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| (CT) 9/08 - State: Feb 08 UCONN Post ... |
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christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 941
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 - 10:40 am: | 
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I had not seen this report, though it apparently has been out since July.
http://voter.engr.uconn.edu/voter/Reports_files/audit08-b1.pdf
The memory card failure rate was 4.8% (e.g. junk data present), and there were several unexplained instances of duplicated cards (Monroe and New Milford were the towns). Shvartsman tried to get both the master and duplicated cards back, but was unable to get the duplicate card from Monroe. Shvartsman recommends a logging system for card duplication and says he is unaware of any reason they should be duplicated.
CT SOTS is long overdue in issuing a report on the post February 2008 election audit.
Some of the cards were in "Results Print Aborted" mode, suggesting that they were shut down before the printing of the full tape was done.
The report also contains a brief description of the setup of the AVOS 196.6 including an explanation of how GEMS is used on that computer.
That such a report can be generated and recommendations made that are never }required to be implemented is one of the shortcomings of our audit system. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 9630
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 - 9:54 pm: |
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See information that precedes this post, contributed by Connecticut citizen Christine Reid.
Impact on 2008 Election - Affects 2008 Diebold/Premier-counted elections in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut, demonstrates systemic failures in memory card integrity and chain of custody procedures.
See also: Missing Connecticut Audit Report - http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/134/77988.html
And 30 percent missing, incorrect, or unusable data in CT Audit Report ("What are we paying for?"):
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/134/78011.html
What you can do about it:
BEFORE THE ELECTION
1) Push for immediate implementation of the Humboldt County, California "Transparency Project"
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/76827.html
for November 2008 in the five states mentioned above; all memory cards in above states are programmed by a single vendor, LHS Associates.
2) Seek citizen inspections and full freedom of information access to all election-related records from LHS Associates, located in Methuen, Massachusetts. LHS election sales director and a key person on the LHS management team is Ken Hajjar, a convicted narcotics trafficker.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/71236.html
3) In the weeks before the election: Computer guys: Set up your own time-slice results auditing system using the Web Snapshot strategies found in the Black Box Voting Tool Kit 2008, page 48 (pg 24 in PDF browser).
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf
Internet searchers: Find and post links to the all live results-reporting sites for Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont. These are needed for the computer folks doing the Web Snapshot actions. Post the links in the appropriate geographic section of the Black Box Voting Forums. First preference to government sites, if/when you don't find those, locate media sites.
4) APPLY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CONNECTICUT AUDITS, and tell the truth about missing checks and balances
DURING THE ELECTION Observe and report memory card substitutions, voting machine substitutions, election-day service calls, and any presence of convicted narcotics trafficker/LHS sales team Kenneth Hajjar in any polling place or local elections office.
ELECTION NIGHT: Computer guys: Capture Web snapshot information, save it into databases (MS Access or Filemaker or other large-capacity database; it will max out Excel spreadsheets). SAVE the information for at least 90 days. Upload the information in text delimited form here at Black Box Voting - find appropriate state and location, use "upload" feature when posting a message as a registered user.
AFTER THE ELECTION Hopefully you have pre-arranged it, so you can PARTICIPATE in any audits for any state using LHS Associates to program the memory cards.
PUSH TO BAN THE COUNTING OF VOTES IN SECRET through meaningful reforms which provide truly public controls. Eliminate all forms of "Trust Me" elections. |
christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 943
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 - 6:44 am: |
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I want to put this even further into perspective. Earlier this summer I tried to FOIA the "memorandum of understanding" between UCONN/Shvartsman and SOTS, and I was sent a MS Word document with no signatures. I wrote back and said, "This is a draft; may I please have a copy of the final, dated, executed document?"
Well, it turns out that there was no 2008 signed agreement and that, in mid-summer, SOTS/UCONN were still talking about what the agreement should contain. I think that in the last three years, there was only one agreement with signatures on it, (maybe 2006?) and the signature was on the UCONN side - SOTS had not signed. What was unbelievable in and of itself was that their agreements seemed not in order -- took awhile to even get an answer on this (visions of piles of unfiled paper?? speculation.) It is my understanding that Susan Bysiewicz then signed the document without a date, and I got a copy of that. I got that undertanding by asking a question and getting an emailed response to/from DSOTS Lesley Mara.
