:53 am: |
|
Kurt,
I agree. However, he hasn't answered my questions regarding the thousands of programmers offering suggested changes to the software by clarifying who those experts will be. How will they decide whether or not to implement these changes or not and on what basis. Even if the software should prove to be benign, that may not be the case once the software is inside another vendor's hardware. According to Harri Hursti, open source software can be overriden through the hardware. This possibility hasn't been appropriately addressed and could very well lead to the same problems we are facing now with voting systems. So, caution is very much in order.
Open source software on its face sounds like a great idea. Everyone thinks they will be able to see exactly how the software is working. However, based on Mr. Hursti's observations, I'm not willing to welcome it with open arms just yet. This is why citizen oversight is so very important. We keep the technologist from making the same mistakes again and again.
Kathleen
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 75
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 10:49 am: |
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Oh Catherine,
I can tell you with pretty much certainty why we're seeing so many problems with ballot printing this year. It's because the old systems have been swept away, and everyone's become dependent on a few vendors, like ES&S.
I know in the "old world" each county knew its state laws regarding ballots and counties contracted with a commercial printer who knew the state laws inside and out and knew how to create a template for counties to order their ballots. In PA, the biggest specialty printer is a place called William Penn Printing in the Pittsburgh area. They did all the nomination petitions, the precinct supply materials and boxes, the whole schmeer. Remember, lever and "old school" DRE counties still need paper ballots for absentees and provisionals. Op scan and punchcard counties used the same basic materials for everything.
I'm sure every state has their own "William Penn" or perhaps two or three of them. Well, now along comes HAVA and the whole world is turned upside down. Counties and states are all of a sudden are relying on ES&S (seem to be the biggest error makers so far - several states' early ballots are late) and they seem ill-prepared for either inviolable deadlines, or for the subtle differnces between states. ES&S is, IMHO, in WAY over their heads. They plainly don't have enough support staff to handle their business, and clearly not enough state and local expertise. The whole country ain't Nebraska, sorry.
In my state, for my paper, I used ES&S's Election Data Manager and their ballot layout product whose name escapes me. It created PostScript files which could be sent to a PS printer, or to a commercial house. We printed all on a PostScript equipped IBM wicked fast laser printer. Huge mother. The biggest problem we had was the PA apellate courts not being done with candidate challenge cases when the AB deadlines came. And the precise content of each candidate's box was specified in state law.
The ES&S software made it impossible to do most "presentation errors". All fonts were forced to be the same size in a given category. No flowing to a second column was allowed, etc.
And if anything didn't proofread right, you do a quick correction and VOILA, new ballots! When we found rrors, we were able to correct them in 2-3 minutes and have new ballots printing instantanously on the IBM printer.
The proof was in the product. No one EVER EVER cared, nor should they really what the devil was in the source code. For counting and tabulating, I can see that problem, but NOT as a general rule for ALL software functions.
Am I starting to detect a "fixation problem" here? |
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 76
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 10:59 am: |
|
Sorry, but I'm REALLY starting to "not get it" now.
I sense that too many people are becoming conditioned to object to ANY use of software anywhere in elections. I'm really sorry but that's just a bloody irresponsible viewpoint to take! What do we design ballots with, Crayolas and construction paper? Sharp sticks and mud tablets? Pitch forks and flaming torches at sundown? What gives? I feel like I'm missing something big here. Is anti-technology an ALL-ENCOMPASING mantra here? If so, I'm outta here. It's getting a little too nutty. |
Linda Franz
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Linda_franz
Post Number: 250
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 11:21 am: |
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Kurt,
So, in terms of printing ballots, your experience has been that those systems, for that purpose, tend to work pretty well? Allow you to make fast turn-arounds, etc.?
Have you experienced the need, with the new "Election Management Systems," to interface with the tabulation systems in order to create the ballot templates?
If I recall correctly about the need for that, (IF) that's one area of interface I find troublesome.
By the way, I find your responses enlightening, educational, and helpful in how we go about what we're about. |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 261
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 11:45 am: |
|
Kurt,
I'm surprised at your reaction to Catherine and I suppose to me as well.
Have you read the Hursti Report regarding the vulnerability of the optical scan system? Have you read the transcripts of the 2 testing lab reps and noted the outright lies they told? There will be a second Hursti report coming out on approximately May 10th about the devastating security vulnerabilities of the touchscreens.
Based on all the evidence that's been brought forward by BBV and other citizens regarding election issues that exist at all levels of the voting process (with technology being at the heart of it), I don't think we are reacting in a nutty way. This "fixation" as you call it, is a result of being systemically lied to by the vendors and the testing labs for decades. I'd say it's much more a "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" fixation.
When citizens started questioning the security and accuracy of these machines, the burden of proof was put on them to prove that the machines were flawed. We did that. In fact, they should never have been certified in the first place, much less used in our elections. Now, it seems only fair that the burden of proof should now lie with the vendors or anyone who proposes any new technical solution.
It is our obligation as citizens to jealously guard and protect our democratic process and to question everything. Unfortunately, we've been virtually "asleep at the wheel" for a very long time and are now paying a heavy price for our complacency. "Trust" was never part of the plan when our founding fathers created the idea of a government run by its people. And with good reason.
Kathleen
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* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 78
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 12:04 pm: |
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Linda,
I can only speak for the ES&S Unity Suite of products.
We used it STRICTLY to design and print our paper ballots which were all counted by hand (absentees and provisionals). No ballot we ever designed with ES&S's software ever saw a scanner. Now, for sure, the software was designed to make scannable ballots, those ones where you connect the head and the tail of an arrow, but there is no need to ACTUALLY do that. ES&S's software suite is fully modular. Using it for one thing does not require you to use it for another. If we had used scanned ballots, we'd just fire up another piece of software for the counting/tabulating. We never paid ES&S for it, and they never gave us the passwords to install it. We paid for what we used. Actually we paid a lot. The phone support service contract was too expensive. I know some counties used generic page layout software, but with the huge number of races on a single ballot (up to 30) and 180 unique ballot styles, software for the purpose was indispensible. I had one staffer who was a detail oriented savant, or something, and he proofread all the paper ballots. He'd find middle initials with missing periods. BTW, we used squares, not arrows, because they were all hand-counted.
The worst part for my life was - my machine software and absentee ballot software were not database compatible, so I had to enter every candidate name in two completely different systems, manually. In odd-numbered years, that was almost 1000 candidates.
Our precinct judges and inspectors are ELECTED, not appointed. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 79
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 12:26 pm: |
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Kathleen,
It is simply IMPOSSIBLE, I repeat, IMPOSSIBLE to eliminate all vestiges of technology from elections. Ballot layout, by itself, is comletely unrelated to counting the darned things.
