[Additional material was added to this post on 1 February]
The NY State Board of Elections (SBoE)has decided that villages may continue to use the lever voting machines in the March 2010 elections. According to a report in the Post Star "state Board of Elections spokesman John Conklin said officials concluded that counties that haven't participated in a pilot program for the new machines can have an extended grace period."
What is unclear is whether villages in counties that participated in a limited way in the November pilot, like Dutchess, which deployed an op-scan in one voting district in the city of Poughkeepsie, will be required to use the scanners in March.
The SBoE decision was in response to concerns like those in a January 4th memo filed by election officials in Washington County, which did not participate in the pilot, that "The training that we need for ourselves, the inspectors and the technicians is not going to be completed in time for your use." But the other anxiety expressed by the Washington county election commissioners is one which has been systematically ignored by the SBoE despite having been raised consistently by county officials across the state. The Washington Commissioners wrote, "Also a concern is the cost of programming the new machines, transporting them and the printing of the ballots that may be prohibitive to small villages."
Update:
Although electronic voting machines were used in the November 2009 elections, the village of Saranac Lake has asked permission to use lever machines in the March village elections. Village clerk Kareen Tyler said, "I just don't think the expense or availability of the (new) machines is something the village is going to be able to handle." If permission to use the levers is not granted Tyler said the village will go to paper ballots which will be counted by hand. "It would not be difficult to do at all," she said. "There would be rules and guidelines and safeguards so they couldn't be stuffed or anything like that."
The story is reported in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
Showing posts with label Op-Scans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Op-Scans. Show all posts
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Friday, December 11, 2009
Officials Were Warned
Brad Friedman of bradblog.com runs down the run-up to and aftermath of the New York State Op-Scan pilot program and the November '09 elections. Reprinted from The Gouverneur Times.
| Officials Were Warned |
| Northern NY News |
| Written by Brad Friedman |
| Friday, 11 December 2009 07:09 |
| Following the recent November election, the Operation Director for New York's State Board of Elections, Anna E. Svizerro declared the experiment of testing new, uncertified voting systems on live voters in a real election to be "very successful." The Watertown Daily Times reported Svizerro's comments, nearly verbatim and wholly uncritically, on Nov. 13th, despite serious concerns that had already emerged about the equipment used in the NY-23 Special Election for the U.S. House, and the errors discovered in its reported results. Many of those problems, machine failure, inaccurate results, and the difficulty or impossibility of verifying them as accurate following the election, have been reported on in aggressive detail by The Gouverneur Times over the last several weeks. But concerns about the dangers and pitfalls of New York's pilot program were voiced long before the questionable election of November 3rd. State officials were warned about those dangers via a virtual blizzard of letters sent to them over the past year by state and national election integrity organizations and advocates recommending modifications to the pilot program to ensure voters would not be disenfranchised. Indeed, many of the very same groups who have supported the state's move from mechanical lever systems to computerized secret vote counting were nonetheless extremely critical of the way in which voters were to be used "as guinea pigs" to test uncertified hardware and software in both the primary and general elections this year as part of the pilot program. The concerns of the election advocates now seem to have been quite prescient, even as they appear to have been largely ignored by state and federal officials. As early as April 2009, the League of Women Voters of New York State (LWVNYS) - who describe themselves as "a multi-issue, nonpartisan political organization which... has been a supporter of... the replacement of lever voting machines in New York" - had sent a letter [PDF] to both federal attorneys and state election officials urging them to reconsider their proposed pilot program to test machines in this year's elections. The letter from LWVNYS President Martha Kennedy to Brian F. Heffernan in the U.S. Attorney's office, and CC'd to six different New York State Board of Elections officials, found "merit" in a pilot deployment of the state's new Sequoia/Dominion optical-scan voting systems, but disagreed with the way they were to be prematurely forced upon voters during real elections. "We cannot support pilot projects using uncertified machines throughout the state," Kennedy wrote, "unless it were coupled with a mandated 100% hand count of the paper ballots which would become the official count." No such mandate was instituted and, instead, uncertified results tainted by the failing and flawed secret vote counting computers were used to install Democratic Party candidate Bill Owens to the U.S. House of Representatives shortly thereafter. Kennedy also expressed her concern about the "disenfranchisement of many voters because proper and complete testing of equipment and adequate training of election workers would not be possible within an abbreviated time frame." Two months later, in June, the LWVNYS was joined by the election integrity group New Yorkers for Verified Voting (NYVV) and the public advocacy organization New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) to issue a press release [PDF] about the groups' joint concerns about the pilot project. The release highlighted a report [PDF] from NYVV's Bo Lipari who represented the League on the state's Citizen Election Modernization Advisory Committee. Lipari, as quoted from his report in the press release, warned the pilot program, as then planned, "gives insufficient regard to the scale of the project, the need for