Basically, without a clearly delineated and contractual set of duties and work that the SOTS has specifically ontracted Shvartsman et al to provide, he imho essentially is serving at the pleasure of the SOTS and it would seem she can do whatever she wants with the information she gets, unless the legislature mandates aspects of his role and particular actions that SOTS must take in response to his findings.
Here he is pointing out a problem, but his job is not "crime lab" -- it is technical advice. He's gone about as far as he can in saying, "Um, there is no reason I can think of for duplicating cards..." It's forensic in nature, and yet not.
So here we have 1) a state university providing service to a state agency to identify technical problems with the cards, some of which at some point could even raise the question about possible illegal or uncontractual activity, but 2) the SOTS is the employer, not the State Election Enforcement Commission, thus 3) positioning SOTS between the expert and the impact of his advice and the enforcement arm, which might best use that advice, at such times when the information he is finding might be relevant to enforcement.
Thus, unless SEEC, ANOTHER state agency, reads his public report and decides there are some hints that require their investigation, or any citizen reads the report and files a notarized complaint with SEEC and requests investigation, there would appear no direct link between UCONN/Shvartsman's findings and enforcement of any kind, and I don't think there is a statutory requirement or structure saying that "if he finds a problem and recommends it be fixed, then fix it."
Procedures are described, but there is discretion involved. Maybe that is fine; it just seems loose to me.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, one of the risks is that UCONN also has no real basis for evaluation and cannot provide its own auditing oversight on the work of its center. UCONN, in not insisting on an executed and clear agreement that is within the bounds of the university's mission, thus permits to be created via an "undefined relationship" (contractually speaking, not actually, because Shvartsman provides valuable services ) a vague and blurry patina of responsibility around the SOTS and CT elections, since, after all, she hired a group of recognized experts. Seems to me that technical advice can be used to selectively enforce or selectively improve or change how things are done (or NOT), and such selectivity risks being, well, political in nature rather than professional.
I raise the point because there do not appear to be any true lines of authority or accountability to the PEOPLE of CT. Further, where does SEEC go for technical assistance when UCONN/Shvartsman are being paid by the SOTS? Shvartsman works for SOTS (which conceivably ultimately could be implicated in any given investigation) and thus would appear to have a conflict of interest in serving SEEC. It's too personality-based and not sufficiently "citizen servant" based for my tastes.
In practical terms, it is Shvartsman's job to report to SOTS. Then the bottleneck becomes SOTS if they do not do timely followup (I don't believe they have a staff that will understand the implications of Shvartsman's findings without coaching, for example).
What exactly is the promised end product and set of actions and timeline that citizens can examine and measure? It is not contractually established, these reports come out MONTHS after the elections, leaving little time for changes prior to the next election (sometimes even coming out AFTER the following election!), and we have proposed language for an agreement that is unsigned and thus would appear to me not to be able to be evaluated. If the SOTS decides NOT to ask UCONN to investigate e.g. machines that may have had problems or have been handled questionably in an election, something that should be a routine and regular and professional examination becomes an "at whim" use of a professional for the purpose of dealing with public confidence levels, not for getting our arms around the issues with the machines and people and increasing our true security levels.
I don't think I"m articulating my concerns very well, except to say that I don't think an unexecuted agreement serves the SOTS, UCONN, or the citizens of the state of CT. There are plent of ways to leave room for evolution of the job without the lack of signature, aren't there?. I believe the phrase is something like "and other duties as required".
I believe there may be some statutory language defining some of how SOTS and UCONN work together, and DSOTS Lesley Mara has told me that no contract or memorandum of understanding is necessary. I really don't see how you hold another state agency's feet to the fire (or keep your own agency on the straight and narrow) if there is no promise as to what they will do and when they will do it and how they will perform and what they will be paid and what will happen if they don't perform. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 5249
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 - 7:41 am: |
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Is it possible that Shvartsman may have a fully signed and dated copy of the agreement? It would seem to be in his interest.
It would be interesting to hear his perspective.