You don't want computers to do counting? Fine. No tabulating? Fine. But ballot design? C'mon!
We live in a world where the turnaround from a court ruling changing who is on the ballot to the dropdead deadline for mailing absenee ballots can be less than 24 hours, and often is. How on earth is any jurisdiction going to redesign hundreds of ballot styles including thousands of candidates without computers?
Is this movement about accuracy and verfiability or about a neurotic fear of all things computing? Or for some is to make the job of running an election impossible? If that's what it's about, some of you are getting REAL close to it.
It's fine to keep computers out of areas where their abuse can screw around with an election, but let's get off the idea that elections can be a COMPLETELY computer free zone.
And before someone suggests we ran elections before computers, yes, we did. But we also had courts that respected deadlines to have decisions rendered then, and now we don't. We used to have elections where a candidate's eligibility to be on a ballot was rarely contested. Now such challenges clog all our courts for weeks every year. The world has changed. Computers weren't put into elections offices to steal elections. They were put in so that we could carry the darned things off in the first place. My county has 6 times the population it had when we didn't have computers in elections. Times change, and sometimes technology has to be involved in SOME areas. Sheesh! |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2165
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 1:02 pm: |
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I don't think technology per se is the issue in most cases (except for vote counting and vote registration, where it is an issue). Rather, I think it's the lack of appropriate citizen involvement and oversight. It's part of the challenge Kurt described so well elsewhere, where you talked about the frame of mind that election officials had developed over the years, including the assumption of accuracy and validity.
A "problem" I sense in our discussion here, Kurt, is that you have so much common sense and integrity that you can't imagine that certain things such as ballot lay-out or font style would ever be an issue. And you're right--many things shouldn't ever be an issue. . . It's disgusting for us trusting souls when things like the FL butterfly ballot turn up.
Unfortunately some election officials appear to use their positions in ways that are partisan at worst, or less than competent at best. I can't see into the heart of the person who designed that infamous FL ballot, but I can't imagine that you, Kurt, would ever have designed a ballot that would be so visually confusing.
Looking at the source code of the printer software isn't the issue in this case--as long as there are other appropriate checks and balances (such as visual inspection by neutral persons) so that if something is being printed that has the potential to impact an election's fairness that something be done about it. Right now those checks and balances are weak or non-existent. E.D.'s don't have time or money to put mechanisms in place. Most legislators don't really care about what voters want--they care about what significant campaign donors want. Citizens have become complacent and don't believe there are serious problems. All sides want an easy life without hassles. This is understandable--but it's not good for democracy.
The value of democracy, the staff and officials who oversee its exercise in voting and registration, and citizens have become too distant from one another. In many cases this is partly a problem of scale. Most people rarely have any meaningful personal contact with an elected official or a local, state or national legislator. I know in all my years in the States I never did. (I moved to Ireland in 1990 and politics is much more personal here. It is relatively easy for regular citizens to meet with their elected representatives at both local and national level. Monied interests still control public policy, so that much is similar, though not as extreme. Media is more balanced and public opinion is more often able to create political change to a certain degree. The political process is perceived to be within reach of the electorate to a far greater extent than in the US.)
The problems of lack of meaningful, constructive interaction are also due to the related perception that decisions are made far removed from the individual voter. All too often that perception is justified.
Accurate, transparent elections involve more work on the part of both citizens and election officials. There is no getting around it. It then becomes a question of how badly we citizens want it, and how successfully we can persuade those who exercise the power to do something about it, to want it, too. |
Linda Franz
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Linda_franz
Post Number: 251
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 1:48 pm: |
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I think Kurt is talking about compartmentalization.
The use of technology to produce the ballots is separate from the voting/tabulation systems, as it should be.
While we have some infamous examples of bad ballots, in this day and age you about have to create the ballots via computers. I suspect that's the norm for print shops now.
How to do it otherwise and get it turned around fast enough?
In some states, there really wasn't enough time between the primary and the election, if a primary race was contested, to get ballots printed.
If you don't do it by computer, what are your options, setting type? Having a person design a ballot that can be copied? (Which will introduce a small amount of shrinkage)
I think this got into an "apples and oranges" discussion.
I do "get" what Kurt is saying about ONE part of the process- getting the ballots printed.
I "get" Kathleen's concerns about the counting of those ballots.
And that all parts of the process should have citizen checks and balances. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 81
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 1:53 pm: |
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Catherine,
A couple of thoughts.
1) The butterfly ballot was legal in Florida, and except for the fact that no county in PA has retained punchcards, it STILL is technically legal in PA. (There is no way it can be used OTHER THAN with punchcards.) Butterfly ballots have been used nationwide when the number of candidates exceeds 1/2 the number of holes on one vertical column of a punchcard. That is the only way for the font on the overlay booklet to be large enough for presbyopic folks like me. Luckily, it is really really rare, and all but gone now. It is technically legal under HAVA to retain punchcards, but not easy. BTW, the lady that did the butterfly was a Democrat, so partisan motives may not apply. That decision was just dumb, and it ultimately cost her the job 3.5 years later.
2) I have ALWAYS loved public citizen oversight. I'm still looking for it in significant numbers. Do you realize how rare people like those posting here are? Even the participation opportunities that presently exist frequently go unfilled. I wish it were otherwise, but many people can't seem to be bothered to vote, much less oversee any part of voting.
3) I have seen county ballots that don't use "presentation error" prevention techniques, and I do know some folks (E.D.'s) who are less conscientious than others. Some E.D.'s bosses are just plain cheap, and the county where I worked is getting that way. I believe they are trying to use HAVA dollars to replace local effort, in violation of HAVA, but I have no hard evidence. Since that would be illegal, I'll leave it as my BELIEF. I know what SOME in the county (not in enough power to then prevail) wanted me to do while I was still there. 'Nuff said.
4) I'm starting to wonder what "neutral persons" are. I know the concept. I just don't know how to accomplish it. It seems evryone has an agenda. PA law makes it ILLEGAL for anyone from outside a particular COUNTY to observe ANYTHING in a polling place. No international observers. No out-of-state observers. No out-of-county observers. In November 2004, we had $500 an hour lawyers from out of state sitting in lawn chairs in 45 degree weather outdoors monitoring whatever it is they thought they could monitor from outside because the law says they ain't coming inside.
5) Since you are an American overseas, let me share something with you that puzzles me. You had lived in the states. You are now there. You may vote for Presidential electors from your old stateside address. Are you aware that had you moved to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Marianas, the Solomons, or any other U.S. territory, you'd have lost your right to vote for Presidential electors? Why is that? And which is more fair, that you can, or they can't. That one has always troubled me. In addition, if you and your husband are citizens, and you have a child who never lives here, but reaches 18, he can't vote at all, for anything here, even though he is a citizen. How many people know that?