independent verification of results, the potential for problems arising, or a plan for how to learn from and apply the result. In the press release, Aimee Allaud, Election Specialist with the League also slammed the state's proposed pilot for "using real voters as guinea pigs in the upcoming elections." "Elections should be transparent, secure and inspire public confidence," NYPIRG's Neal Rosenstein also chided in the release. "Unfortunately, the Board's plan to have over 900,000 voters use new uncertified voting systems this year without requiring meaningful audits of results undermines the credibility of the election and sets a dangerous precedent for the future." Days later, the three groups were joined by still more election integrity experts and advocacy groups sharing their concerns with the State Board of Elections. On June 10, representatives from LWVNYS, NYVV and NYPIRG, along with representatives from the Catskill Center for Independence, Citizens' Union, E-Voter Education Project and the Task Force on Election Integrity sent an "urgent" plea to state officials to amend the pilot program. In their letter "Re: Urgent steps toward election integrity with the 2009 Pilot Program," [PDF] the groups decried the state's "Failure to modify the current plans for the pilot use of uncertified scanners," and noted - correctly, as it turns out, given the uproar following voting equipment failure on Election Day - that it "could lead to a decrease in the public's confidence in the results. The six organizations - several of which were in opposition to each other on the point of using computerized optical-scanners at all, some preferring the state's continued use of what they regard as more transparent mechanical lever systems - came together to urge the state "to fill these gaping holes in your plan to deploy uncertified ballot scanners," and asked again that they follow the recommendations of Lipari, a retired software engineer and a longtime advocate for the state's new op-scan voting system. "We believe these corrections of inadequacies in the planned program are essential and quite realistic," they wrote. They urged, among other recommendations, that the state ask counties to "limit deployment of the new machines to 10% of registered voters, even if they earlier agreed to do a full county wide implementation." That recommendation would not be heeded, and their letter would go unanswered by officials. In July, after failing to receive a response from either federal or state officials over the previous month, LWVNYS and NYVV tried again, following up their June 3 letter with an "Open Letter to the New York State Board of Elections" [PDF] about the "serious weaknesses of your published 'Pilot Plan' for the deployment of uncertified scanners in the primary and general elections of 2009." In the wake of a resolution adopted by the Board during their June meeting, the organizations excoriated what seemed to be a "direct repudiation" of their earlier request that the state allow counties to reduce their participation in the pilot program to just 10% of registered voters, as Lipari and the others had called for during the previous month. "You thus ignored the fact that experts recommend a 10% limit on the size of deployments of new technical equipment, even when nothing as important as votes are involved," they wrote. While they lauded the Board for taking steps to lay out procedures for the post-election "audits" of results, as they had also recommended, they were highly critical at the Board's failure to revise those protocols "in the direction recommended by experts so that New York would have statistically meaningful risk-limiting audits." The following week Common Cause of New York, Yad HaChazakah - The Jewish Disability Empowerment Center, Inc. and national election integrity watchdog VotersUnite.org would join with several of the other groups to send yet another joint letter to federal officials at the U.S. Attorneys office as well as to state elections officials, trying yet again, ultimately in vain, to see changes made to the ill-fated pilot program - ("ill-fated", at least as many voters undoubtedly saw it, if not officials such as Svizerro who would, implausibly, declare it a success) - even as the primary and general election drew near. In their four page letter [PDF] on July 15, detailing ten recommendations "to correct inadequacies in the planned pilot program and to ensure compliance with New York's Election Laws as well as the [federal] Help America Vote Act," they echoed unanswered concerns originally expressed by the NY State League of Women Voters three months earlier, back in April. "The New York State Board of Elections is now planning a pilot of uncertified optical scan voting systems to be used by up to 1.4 million voters in 46 counties in the upcoming 2009 Primary and General elections," they wrote. "These new systems have not yet been used in real elections anywhere in the country, and still have not completed either New York State or Federal EAC [Election Assistance Commission] certification tests." "Therefore, voters who use these systems cannot be assured that their votes will be counted as cast. We believe the failure to make meaningful changes to the pilot will raise serious questions about the results of these elections," they said, before detailing their recommendations "incorporating the work of Bo Lipari" and averring that "implementation of the... proposals will greatly reduce the possibility of voter disenfranchisement raised by the planned pilot program and by the use of scanners in future elections." Virtually all of those repeated warnings, from all of those often disparate groups, sent across several months, seem to have fallen on deaf ears, before voters were both disenfranchised and have likely come to lose confidence in results in the wake of the various failures in the pilot program voting system, many of which have been reported by this news outlet, and others, in the wake of the election. So why didn't election officials heed the dire, repeated and often "urgent" warnings of both local and national election experts? At this point, we don't know. Calls and emails seeking comment from the New York State Board of Elections co-chairs Douglas Kellner and James Walsh, as well as to Jeffrey Dvorin in the office of the Asst. Attorney General in Albany, NY have so far gone unreturned.