The existing structure (or lack thereof) seems to ensure that no enforcement is ever required, unless it is in the SOTS' interest to do so. In that case, the SOTS may pass on information and recommendations the the SEEC. |
christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 944
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 - 1:17 pm: |
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Not possible. I FOIA'd both UCONN and SOTS, and neither agency had a fully executed, dated copy of a current agreement. I was told by the DSOTS Lesley Mara that they don't need one. A Shvartsman told L Mara that he thought he had a signed copy - he didn't.
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christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 945
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 - 1:34 pm: |
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Coming back to the implications of the capability of duplicating cards. The duplication function, I'm told, is part of a set of advanced functions, which are passworded. If towns have the ability to duplicate cards and there is no control on the number they can make, they have the ability to create shadow election results. This strikes me as an exceedingly risky combination of capabilities -- the job of reporting results and the capability to falsify them.
Keep in mind that on a Connecticut AVOS results report tape, there is NO capability as far as I can tell (by asking others) to make a unique identifier such as a serial number imprint on the results tape. There was a 999 number on the tape which might indicate that one could program in a number, but this has its issues, as well. Nothing hardwires the printing of a unique card or machine identifier onto the card (I guess a machine identifier would have to balk if put into another machine....otherwise, it is misleading and meaningless)
In CT, the results tapes show the name of the town and the voting district number (aka precinct).
Thus, one could create counterfeit results tapes with no special info in a variety of ways.
Let's think about separation of duties here for a moment. When the person responsible for reporting the election results also has the capability to create duplicate cards, it seems to me we might have a conflict of duties that ought to be resolved.
What is the check and balance that prevents the person reporting results from actually falsifying them, to be blunt. If the head moderator files the report and then gives it to the registrar, there is some separation of duties. If not (if registrar files it), too much control by registrar's office imho.
These towns may have completely innocent reasons for these duplicated cards, but the loss of control of a duplicated card doesn't seem minor to me. |
Hugh W. Busey
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hbusey
Post Number: 7
Registered: 7-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 6:15 am: |
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Bev, Christine, Cathrine,
Thank you all for your thoughtful insights and concerns. As an interested Connecticut resident with an applicable technical background, I had found only a few media reports of machine and processing problems and those were largely the more sensational cases in other states. Thanks to you, I am now reading through a 2-3" stack of published reports, papers and suggestions by the State and UConn to more fully understand what the State's experience and corrective actions have been, what has been identified as potential and real weaknesses in our procedures and what might be done to correct them.
At the same time I have made contact with the SOTS's office offering my services as a friendly but concerned citizen with a desire to help make this a smooth and true presidential election. My goal is to constructively help identify and correct potential problems and procedures before they become serious post-election issues. I believe that a positive, cooperative and constructive approach will accomplish more at this point in time than a confrontational mode.
During the initial rush of election officials across the country to embrace a wide variety of technologies following the hanging-chads debacle, I posted a letter to our SOTS suggesting some aspects of these technologies to avoid for reasons of human interfacing and potential reliability issues, including a lack of paper audit trails. I also thought that having the responsible election officials develop a relationship with UConn as a broad based technical adviser was certainly an appropriate action.
I have now heard back from Ms. Bysiewicz with answers to my earlier comments and concerns. She was also kind enough to introduce me to Prof. Alex Shvartzman, the lead at the UCONN VoTeR Center. I will try to capsulize your concerns, add some of my own, and help identify actions that might be taken for the Nov. '08 and future elections. I must again thank you for your inputs. They have been very useful and informative. I'll keep in touch.
Hugh W. Busey
Consulting Engineer |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 5257
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 6:28 am: |
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I trust you are taking a look at the formal audit results. Christine Reid has quite a number of insightful posts about it (and about other questions relating to CT elections).
You might want to have a look at all her posts, if you haven't already. |
Hugh W. Busey
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hbusey
Post Number: 8
Registered: 7-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 7:06 am: |
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Cathrine,
Yes indeed. It was this thread in particular that I was responding to. I have read Alex Shvartsman's audit reports and noted that he recognized the programming vendor's reject rate of 4.8% due to having data written in supposedly "ready for election" memory cards, as requiring follow up. We will discuss this from several perspectives. 'nuff said for now.