6) Flattery will get you everywhere, but I stand in awe of the Sanchos and others of his caliber in the field. He has a set of big'uns. The election field needs more of his type. I got firec because I wouldn't be quiet while others gamed the system around me, and I didn't have the protection of being an elected official. My bosses wanted an obseqious yes man. I'm not one, so I'm gone. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 82
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 2:10 pm: |
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Linda,
Thanks for understanding. You are, of course, right on the money. I am quite sure that, once Kathleen thinks of these as "compartmentalized" functions, she gets it, too. That is, unless, she believes they can't be compartmentalized, which I can assure her they can and are. Please, all, TRY, TRY to not assume that everything is as sinister in practice as you can imagine it to be. It must be hell to live in a belief system like that. Most of my former colleagues are honest decent folks trying to do what is right, and most of them are as politically neutral (neutered?) as any you will ever meet, at least in states where they are appointed. I never understood people in charge of elections being elected. It makes political neutrality all but impossible. In PA, our precinct level officials are elected. Our county and state administrators are appointed. I like it that way.
There does seem to be, for some, a kneejerk reaction of "Computer bad" when it comes to elections. Of course, the more we think about that, it's silly. Ever tried posting on this board without one? Using a computer to design a paper ballot that will be counted by hand is no more damaging to the integrity of elections than typing your post on your PC.
Thanks. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2167
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 3:31 pm: |
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I don't think there is a knee-jerk reaction of "computer bad"! But sometimes it requires a fair degree of clarification to be clear about what situations and scenarios are under discussion.
In fact it's one of the typical spins, to classify those who want fair elections as "luddites". This was one of the cards played over and over by the Irish government.
Re: butterfly ballots, my point was not whether or not they are legal. It was about whether or not they are a clear visual format and a good choice for fair elections. It was also about whether or not the ballot layout would have tended to favor or harm some candidates more than another, and whether input was sought or given and whether other options were considered.
"Democrat" does not automatically mean partisan to the Democratic Party. In some states party membership is used flexibly so as to load committees with allies by having them join whichever party is required.
Kurt, I had to laugh when I read, "Please, all, TRY, TRY to not assume that everything is as sinister in practice as you can imagine it to be." Time and time again, when one is finally able to scratch beneath the surface, the reality is usually far worse than anyone had suggested or suspected. The sinister acts could be in relation to CYA to cover up mistakes or incompetence; they could be to cover up fraudulent elections; they could be done to prevent criminal or civil cases. There are serious problems, and the causes are probably myriad.
A common theme, however, is that there is systematic obstruction to getting facts or carrying out investigations. The vendors are one major part of the secrecy, though not the only source of secrecy.
Secrecy can be used as a cover for election fraud, vendor fraud, or incompetence. It can be used by vendors, election officials, pollworkers or others. In any case, secrecy is the initial hurdle to establishing the facts.
Acknowledging that symptoms of a conspiracy may exist should not consistently lead to someone being branded as mentally or psychologically defective. Like it or not, there are plenty of conspiracies around. The newspapers are increasingly covering some of them. But the label of "conspiracy theorist" is used as a perjorative in an attempt to discredit people who ask difficult questions. The label is used as a psychological weapon to discourage people from carrying out investigations or asking questions.
You've pointed out some of the reasons why things sometimes go wrong: ineptitude, inadequate prior training, too little time, poorly designed equipment or software, laziness or inattention to detail, insufficient staff, inadequate financial resources. There are also cases where there are all the outer symptoms of conspiracy, commonly combined with legal or procedural obstacles which prevent uncovering the hard evidence which is required. Procedures and in some cases apparent abuse of power are too frequently used in a way that is obviously and deliberately obstructive. (For example, counties and states that require prohibitive fees to respond to PRRs; or that do not respond until the time for challenging an election has passed; or who do not respond at all, obliging the requesting party to file a lawsuit for which they cannot be reimbursed for legal costs even when they win their case.)
Have you read Bev's descriptions of what happened in Volusia county, FL, and looked at the poll tapes, and looked at the video tape? Have you read Kathleen Wynne's eyewitness account of what she observed in the Ohio "recount"? If so, you might come to the conclusion that some form of conspiracy is the most logical explanation for these events, even though one would not be able to conclude who or what was behind them.
It is inappropriate to suggest that everything is a conspiracy. It is equally inappropriate to suggest that there are no conspiracies. We need to systematically enable investigation rather than prevent it, and to encourage observation rather than obstruct it. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 84
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 5:36 pm: |
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Catherine,
...or as Henry Kisinger once said...
"Paranoids can have enemies too, you know."
Of course, I'm jesting.
I acknowledge that there are myriad problems and misconduct going on out there. Where I part company with many out there is when the attempt is made to "connect the dots" and find a puppetmaster pulling the strings (if I may mix my metaphors).
This is a now well documented tendency of the human mind. It is now well documented that no one ever saw what all early planetary astronomers called the canals on Mars. Astronomers all independently imagined the canals. The research has shown a nearly unbelievable need of the human mind to "connect" separate events into a whole. We need to be ever vigilant of that. Sometimes separate events really are separate events. You correctly have identified some things in common. (CYA, trying to save $$$, saving face due to incompetence). There simply is no master henchman out there, no Dr. Evil, no one who communicates with election officials across the nation to effect a conspiracy.
In my 4 years in elections, no one at ANY LEVEL of government higher than my county EVER ONCE suggested I do anything in any particular way. Karl Rove never called. An RNCC lawyer once visited me to inform me of his plans to challenge the credentials of Democratic voters in the 2002 Congresional race in PA-17 (Holden v. Gekas), and I threw his sorry *ss out of my office, and notified the press. I was quoted on Democratic Underground as some kind of folk hero. Do the research on DU. Many of you know it well. Heck, I think you can find it merely by Googling my name.
In 2004, I had to smack the "left" around because they were committing massive registration fraud in my area. I played it down the middle no matter what.
No one from Washington ever contacts counties, and even when we ask the state for guidance they usually refuse to give any. That's just the way it is, believe it or not. |
Hamilton Richards
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hamrichards
Post Number: 6
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 - 1:22 pm: |
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Kurt: It is important to remember that in Ham's system, no software participates in counting, so it doesn't matter who does the programming. If all it does is make ballots, the programming could be done by Lucifer himself.
Indeed.
Kathleen: I agree. However, he hasn't answered my questions regarding the thousands of programmers offering suggested changes to the software by clarifying who those experts will be. How will they decide whether or not to implement these changes or not and on what basis. Even if the software should prove to be benign, that may not be the case once the software is inside another vendor's hardware. According to Harri Hursti, open source software can be overriden through the hardware. This possibility hasn't been appropriately addressed and could very well lead to the same problems we are facing now with voting systems. So, caution is very much in order.