Additional research by The Gouverneur Times' Nathan Barker and Howard Stanislevic of the E-Voter Education Project. Brad Friedman is an investigative reporter, blogger, election integrity advocate and expert, and the creator and publisher of The BRAD BLOG. He is a broadcaster and contributor to the UK's Guardian, Huffington Post, Computer World and other periodicals, a Fellow at the Commonwealth Institute, and a frequent guest on radio and television outlets from Air America to Fox News. In addition to offering expert testimony on these matters to a number of federal and state electoral oversight commissions, he recently contributed a chapter on the disaster for voters that was the 2008 Election for the book Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-2009 and co-wrote an investigate report on the illegally certified Sequoia touch-screen voting machines, still in use in Nevada, for Mark Crispin Miller's book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 - 2008. This year his work on the mysterious death of Republican IT guru Mike Connell was cited with an award for "Excellence in Investigative Journalism" by Sonoma State University's 33-year old "Project Censored" organization |
Friday, November 27, 2009
The Plunging Pilot Project: Impossible Vote Totals in NY-23
Re-posted from our "Levers" site
Last night, on the eve of Thanksgiving, election fraud investigator Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. published an article in the Governeur Times revealing Impossible Numbers Certified in NY-23. Phillips is best known for his book, Witness to a Crime: A Citizens’ Audit of an American Election, detailing the investigation he led of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. But he actually lives in St. Lawrence County, NY. So when questions began being raised about the vote counts in the special Congressional election earlier this month, Phillips was quickly on the case.
His article released last night reveals, “The election results certified by the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections for New York’s 23rd Congressional District contain some numbers that are mathematically impossible.” The article goes on to detail the negative numbers included in certified vote totals. Read it. It reveals important information everyone concerned about democracy should know.
St. Lawrence County was part of the State’s “pilot project,” an early rollout of the optical scan voting technology that will be required to replace lever voting systems by our next election — if not stopped by legal action. The Election Transparency Coalition is preparing to file litigation to have concealed vote counting — such as the counting that takes place inside optical scan voting systems — declared unconstitutional.
St. Lawrence County’s now-certified election results cannot be accurate. The true vote count cannot be known. And while other counties involved in the early rollout of electronic vote-counting systems may have produced possible vote totals, their true vote counts are no more knowable. Only with a system where the public has access to meaningful observation of every step of the vote-counting process do we have a basis for confidence in election results.
This is why Virginia Martin, Democratic Election Commissioner from Columbia County, recently testified that she would refuse to certify an election in which she could not verify the accuracy of the vote count.
Richard Hayes Phillips joins ETC in supporting NY’s time-tested and transparent lever voting system. The reasons for his support are detailed in his article, “In Defense of Lever Voting Machines,” published on his own website, and reiterated in the Gouverneur Times piece.
While the pilot project is clearly in a nosedive, the State is proceeding with its plan to certify the very electronic voting system responsible for the impossible numbers in the NY-23 race. This certification would be meaningless and would lead to elections that are just as meaningless. As Phillips says, “How can we have a democracy if we cannot know if the vote count is accurate? If election officials cannot know, and if the candidates cannot know, and if the voters cannot know that the official results are true and correct, why even have an election?”
Please join us in our work to stop the abandonment of NY’s working, affordable, trustworthy voting system and its replacement with systems that keep the true vote count secret from the voters themselves.
by Emily Levy
Emily Levy is the Election Transparency Coalition project coordinator.