I have also made note of the lack of state issued reports on the Feb. audits. UConn's report concerns only the Memory Cards and does not address other process issues, training, machine and memory card security, etc. Secretary Bysiewicz did mention them in her response letter to me but has left the door open for further discussion. I will suggest to her that this and other materials should be placed in the public domain for reassurance of the voters as well as watchdogs groups. I have other suggestions, near and long term, to discuss with her as well.
Hugh |
christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 947
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 5:05 pm: |
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Hugh,
As a CT citizen, thanks for your interest and thanks for your activism. There are several groups that rather quietly go about their efforts to become familiar with the issues and weigh in on/attempt to change problematic areas or shift the vision to something more accountable, visible, and secure.
You may also like to contact ctvoterscount.org and visit/peruse their website. They put out the post election audit reports of citizen observations, and while i have pointed out to them the value of "naming names" of towns with issues (they present a composite picture so far of problems), it is the best one-stop summary of the kinds of process issues that are showing up in the audits we had a chance to attend and observe as citizens. Lu Weeks, who heads that organization, will also be responsive to your emailed or posted questions. He has a math and computer science background, and is primarily focused on the technical aspects of the process.
Another great source of reports/on-the-ground information would be the GAE Committee page in the general assembly website. There are two sources within the GAE of relevant documents: submitted testimony and transcripts of in-person appearances. The GAE held citizen hearings around the state in Feb or so of 2008, and regular citizens, election officials, and organized activists all provided some testimony.
There has been what is in my opinion a disappointing level of results in terms of changing election statutes in CT including a swiss cheesy, weak audit law (that Susan B likes to tout as "one of the strongest in the nation" -- be very, very worried!), but I did think that the GAE committee worked harder to come to some understanding of the technical and process issues around the change to electronic voting.
As Catherine has pointed out, I have attempted to log into this site many of my own explorations of issues for CT so that other CT citizens can get a leg up on what others have researched and discovered, so hope that some of it is of interest to you.
To see how the audit is toothless, I suggest searching for threads related to the presidential primary in February 2008, and the subsequent Bridgeport, CT post-election audit (or: NOT so much of an audit, but that is what it was called). |
christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 1004
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 4:33 am: |
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UPDATE: I received a copy last night of an executed 2008-2009 Memorandum of Understanding from CT SOTS today, signed by the DSOTS Lesley Mara on 7/31/08 and signed by UCONN on 9/4/08. As noted above, I said that as of midsummer there was no agreement.
This marks the first year out of the last three in which a fully executed MOU was completed during the calendar year. 8+ months into the calendar year. I actually do not know if the state is on a fiscal year that makes this less of an "eye off the ball" than it appears.
While the document points to general activities that Shvartsman et al will perform on behalf of the SOTS, the MOU does not identify timetables or performance specifics for the work done by UCONN, but then, since timeline specifics for the post-audit escalation are not included in the audit legislation, unless the public outcry is sufficient that the legislature puts some parameters around SOTS and UCONN so that the reports developed by Shvartsman and team actually have some timely relevance to the next election (not just keeping the results in a shared secret with the SOTS) SOTS has repeatedly demonstrated that on this issue, that department is missing in action in terms of getting any kind of meaningful result for the taxpayer money being spent on this audit).
This MOU states that the purpose of the audit is to test whether the machines properly function. It is an extremely poor method for doing so, and I would strongly suggest that what would be a better thing to do is to position the lifeguard upstream of the "election dam," and institute a rigorous pre-election testing and calibration that verifies that the batteries are working well, the mechanial aspects of the machine are properly calibrated, the ballots are properly printed with properly placed edgemarks, and the pens selected for the election can be read and their marks not easily removed.
It is not clear to me that any regulation stipulates how each town does their machine maintenance, and I have not seen the list of actions to be taken in preventative maintenance.
The performance of such maintenance before an election is another opportunity for both eliminating problems - and causing them. I think the penalty for 1) knowingly miscalibrating a machine and 2) causing the machines to miscalibrated whether deliberate or not could be stiff enough to be a deterrent, but if a state finds itself relying on such penalties as reassurance that an election will not be thrown by poor calibration, then it is unrealistically optimistic.