Kathleen, you're right that I haven't answered your "questions regarding the thousands of programmers offering suggested changes to the software", because it doesn't matter. If you think it does matter, I think the ball is in your court: If that software does not count any votes, but merely prints a ballot for the voter to inspect and then cast or not cast, why does it matter who writes the software?
Harri Hursti demonstrated a particular hack on a particular machine. He never claimed to demonstrate that all e-voting stations are similarly vulnerable.
Even if someone hacks the open-source software installed in a ballot-printing station, what could happen? The printed ballot might come out wrong. So the voter inspects it, rejects it, and votes again. About the worst that could happen would be a denial-of-service attack, in which so many voting stations were brought down that the election would grind to a halt. That's a far cry from the undetected theft of elections that's the greatest threat, and it would trigger an investigation which might well reveal the identity of the perpetrators. For them, the risk is large, and the gain small.
Kathleen: Open source software on its face sounds like a great idea. Everyone thinks they will be able to see exactly how the software is working. However, based on Mr. Hursti's observations, I'm not willing to welcome it with open arms just yet. This is why citizen oversight is so very important. We keep the technologist from making the same mistakes again and again.
It's not the case that "Everyone thinks they will be able to see exactly how the software is working," and that's not the reason I advocate open source. Everyone who understands software knows that determining exactly how a piece of software will work in all possible circumstances is impossible. That's why the system I'm advocating prints paper ballots, and its voting station does no counting.
Open-source software may boost the confidence of folks who believe what Kathleen says everyone thinks, but the reason I advocate it is that it would release election officials from the stranglehold in which the vendors have caught them. Even if open-source is no better than proprietary software, if it's running on commodity PCs the customers can switch vendors far more easily. That would tend to keep the vendors honest.
Nevertheless, I think open-source software, while not perfect, would be far better than the dreck that the vendors have foisted onto the poor unsophisticated election officials. The proprietary e-voting software that's been exposed to public view is reportedly really bad. It's hard to imagine that the vendors' claims to concern about their intellectual property have any merit-- more likely they just want to avoid embarrassment (and in Diebold's case are too incompetent even to manage that!).
Linda: I think Kurt is talking about compartmentalization.
The use of technology to produce the ballots is separate from the voting/tabulation systems, as it should be.
Well put. We've got a big problem on our hands, and like many big problems, this one can be broken down into separate problems which can be solved separately. No doubt much of the confusion afflicting the vote-reform movement could be ameliorated by a proper separation of concerns.
Cheers,
--Ham
(Message edited by HamRichards on April 25, 2006) |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 519
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 - 1:33 pm: |
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There is also the well documented tendency for people to think that their experiences must be similar to other people who do the same work, or have the same interests, etc. up to the point that because something did/didn't happen to them in their pursuit of that work, or interest, it must have/not have happened to anyone else who has that pursuit, or interest.
Just because something did or didn't happen to you, Mr. Bellman, it doesn't mean it couldn't have happened or didn't happen in other places to other people.
Oddly, it's well documented that Mr. Blackwell forced his guidance down the throat of many elections officials in Ohio; do you doubt that happened (it's been the subject of lawsuits)? |
Kathleen Wynne
Moderator
Username: Admin_ii
Post Number: 263
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 - 8:29 pm: |
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Ham,
you stated:
"Harri Hursti demonstrated a particular hack on a particular machine. He never claimed to demonstrate that all e-voting stations are similarly vulnerable.
Even if someone hacks the open-source software installed in a ballot-printing station, what could happen? The printed ballot might come out wrong. So the voter inspects it, rejects it, and votes again. About the worst that could happen would be a denial-of-service attack, in which so many voting stations were brought down that the election would grind to a halt. That's a far cry from the undetected theft of elections that's the greatest threat, and it would trigger an investigation which might well reveal the identity of the perpetrators. For them, the risk is large, and the gain small."
Ham, as I said above, the devil is in the details. While it is true Harri Hursti did not declare all voting systems similarly vulnerable, that doesn't mean we shouldn't independently test all voting systems just to make sure, don't you think? By virtue of the testimony given by the testing labs before the California Senate Hearing -- it stands to reason that we should call into question all systems that have been recommended for certification by these labs to have similar problems.
Also, unless and until it is explained to me who will be overseeing and deciding on which changes offered by these thousands of programmers will be made to the software you speak of, as well as what role citizens will play in that process, I cannot just accept your explanation on blind faith alone. If it's a simple process, then it should be easy to explain.
you stated:
"Well put. We've got a big problem on our hands, and like many big problems, this one can be broken down into separate}} problems which can be solved separately. No doubt much of the confusion afflicting the vote-reform movement could be ameliorated by a proper separation of concerns."
I respectfully disagree with you that there is "confusion afflicting the vote-reform movement". On the contrary. I think the confusion lies within the technically-inclined who continue to insist on using the same protocol that was used by the voting machine testing labs. This kind of thinking is the cause for all of the problems we are now facing in figuring out a solution to rid ourselves of these flawed voting systems. As I'm sure you are aware, the testing labs themselves "compartmentalized" the manner in which they tested these voting systems. One lab tested the hardware and firmware, while the other tested the software. They never tested the system in its whole form. How is this protocol for testing a voting system scientificly sound? I can't imagine using a similar protocol with the open source software for printing ballots either. At some point, this software will have to interact with the hardware from which it functions. I want to know what the result of that interaction will be and whether there will be unforseen problems detected before taxpayer dollars are spent and the software is put into use. This reasoning doesn't sound confused to me.
Actually, I think the same logic of demanding citizen oversight in every phase of the voting process is based on the same reasoning which was used in deciding citizens should sit on juries instead of judges and lawyers; or that the President is the Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces, instead of it being a general. Citizen oversight maintains that one's vision is not clouded by a tunnel vision of thought. No disrespect for the experts is intended. Just a healthy respect for a clarity of thought that can only come from a more objective vantage point.
Kathleen
(Message edited by admin_ii on April 25, 2006)
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
TRIPLE PROTECTION FOR ELECTION 2006 - STARTING NOW:
(1) Use Freedom of Information, public records requests ("All American Paper Chase")
(2) Try Dumpster Diving for Democracy
(3) Candid America Project - Don't leave home without your camcorder
HOW TO DO IT: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/6/6.html
|
V. Kurt Bellman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 97
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - 8:42 am: |
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Brant,
A quote:
"Just because something did or didn't happen to you, Mr. Bellman, it doesn't mean it couldn't have happened or didn't happen in other places to other people.