—–
On this Thanksgiving, we at ETC are thankful for the work of Dr. Phillips, Commissioner Martin and all those who dedicate themselves to the constitutional principles of transparent democracy.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Election Commissioners Party With Vendors
More than 18 New York counties have passed resolutions asking to keep their lever voting machines and the governor has issued directives to limit state employee travel expenses; nevertheless 180 county election commissioners and staff spent their evenings partying at events sponsored by voting machine vendors who plied their wares at the four day annual Election Commissioners Association meeting at the Finger Lakes in late June.
Here are some highlights of the Daily News report of the event which is worth reading in full, especially for the photos:
Here are some highlights of the Daily News report of the event which is worth reading in full, especially for the photos:
At this conference, vendors seeking business with election boards across the state picked up the tab for food and open bars...
On Wednesday, commissioners and staffers attended work sessions about paper ballets, vendor contracts and other election issues. At one point, Sequoia and ES&S - two companies vying to supply electronic voting machines to election boards across New York - pitched their wares...
As the party ended, some revelers re-created a scene from "Animal House" by jumping up and down, yelling "Shout!" to the Isley Brothers' hit.
[New York Election Commissioners Association president William]Scriber said he didn't know which vendor paid for the private party room and liquor and had "no recollection" of who threw the costume party. A hotel sales rep did not return calls.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Columbia County Election Commissioner Rejects "Pilot Project."
Columbia County Election Commissioner Virginia Martin writes on why her county will continue to use lever voting machines in the fall elections:
Uncertified Machines Do Not Serve Voters
"...Iran's supreme leader ... has called for a limited recount."
(First published in print in the Albany Times Union June 25th 2009.)
"...Iran's supreme leader ... has called for a limited recount."
Uncertified Machines Do Not Serve Voters
| A sentence in the June 17 editorial, "Iranians' fight for democracy," sent a chill down my spine. |
"...Iran's supreme leader ... has called for a limited recount."
Hold that thought. Something else -- that I literally shudder to connect to the above -- has been nagging at me for some weeks. It is this:
How many candidates running for office this fall know that the votes that will decide their fate will be counted by an uncertified computer program?
And how many of those candidates know that only a small fraction of those votes will be hand counted after the fact to see if that uncertified computer program (which also has not yet proved to be accurate, reliable or tamper-proof) worked as it was intended to and was not hacked into?
"A limited recount."
Across New York, 47 counties with 1.4 million registered voters will participate in a "pilot project" in which uncertified optical-scan voting machines, manufactured and programmed by Sequoia Voting Systems or Election Systems & Software, will count the votes. Some of these counties signed on for full participation, so that all the votes in every election district will be cast and counted using uncertified machines. Other counties signed on for participation of a more modest scope, in which just a few districts, perhaps, will be involved.
And the recounts of these votes?
They'll be limited.
Right now, and the regulations are now being considered, it appears that three percent of all machines will be subjected to a hand recount. Additionally recounted, and fortunately at 100 percent, will be any race in which there is a margin of one percent or less between candidates. (Think about that one. If Candidate A receives 51 percent and Candidate B receives 49 percent, there will be no full recount.) Fortunately, it does seem that each race will be subject to at least a partial recount.
It's been suggested that any candidate will have the option of going to court to request a full recount. Yet that unfairly puts the onus on the candidate, who risks charges of sour grapes or of running up expenses to add to the taxpayers' tab. Remember that this year, an "off year," is the election for modest candidacies -- for town board members, tax collectors, highway superintendents. These are not races in which high-powered attorneys backed by deep-pocketed interests stand ready to spring to action, to demand the recounts their clients deserve.
But Columbia County candidates and voters will be far better served. None of our races will require "limited recounts" because none will be counted by an optical scanner. Voters will select candidates using their choice of a lever machine or ballot-marking device.
That's because Commissioner Don Kline and I opted out of the optical-scan pilot project. We, along with the overwhelming majority of our custodians, inspectors, voters and county legislators, hope to continue using this voting system of lever machine with ballot-marking device, which meets all the requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act, well into the future.
Virginia Martin is the Democratic commissioner of the Columbia County Board of Elections.(First published in print in the Albany Times Union June 25th 2009.)
"...Iran's supreme leader ... has called for a limited recount."