How meaningful is it to have an election official who doesn't know squat about the machines "present" when they are being "maintained"?
Frankly, it is a waste of taxpayer funds and a sham to produce this document in less than a timely way. I would suggest that complaints be directed to the GAE committee (Government Administration and Elections) of the CT GEneral Assembly, co-chairs Sen. Gayle Slossberg and Rep. Chris Caruso. The law needs to compel the timely filing of this report and make explicit that the report be made public.
Frankly, since the SOTS actions are a component of the way the election was administered, I think it is improper for the SOTS to control the escalation of the post-election audit.
The notion of creating an independent audit board was explored and rejected last year, not sure if by the GAE committee or full legislature. In these economic times, it may be tough to ge such a board created. The current structure of the SEEC (State Elections Enforcement Commission) may have potential for being enlarged to cover this function.
If SEEC controlled the audit process, it would have an ongoing window into the people and processes being used in the towns across the state. It would seem to dovetail well with their enforcement activities. I do not know enough about how this agency functions and whether it is effective to know if such a suggestion has real-life merit.
We hear about what amount to "rogue phonecalls" where a SOTS employee calls and gives permission to a town to do something that certainly appears from a reading of the laws to be illegal or improperly authorized. Since SOTS has the power to issue directives to the towns, and since those directives have to be in writing to be enforced, a phone call giving permission is simply unenforceable as a directive and, if the actions recommended prove illegal, actually involves the SOTS in illegal activities.
So -- back to the audit -- why would SOTS investigate that? They know what happened already, and it involved them. An example is SOTS attorney Ted Bromley's calling New Milford during the May budget referendum and saying that since they had to hand count a voting district due to "memory card failure,", they could "start early," which goes against a law that says that machines must be shut down and polling place closed before counting starts.
This kind of action by SOTS employees apparently is not viewed as a problem at SOTS, and unfortunately, can potentiate fraud. Local referenda are not only one of the types of elections that is most frequently targeted for fraud, but a type of election which is not covered by Connecticut state "audit" laws and is a local election in which, according to DSOTS Lesley Mara, the state doesn't involve itself. |
Hugh W. Busey
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hbusey
Post Number: 13
Registered: 7-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 5:55 am: |
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Christine,
Thanks for your thoughts and comments. Please contact me right away at hbuseyATgmail.com as I have an appointment this afternoon with DSOTS on other timely topics and, with your permission, would like to request comment on your submission.
Our goals are the same but what I have found may not be as bad as you imply. DSOTS, Shvartsman and other activists have made some substantial changes in security, procedures and training since the last elections and many more may be in the works for future elections.
Hugh |
christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 1005
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 7:37 am: |
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Hugh,
I appreciate your involvement and action. I think it is powerful to speak from your own set of concerns, and if you share mine, you are welcome to make them your own.
I am in regular contact with the SOTS office, who mailed me this document, and have made many of my explorations public because of the attempts I and other citizens have made to get statutory -- not procedural -- changes made have not yet been successful.
The lack of transparency in terms of timely report filing and the lack of statutory guidelines on making sure the money spent on UCONN's efforts has maximum impact by requiring UCONN to file in a timely way with SOTS kind of says to me: What is going on here? Is this an insiders club? Where is the accountability to citizens? IF SOTS waits till after the election to say what was found and what should be done about it, then SOTS can really control damage e.g. when the problem has NOT been either identified or dealt with and there is an issue at the time of the election. It's a bad way to go with this report and I hope the General Assembly at the minimum tightens up the poorly designed audit and follow through that we have.
It has been my experience that rather than accepting the (always earnestly provided) statements in good faith, it is often quite instructive to actually do the homework and walk yourself through what was done and what loopholes remain so you can clarify to yourself that what is being said checks out and is the full story. Virtually nobody does this, or if they do, I have yet to meet them.