Oddly, it's well documented that Mr. Blackwell forced his guidance down the throat of many elections officials in Ohio; do you doubt that happened (it's been the subject of lawsuits)?"
Let me take them in reverse order. No, I do not doubt the Blackwell stories, and I am horrified by them as well. They spring from two sources, I believe. In Ohio, the Secretary of State has too much power, IMHO. I know there are more states where the chief state election official has considerable authority over the local jurisdictions than not. That has some advantages for uniformity in elections. However, when juxtaposed with the fact that the Ohio SoS is an intensively political animal (comes from electing them - see Florida & California, too), that power is poorly placed.
My state has its share of idiocy in elections, but we got SoS, or as we call it Secretary of the Commonwealth, right. He or she (we've had both lately) is appointed by the Governor. Now of course, political appointees can be ALMOST as bad as elected folks when it comes to party shenanigans, but our Governors have endeavored to usually NOT pick hacks (Governors of both parties) because they know how unseemly partisanship in election admin can be.
Pedro Cortes (our Sec.) is of the opposite party I am. He was instrumental in Rendell's becoming Governor, before he was Sec. of the Comm. And Mr. Cortes does have ideological "leanings" that differ from mine. But I would trust Pedro Cortes with my life, if the need arose. He is a straight shooter and as classy an act as I've encountered at any level of government. Yeah, he reuses "buzz phrases" to the point of distraction, but he is what Diogenes never found while wearing his barrel, an honest man.
One of the problems we've had in PA under HAVA is that the Secretary is required to certify certain things to the EAC which he has no power to enforce. Our state constitution squarely requires almost all authority in elections(certainly all substantive decision making) to be in the hands of the counties, even in feral elections. Our Secretary can (and has) made "demands" of counties, and some counties have essentially told him or her to go "pound sand". Our electoral sovereignty is SQUARELY in county hands in PA. That frequently frustrates HAVA compliance, and the desires of national advocacy groups (they have to learn and lobby 67 county BOE's, not one state).
Now for your first point, that just because pressure wasn't put on me from "on high" doesn't mean it didn't happen elsewhere. I think we've covered that from the state level above. Now that leaves Washington. I ran the elections office in one of the largest swing counties in PA, one of the largest swing states in 2004. Only Florida was a larger swing state, and most counties larger than mine were going to be runaways for either Bush (e.g. Lancaster) or Kerry (e.g. Philadelphia). If Rove and Company were not going to try to influence me (same party), then who?
Maybe they knew better. Maybe they knew I don't play "team ball". Maybe they knew I'd rat them out. Maybe they asked by buddy who is the county GOP chair. Maybe.
Or maybe they used, as some have suggested, PA as a "rope-a-dope" state, that they never expected to win at all, but to trick Kerry into dumping too many resources here,
I can't believe these guys were THAT smart, although PA never looked like a swing state to those of us in elections. Most county E.D.'s here quite expected a Kerry win, and it happened, even though about 55 of our 67 counties are run by Republicans.
Or maybe, just maybe, Bush's people knew that it REALLY IS who votes that counts, not who counts the votes. Heck, they got the Amish to vote in huge numbers, something many of them never did before in their whole lives. And because of what? Gay issues and other religious themes. That was the reason Bush's numbers improved in PA, although he still lost. Fundamentalists (the Amish are a sort) came out in HUGE numbers and voted for Bush. I think a close study of Ohio will reveal the same. The Amish are there too. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 523
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 4:45 am: |
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It seems to me that you keep trying to hint at the idea that Ohio was honestly counted and that that Bush rode 'heartstring issues' to a win there. How do you account for the indictments, evidence of punched card rotation and other evidence that is continuing to come out of Ohio?
This election was fixed. I'm not saying that there was one unique guiding hand behind it, but if you fix an election, the only reason to do that is if the people who fixed it stand to be among the beneficiaries of the results.
Look on the freepress.org site and see how many precincts topped 80% turnout in Warren County. 76%. Now, how often do precincts manage 80% turnout. 80% turnouts just don't happen. The low 70's were an unheard-of turnout. I can't remember hearing of turnout anywhere near 80% ever before, actually. And another 15-20% of the population didn't suddenly turn out be fundamentalists that didn't ever vote before in Ohio, either.
No, Kurt, if you look at this open-mindedly, it just doesn't pass the smell test. It's no accident that the current federal US administration believes that exit polls work everywhere but here. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 105
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 7:31 am: |
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Brant,
Yes, I do believe that Ohio was COUNTED "honestly". That is NOT to say it was counted "correctly", or that the recount procedures were followed correctly, or even that there was not a "gaming of the system" to avoid doing the more comprehensive recount in some places. I believe all that happened.
That does NOT change the fact that Bush won Ohio legitimately, if not precisely accurately down to the last vote (no state EVER accomplishes that).
I'm sorry if that belief offends you. But the people who believe as I do INCLUDES the candidate, Mr. Kerry himself.
Mr. Lamb, I'll admit to you that 80% turnouts are the exception rather than the norm, but my county had a few of them also in 2004. My entire county turned out at about 70%, and that is 70% realizing how inflated the voter rolls are since NVRA. The turnout in many areas of people who actually still lived there probably approached 95% in some areas.
Incidentally, Pennsylvania was just as close by percentage as Ohio was. Why don't you suspect Kerry's win in Pennsylvania? Maybe you should. After all, Kerry won huge where electronic voting machines were used and lost big where there were paper ballots. OOOOOH! Republicans in PA had to, on average, endure FAR FAR longer lines than Democrats did. OOOOOH! Where's the stinking investigation in PA, Mr. Lamb??? Hmmm? |
Mike Myhre
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mike_myhre
Post Number: 25
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 8:46 am: |
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On the subject of Computers in voting:
Computers are a wonderful tool when used properly. They can however, very easily be "re-tasked" to accomplish a new goal. Since the software goes on behind the scenes, we can only witness external events (display, printer, votes, etc.) to confirm they are doing what we think they should. A good hack will not show any change on these external events except for the change in vote (if that is the hack).
Open source solves some problems and adds others. It does not verify the source code you reviewed is the one actually used in the election however. The benefits of open source is that it is the ultimate design review. Many holes or potential hacks can be fixed because of the number of eyes involved in reviewing the software for problems. The problem that open source adds is it lets everyone know what is going on in the program and makes it easier for a potential hacker to exploit a vulnerability (one they wouldn't have known about if the software wasn't open source).
The problem with computers in voting is:
1) The voter enters information into the computer but doesn't see the result.
2) The elections department only gets to see the results.
3) The election machine manufacturer is the only one who gets to see the source code.
For this reason, many are nervous to let anyone touch an electronic voting machine in any way because it could be the action that "re-tasks" the machine. The solution for this is to close the loop. Let the voter be able to verify the vote at the other end and keep logs at different points along the way. When things "don't add up", you would be able to find out what link along the way was broken and correct the problem.
On the issue of Ohio:
Kurt, How do you account for the tech that took the hard disk and posted a cheat sheet of what counts they should get after finding out what the random recount precincts would be? What about the GAO report? What basis do you have for saying it was counted honestly? Are you letting 'belief' trump the facts available? If you have facts about a tampered Pennsylvania election, let's here them. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 106
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 10:05 am: |
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Mike,
I have read, at the urging of people here, the ENTIRE GAO report. Nowhere does it even SUGGEST that Ohio was stolen, and anyone's characterization that it does say or suggest that is a blatant lie.
The GAO report correctly identifies problems, vulnerabilities, even illegalities in process. It is a phenomenally well written piece and I can see almost nothing substantive in it with which I disagree.
But where I disagree is with the last leap many here are taking. The "Aha!" moment just is not in that report.
The hard drive and cheat sheet are likely crimes and should be treated as such, but the motives are so many more, and more compelliing for other reasons than to materially affect the outcome of the vote.
As an election director, I was pressured to do a good many things by my bosses that did not pass the smell test, most of them to save money. Never ever did anyone suggest I do anything untoward to affect an electoral outcome. I do not believe it happens. The stakes and penalties are too high. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 524
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 28, 2006 - 6:11 am: |
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You have obviously not kept up with news releases, Mr. Bellman; Mr. Kerry has been quoted in the news about a month ago to say that Ohio wasn't counted correctly. You also seem to be ignoring the indictments that have come out of Ohio, as well as admissions of pre-selection of precincts to recount that included even sorting the votes from the precinct prior to when a precinct was even supposed to be selected. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 114
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 28, 2006 - 7:17 am: |
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Wow Brant,
Please read carefully.
I never said Ohio was "counted correctly". It wasn't. Neither was any other state or the District of Columbia. "Correctly" does not exist in elections. I agree with Kerry. But Ohio was DECIDED correctly. The slate of electors with the most votes was sent to Columbus to cast their electoral votes. If Kerry doubted that, he would have pressed on.
And no, I am not ignoring the indictments, pre-selection of precincts, or even the sorting of the votes. It is more likely than not that those things happened, and no, I don't SUSPECT that Michael Wu is blameless in that, but he hasn't yet even been indicted, so we'll wait and see. His staffers have been indicted. Those investigations and trials should be concluded. None of that casts doubt that Bush won Ohio! Why don't you get that?????!!!!
It means a stinking county election office that didn't have the time or money to do what the law required cheated on the procedural matters.
I'm going to lay it on the line for you, Brant. Hundreds of local election jurisdictions "cheat" on process matters all the bloody time. Shortcuts are taken that shouldn't be, and counties even lie about what they've done and then have their Solicitors lie to judges to cover up what the election office has done. It happens in Pennsylvania. It happens everywhere. It happened in the county to my north in the Primary in 2004. They made an illegal ballot for National Convention Delegate (they're directly elected here), lied about it, and then their lawyers lied to the Secretary of the Commonwealth about it. I got in trouble from MY county for pointing it out!! Their illegal act was done to give their home county candidates an edge over those from neighboring counties, but it didn't work, because 2 of their 3 candidates lost anyway, and the one that did win would have won without the gambit, and everyone knew it.
The point is there is "process cheating" and there is "electoral result" cheating. In a REALLY REALLY close election, process cheating can morph into electoral cheating. Ohio was NOT REALLY REALLY close. A 2% margin is NOT a close election.
The process cheaters should and will be prosecuted in Ohio, and I think someone in the lower echelon in Cuyahoga ought to be given immunity so they can see how far up the food chain the cheat goes.
But for you or anyone else to suggest that this in any way proves Ohio was "STOLEN" is similar to childhood ignorance and naivete. The conclusion simply does not follow from the facts we know, once we fully know them.
I expect adults to not jump to unsupported conclusions. "Hey, Cuyahoga cheated on the recount and audit process, therefore the fix was in and Kerry actually won." Come on, man! Get a clue. That's infantile ranting, not logic. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 115
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, April 28, 2006 - 8:24 am: |
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Brant,
More examples:
When I was in elections, I stood next to my Solicitor once while she lied her butt off in open court to the Election Day judge. Just flat out lied. She could have been disbarred for it. I didn't speak up because it would have been her word against mine and she's the lawyer.
In a federal civil rights case, my county stipulated to things in pleadings that simply were not true and did not happen. And that was before a federal judge in a civil rights case brought by the Justice Department! They didn't want to spend the money for the lawyer to correct the pleading.
I signed certifications of things regarding voter registration figures that I had no way to know if they were accurate or not, because the state SURE software was so buggy, I didn't trust it. I had no choice.
In 2004, I had reason to believe that that same software had "discarded" or "lost" about 100 absentee ballot labels, but I had no way to prove it until after the election. Then, I was able to prove it to my satisfaction, because several consecutive pages of absentee ballots on a list report were never returned.
You see, processes are fallible. So are people. Sometimes people lie. Sometimes people certify things they cannot possibly know. Welcome to the world of elections. It doesn't mean losers win and winners lose. It means that not everything gets done correctly to the letter. |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 525
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 - 12:52 pm: |
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Apparently you haven't gone to freepress.org and read Bob Fitrakis' investigative reporting on this. He's looked into it for 2 years and says that the election was rigged for Bush, and that if the fix wasn't in Bush wouldn't have won. Funny how Blackwell resisted the recounts tooth and nail, isn't it? Funny, how even the major Ohio papers noted a bunch of that. Even to the point of doing things that were illegal, like having poll books pulled right out of recounters' hands, on his orders? Try reading Conyers' report.
Also, your statement, and I quote: "Come on, man! Get a clue. That's infantile ranting, not logic."
is especially rude, if you can't be polite, at least keep it to yourself.
As to your idea that any or all these people can make a variety of unknown errors or deliberate mistakes and then the election comes out fine, I think you've just displayed your own version of something that's completely illogical. You don't know what it means, because with no one owning up to it, you have no idea what's been done, or hasn't. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 127
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 - 1:25 pm: |
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Brant,
Sorry, but freepress.org and even John Conyers (maybe even ESPECIALLY John Conyers) have absolutely no credibility whatsover in my mind. Maybe less than zero. If those sources told me the sun rose in the east and set in the west, I'd need to wait for the next sunny day and check it myself.
Sorry, that's just the way I feel about those sources.