If is very easy to become best friends with the SOTS in our state, because their approach is to hold your friends close and your detractors even closer. I can tell you my own personal preferences: I don't do meetings, tea, or lunch -- I do business. If the meeting has a concrete purpose with goals and outcomes, it makes sense to attend. All the rest is public relations imho, but that's just how I operate. Guess I am not a relationships person -- I don/' want the fact that our pet poodles both have the same name to get in the way of some rather uncomfortable facts about how things are being done here. I salute any and all positive changes and will be the first to contratulate them, but the question is always, is it sufficient. Characterization of "making great strides" and debating how much is "enough" is a distraction from a factual review of what is done and what remains to be accomplished. We are careening toward a high turnout election with machines we cannot look at and a memory card test by UCONN that would NOT uncover programming fraud by Diebold itself. The test compares the programmed card to the original program, but if each and every card had fraudulent programming, all we would know as I understand it is that 100% of the code matched.
I have no time to run to Hartford to be reassured -- just show me the evidence in statutes, regulations, or meaningful WRITTEN directives. The combined efforts by citizens' groups to date have produced some changes, but there is much more to do.
The audit was created as an opscan marketing tool, and Lesley Mara has said so publicly (check out the youtube.com video for independent confirmation). It is a not a thorough or reliable methodology for finding out "if the machines functioned properly" -- you cannot create an audit based on speculation about how the machine performed (the step where you separate what you consider to be anomalous ballots - wildly different in each town), and compare your speculation about "what would the machine read?" to vote count discrepancies for the purpose of explaining them away. That is what we do in CT, and we have the audacity to call this "one of the best in the nation" because a questionable process is applied to a comparatively high percentage of ballots. (I mean, if you give a placebo to a high percentage of patients, will they be cured of disease?) We cannot know how a specific improperly vs properly calibrated machine read those ballots on that election day, and we cannot predict that the same machine will read exactly the same way in the future. It is a machine that is subject to variation, just as making a great copy at Kinko's today doesn't mean if you go back to the same machine in a month, you will get a great copy again.
We must have tight custody of the ballots in order for them to be reliable evidence of the voters' intent on election day, and yet many towns do not have solid security protocols implemented for paper ballots. One ROV stored the ballots unsealed in clear plastic bins in her office because it was "more convenient". Comparing those ballots to the machine tapes would be a waste of taxpayers' money, and yet that is exactly what is done. The audit asks if the ballots are sealed and the seals match, but SOTS does nothing meaningful if the answer is no -- if the towns even bother to report this procedural step (read: no enforcement if they don't). If they aren't sealed, the audit ought to stop right there. Don't waste the taxpayers' money on boondoggles. All you have to do is look at the repeatedly high numbers of towns that complete the audit inaccurately and it is obvious that somebody hasn't taken things in hand on an aggressive basis.
There is variation in the understanding of whether ballots must be sealed post audit. There is a two day period in which candidates may challenge the audit results, meaning that unsealed ballots post-audit would make such a challenge meaningless in terms of evidence of voters' intent. The voter loses, not just the candidate. FEderal law calls for a 22 month retention of "election materials," but when I wrote to SOTS' Michael Kozik to ask whether that meant the ballots would be sealed, not just packed away in boxes, I never got a reply, so I don't know what it means. It is relevant in this election, because if any "machine problems" or audit issues occur, the hypothetical escalation of the audit would require sealed ballots and memory cards in order to have any real meaning.
One might also ask re: "audit to find out how the machine functioned", why the lifeguard is positioned at the bottom of the dam?
What are the statutory mandates that the machines be calibrated prior to each election? There are none. Where is the requirement that each town compare their ballots to a template to verify that they all have proper edgemarks before the election? They don't do this, and I have read that Diebold has a cheap template they can buy for this purpose.
Why is there no control over overruns by the printer? Think about this: In one town, ballots were not feeding through the scanner. They opened a new package of ballots, and they fed fine. I have to ask: Are ballots trimmed in packets of 100, as they are packaged? I think the number is much higher than that. The only reason I can see for an exact packet of ballots to be trimmed wrong is that a substitution was made of good ballots by using overruns and defects. the town did their ballot count, but didn't verify they were all first-quality ballots. We don't control overruns or ask the printer to do so, so the opportunity to get ballots and premark them, or to create ballots for substitution, or even to start chain-voting chains -- right there in the potentially substituted ballots.
Let's talk about ballot security in the polling place. Is there a written directive from the SOTS that since this election will have heavy turnout, each town must submit a written security plan for its ballots? The keys on the ballot bins are a joke. If they fill the bins, what will they do with the ballots? Must they be stored in full view of the public? How does the number of ballots alter their transportation plans? Is there a log of ballots being transported that is signed at the ROV office when received? Do they have enough bags? Sounds simple, but you would not believe how much resistance there is to purchasing extra -- and cheap ballot transport bags. No ballots should be showing up in boxes because "we ran out of bags" or "we couldn't lift the bag it was so heavy".
Let's talk about that security factor that "we don't do central tabulation -- our ballots are counted in the districts".
Some CT towns do not transport ballots on election night, or machines, for that matter. Some towns store the ballots AND machines in the same rolling cart provided by SOTS, locked, and left in a gym overnight after the election, picked up the next day by workers. (I have conveyed this info to Lesley Mara, but not the name of the town I learned of, since it is a general issue.) Do you want your ballots AND memory cards in an insecure school gym? How long do you think it would take to pick the lock? What is the chance of substituting ballots or memory cards?
What guarantees are in place to ensure that towns check seals after the election to make sure that the seals match what was reported? I attended an audit in one town where the seal did not match what was reported -- a number "one" was written as a number "seven". Sounds like an innocent mistake, right? Except THAT TOWN DID NOT CONTROL THEIR INVENTORY OF SEALS. They even left extras in the bags for convenience. It potentiates fraud to have this sort of loose management of items that should be completely controlled and use logged, such as the seals.
Keep in mind that this issue of the mismatched seal and apparent error should have been discovered when the bag first came in. But apparently nobody compared the seals to the reports before the bags were put into storage. If you do not do the seal/report matchup on election night, you are missing a data point as to whether and when that seal was changed.
Or how about the submission of the moderators' returns to SOTS on election night? First, the moderators file their returns with the chief moderator, and the chief moderator aggregates the results and files his/her report with the state. Once those signed reports are turned in, if any changes are made, the changes are pre-validated by the moderators' signatures. Bleach removes ballpoint ink, or simple removable correction tape provides a temporary change to the report.
They are faxed in to SOTS. But do the signors all stand around and watch as the fax goes through to SOTS, and confirm both the phone number on the receiving end plus the paper printout saying the fax went through verify that what they signed is what was sent?
I have made clean copies of documents to fax by covering redacted parts with removable correction tape, photocopying the document, and faxing what looked like a "clean" document. Why couldn't numbers of already-signed documents be adjusted this way?
The law permits the SOTS to destroy the moderator returns once the figures are entered into the official register of voting results. I do not know what their actual procedure is, or the timing of such destruction. However, I do know that once destroyed, if the gambit I have described above were to be employed, the proper and different results would be on file with the town clerk, and it would look like the error or malfeasance occurred at the SOTS level.
Well, don't they get the machine tapes? No, they do NOT get the town machine tapes. When SOTS has provided "oversight" of the post election audits in the past, the ONLY information they had on how the town's elections turned out...was what the town TOLD them had happened, not something they had been able to corroborate was error-free and accurately reported with those tapes (whether the tape actually reports what the ballots say is a whole different and important area of issue).
You have to remember that the same people who reported those results are often involved with the audits of....their own election night reports.
But...have a good meeting and I look forward to reading about what you have learned.
UPDATE: Think Florida 2000, think Ohio 2004. What would an attorney wanting to challenge results do with ballots that had undocumentable chain of custody? It all boiled down to town by town and county by county in those elections.
What each town DOES matter, and "nothing happens in our town" when a town is blasted across the national media during a contested election doesn't cut it. I'm disinterested in explanations after the fact -- full court press to transparent, well conducted, secure and accurate, fair elections. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 9778
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 7:46 am: |
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Christine, you wrote a brilliant post. In 2008, we cannot afford the four-year learning curve that so many newbies had to go through before they realized that the emperor often wears no clothes.
Bottom line, as you say, is this:
quote:just show me the evidence in statutes, regulations, or meaningful WRITTEN directives.
Show me the documents. Show me the video. Show me the logs.
All the rest is PR.
And by the way, I don't know of any reputable financial auditor who cares to do lunch or "build a relationship". No rudeness, but no chummy-ness either. Just "let's get down to business. Show me the records." |
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