Kurt |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 128
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 - 1:40 pm: |
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Brant,
...or to put it more succinctly, it'd be like a Conservative using Limbaugh as a source to convince you of something. It just ain't gonna happen, Brant. The source is too ideologically tainted. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 2254
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 - 2:11 pm: |
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Something I found interesting recently on the Freepress.org website was that they have scans of actual punch card ballots that show irrgularities.
Personally I don't think these errors in and of themself are proof of wrong election results, but they are certainly proof of certain kinds of errors in certain locations. It's a step forward that they are showing some physical evidence.
It's unfortunate that for many errors there's no way to prove the total damage and to prove the impact on election results. |
Pat Vesely
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Pat_vesely
Post Number: 294
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 - 2:26 pm: |
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Kurt, it's been said that "A mind is like a parachute, it only functions when open". It's also been said that, "Even a blind pig occasionally finds an acorn". I might as well go for broke and add, "You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own 'facts'".
You do yourself a disservice to summarily dismiss the thought of even looking at the facts because you have ideological differences with those who confront you with them. When a conservative confronts me with something that Rush Limbaugh says, I take the time to dig up the facts of the matter at hand and present them. We can then argue the facts and Rush, more often than not, looks foolish on his own merits. I don't even need to bring his name into the argument.
IMHO, One of the surest ways to tell who's losing an argument is to look for the one who discredits the messenger, rather than debate the facts. You might be surprised at where John Conyers gets many of the facts that he presents as evidence. His opinions on what those 'facts' represent are entirely his own. At least he took the time to examine all the facts before he formed his opinions.
Pat A. Vesely ;-) |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 528
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 4:41 am: |
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Thank you, Pat. I couldn't have said it better myself. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 129
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 5:07 am: |
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Catherine,
I've seen those images, and they present questions. I've seen similar images from Florida 2000, and they raise similar questions, on the other side. It's one of the reasons punchcards are a "target" of HAVA. (Not actually outlawed, but pretty close in practice.) Punchcards are especially susceptible to alteration, before or AFTER the counting is done. Do you remember the photos of dislodged chads on the floor in Florida?
As for the specific issues in Ohio, I have also seen numerous traditional paper ballots with only President voted, and no others. Remember, for absentee ballots my county uses traditional paper ballots hand counted at a central location AFTER they are counted at the precinct. I was on the three person board that had to examine all questionable ballots. You simply would not believe the number of people who vote in bizarre patterns. It's what allows me to dismiss all "aha" charges about undervoting. Undervoting is rampant. I've seen people take a Presidential year ballot and vote only for State Representative, but I've seen hundreds who vote only for President and nothing else.
I also know, from my counterparts in other counties, the ridiculous things that can come out of punchcards because people don't insert the card properly in the holder. At one conference, a speaker ran us through some typical errors and had us repeat them ourselves after his presentation. While all of us could "feel it" when we did something wrong with the punchcard, we could also see how someone less familiar with how a properly seated ballot card looks and feels could get it wrong.
I was on the Pennsylvania board that established the standards for what constitutes a legal vote on each voting device, so we studied it extensively.
Pat,
Unlike many many people here, I make it a practice to take with a "truckload of salt" all information posted on the blogosphere from highly ideological sources. It applies equally to the left and right. Until such information is corroborated by media sources that have an interest in quasi-neutrality, or traditional standards of journalistic integrity, they simply aren't worth my time. When their agenda drives their news, instead of the other way around, they simply are not credible. If I look around a site and see a blatant ideological bias that spans numerous issues, I dismiss it. You'd be wise to do likewise.
There used to be a standard in journalism that if you didn't have at least an effort of objectivity, you couldn't get published. The web changed all that, and not always for the better. Now we have a sort of "democracy of ideas" and any schmuck with a computer is all of a sudden a publisher. Well, that doesn't make them believable, and in my opinion, we'd all do a heck of a lot better to be dismissing as garbage about 80% of what's on all these extreme ideological sites. And if that means that I am at odds with 95% of the readers or posters to THIS SITE, then I'm okay with that. I have the first hand frontline experience in this field that they do not have, and I'll trust what I've seen and lived over what ANY 95% of people think. I'm sorry, I'm just that much of a contrary cuss. People used to call me the "Dr. House" of election administrators, and not without reason. Check out the TV series if you don't get the reference.
Besides, if we were to not hold our trusted sites to that standard, there first is too much out there to EVER read it all, and there is too much in direct conflict factually with each other.
No, I don't trust anything that comes out of Conyers' mouth, nor McKinney's, nor Kucinich's, nor DeLay's, nor Ron Paul's, nor any of about two dozen other ideological extremists in Congress. Their "word" is simply not trustworthy to me. They are too tied to an extreme ideological bias.
Kurt |
Bob Fleischer
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Rjf7r
Post Number: 62
Registered: 09-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 5:20 am: |
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After reading the above and some of the other recent threads on the BBV forums, it is obvious to me that results from whatever system is used will simply be accepted almost always.
I come away with two conclusions:
One, we must have the simplest and most open systems and procedures that are consistent with our principles. Secret software from private sources is as far as one can get from this.
Two, any auditing or other checking mechanism must be built into and inseparable from the initial procedures -- it must be impossible to certify an election that hasn't passed. Otherwise, it won't be done, won't be done well, or will be ignored.
Thus I agree that HB 550 is most dangerous. It doesn't take us towards either end. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 131
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 7:55 am: |
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Bob,
I agree with everything you just said, and it has the genius of not requiring a billion law and state constitution changes. But those goals are DIFFICULT, but NOT impossible, to achieve without abridging ballot secrecy, so choices of method need to be made carefully. Some of the more radical ideas I've read on here take a bad situation and make it worse, by fixing one problem but creating myriad others.
Look, we all have principles we are not willing to compromise on, and others that we can see bargaining on. The hard core inviolable for me is ballot secrecy. And that means not only do you not get to see my votes, you don't get to have a system where you can PROVE your vote to anyone else, either. I am not willing to live in a world where vote buying and selling is possible. I just won't do it as a starting principle. It's bad enough I have to live in a world where the elected officials do it routinely, I can't tolerate it at the public election level. All apologies to Lynn Landes' latest position. That's simply not an acceptable world to me.
Now, if we can devise a system ABSOLUTELY immune from vote buying or selling, or coercion, and also give everyone their open process (free of secret counting) and a fully auditable and checkable system, then we can talk rationally.
Me? Personally? If the price I have to pay is I have to give up ballot secrecy and a coercion-free system, I'll cast my lot with private secret software every stinkin' time. It's that important to me.
I lived almost all my life in a place where whether you could even do business was tied in with being in one political party. I was in the other party. Secret ballots, and a system that doesn't allow proving my vote, are worth dying for, in my book.
Kurt |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 530
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 10:57 am: |
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You've said specifically 'a system that doesn't allow proving my vote'. That's a very curious turn of phrase. You didn't say 'someone else proving my vote' or the vote being traceable to you, you make it sound as though you're against your own ability to prove your vote in any and every case. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 135
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 11:36 am: |
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Brant,
The problem is simply this: if I can prove my vote to another person, so can everybody else, or am I missing something? If person "A" can "prove" his vote to some other person "X", then that opens the vote buying, selling, and coercion industry wide. I've seen that industry work. It bites. It is an EVIL thing.
What I don't have a problem with is if I can prove MY vote to ME, but the only thing that I can use to prove it to person "X" is my "say so", then I have no problem with that at all. That much we have today. My "word" is all I have to convince good ol' person "X", and that's all I ever want to see anyone have.
A system that lets me verify my vote through some code that only I have and I can't show that code to anyone else, that's okay with me. Otherwise, no.
Kurt |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 531
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 1:54 pm: |
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You don't have 'that much' today, it isn't in use anywhere. What in the world are you talking about? |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 144
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 - 2:16 pm: |
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Brant,
Right now I can tell anyone I want to how I voted. If I witness a hand count of my precinct's absentee ballots, I can at any time say, "Yup. That's mine." That's what I have today.
We have a system where we can tell anyone anything about how we voted, but we can never prove it with documentation.
I want it kept that way.
If that means that we have a system where I KNOW my ballot word or code or number, but I have no stub or ANYTHING to show to a third party to prove which ballot is mine, I'm okay with that.
As soon as that proof or documentation is added to the system, I'm signing off. Not acceptable.
Kurt |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 533
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - 4:50 am: |
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You don't have this for everyone, it isn't physically possible to have everyone who voted within sight distance to see that they counted their ballot. If you try to do this in front of all the actual people that voted you would have hours of people shuffling to the front of the standing crowd to view their ballot as you read it, or get close enough to hear you call it out. And anything that you do to project this is calling for trusting people that you have no good reason to trust. You don't have this now for everyone, you just don't. If you can't see that, you're ignoring the physical limitations of human sight and hearing. Plus, if it's wrong you're just screwed. |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 153
Registered: 04-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - 7:15 am: |
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Brant,
I grant that all you just said is correct.
I'm just saying that I have the ability to tell anyone I want anything about my votes, or not, as I choose. Even my wife has no way to know for sure how I voted. I tell her, but she has no particular reason to believe me.
Kurt |
Jonathan
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Pvilla
Post Number: 1
Registered: 05-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 15, 2006 - 5:29 pm: |
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Follow the Money!
Did it ever occur to anyone that there is not one slot machine in the entire state of Nevada that doesn't have a fully auditable paper trail? Did it also not occur to anyone that there is not one ATM machine in use that is also not fully auditable? Yet, somehow, they can't make a Voting Machine that's immune to fraud? Or are they just playing you for stupid?
I understand the need to address the Butterfly ballot issue; its entire design is flawed and quite easily susceptible to voter error or fraud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Butterfly_large.jpg ).
But it is the Butterfly ballot that is flawed, not the methodology. And by simply replacing paper ballots with hacker friendly Diebold machines, you comprise the integrity of Democracy itself.
The best electronic voting machine is the one used at my poll, which reads the hash mark on my paper ballot as I insert my Constitution Rights into its OCR scanner. You get a tally that can be collected and a paper trail that can be verified. Wow. It’s that simple. No, really, it is!!
Or maybe you prefer given away $100 MILLION+ contracts to unscrupulous contactors who are working with the same unscrupulous politicians?
Or maybe you’d rather live in a world were Trans-National Corporations make all the rules and you just except it as “the way it is”
Oh America, you're being played like a two dollar fiddle... and the embarrassing part? It’s not even that hard. |
Pat Vesely
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Pat_vesely
Post Number: 319
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, May 15, 2006 - 5:52 pm: |
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Hi Jonathan! welcome to Black Box Voting.org. I'm not sure who in particular you are addressing but if you scan through the site you'll find that the people who post here cover a wide array of election related topics. Try not to judge this site and what we do here from any single thread.
Personally I believe that electronic voting machines could be made secure enough to give preliminary results, but I also firmly believe that only a hand count of all ballots should ever be used as a certified result for an election.
Pat A. Vesely ;-) |
Jonathan
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Pvilla
Post Number: 2
Registered: 05-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 - 2:46 am: |
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Hi, Pat, thanks for the welcome. I guess I was addressing the "void," as I replied on impulse. But yes, I agree with regard to the hard copy being what is legally binding.
Anyone can write a program to do anything, pending hardware specifications (you could not, e.g., instruct the hardware in a Coke machine to navigate the Space Shuttle). But given a connection to the OS, be it physical or via a network connection, and that is a system that can be compromised. Network Security 101; a safe computer is one that is not turned on.
I believe an electronic machine can be part of the process. As I mentioned above, in Wisconsin, we are given a paper card ballot with a "hash-mark" space next to each name for each elected position. You place you mark next to whom you wish to vote, and then take your card and insert it into the "voting machine." You now have a hard copy, which is LEGALLY BINDING, and an electronic count, which you can use for polling.
Now I've been programming computers for close to twenty years. But common sense should tell you that any Electronic Voting Machine that does not read a paper copy first is one that can be compromised. Every single electronic pulse from a Diebold "touch screen" is a data packet that can be intercepted and re-coded. Any paper trail that comes after that is moot and should be considered "highly suspect."
But what astonishes me most of all, is that we even need to have this conversation. I guess Thomas Paine was right when he argued "common sense is not very common." Well, let me be incendiary myself; do you, America, actually believe there is a difference between Republicans or Democrats (besides the rhetoric!) ? There are many a time when both parties engage in activities that the Common Man/Woman should step back and say to themselves, "wait a minute, that's not right., somethings wrong here." The rapid deployment of unproven, hackable, and very unaccountable electronic voting machines into a clement still scorned by the 2000 Presidential Election is one of those moments. No mater what you believe about that election, the Rational American would agree quite strongly that MORE accountability is demanded , NOT LESS. Why on Earth would you try to make something as important as voting LESS accountable, unless you were trying to subvert the very Laws you swore to protect?
And, pardon my jest, but these Diebold machines are running Windows CE? So I am supposed to intrust the integrity of our Republic to an OS more exploitable than a Developing Country trying to close a loan with the World Bank? How stupid do you think We The People are? (sorry, that's a rhetorical question; that wagers too hot for me..)
Well, I digress.. but my god, America, you've been hitting the snooze button for five years.. WAKE UP! |
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