Hold that thought. Something else -- that I literally shudder to connect to the above -- has been nagging at me for some weeks. It is this:
How many candidates running for office this fall know that the votes that will decide their fate will be counted by an uncertified computer program?
And how many of those candidates know that only a small fraction of those votes will be hand counted after the fact to see if that uncertified computer program (which also has not yet proved to be accurate, reliable or tamper-proof) worked as it was intended to and was not hacked into?
"A limited recount."
Across New York, 47 counties with 1.4 million registered voters will participate in a "pilot project" in which uncertified optical-scan voting machines, manufactured and programmed by Sequoia Voting Systems or Election Systems & Software, will count the votes. Some of these counties signed on for full participation, so that all the votes in every election district will be cast and counted using uncertified machines. Other counties signed on for participation of a more modest scope, in which just a few districts, perhaps, will be involved.
And the recounts of these votes?
They'll be limited.
Right now, and the regulations are now being considered, it appears that three percent of all machines will be subjected to a hand recount. Additionally recounted, and fortunately at 100 percent, will be any race in which there is a margin of one percent or less between candidates. (Think about that one. If Candidate A receives 51 percent and Candidate B receives 49 percent, there will be no full recount.) Fortunately, it does seem that each race will be subject to at least a partial recount.
It's been suggested that any candidate will have the option of going to court to request a full recount. Yet that unfairly puts the onus on the candidate, who risks charges of sour grapes or of running up expenses to add to the taxpayers' tab. Remember that this year, an "off year," is the election for modest candidacies -- for town board members, tax collectors, highway superintendents. These are not races in which high-powered attorneys backed by deep-pocketed interests stand ready to spring to action, to demand the recounts their clients deserve.
But Columbia County candidates and voters will be far better served. None of our races will require "limited recounts" because none will be counted by an optical scanner. Voters will select candidates using their choice of a lever machine or ballot-marking device.
That's because Commissioner Don Kline and I opted out of the optical-scan pilot project. We, along with the overwhelming majority of our custodians, inspectors, voters and county legislators, hope to continue using this voting system of lever machine with ballot-marking device, which meets all the requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act, well into the future.
Virginia Martin is the Democratic commissioner of the Columbia County Board of Elections.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Like Filling Out Lottery Tickets: New York State Rolls Out Uncertified Voting Systems for Fall Preview
Despite the steady stream of keep our levers resolutions emanating from county legislatures throughout the state, the State Board of Elections is carrying through with a pilot Op-scan project for the fall 2009 elections. ETC e-voting education consultant Howard Stanislevic sounds the alarm in this post from his blog e-voter.blogspot.com :
ALBANY -- At a May 12th Commissioners' meeting, after collaborating with the US Dept. of Justice, the New York State Board of Elections cavalierly decided to risk the disenfranchisement of nearly a million of the state's voters, by allowing what one commissioner called a "huge pilot" of uncertified software-driven electronic vote-counting systems around the state in 45 of its 62 counties.
Here are the links to the Commissioners' resolution, and other documents containing the details of the plan:
* Authorizing Resolution 05/12/2009 (PDF 50KB)
* Pilot Plan Narrative 05/12/2009 (PDF 65KB)
* Timeline 05/12/2009 (PDF 492KB)
* County Participation Spreadsheet 05/12/2009 (PDF 42KB)
Over 900,000 voters (read: guinea pigs) could be affected by these irresponsible tests, which one county election commissioner, perhaps unwittingly, compared to filling out lottery tickets. Gambling with the votes of a million New Yorkers is hardly a way to instill public confidence.
The plan contains almost no provisions for manual recounts of the paper ballots to check the computer tallies, other than those that might be obtained through the courts. The only exceptions are for contests with a margin of victory of 1% or less. Full recounts of those contests will be conducted, but we bristle at the suggestion that the victory margin reported by the uncertified voting system will be the one used to determine whether or not the hand count to check the system will take place.
Commissioner Douglas Kellner made a motion at the May 12th meeting to allow any candidate to ask for and obtain a full hand recount. His fellow commissioners defeated it by a bipartisan 3 to 1 vote.
Apparently Kellner's colleagues believe that:
* any candidate can convince a judge that a voting machine didn't count her votes -- even without evidence to support such a claim;
* the judge will also believe that the paper ballots have been preserved inviolate and thereby allow them to be hand counted to find out who really won an election (contrary to a number of previous decisions by the highest court in the State -- not to mention the highest court in the land); and
* the court would gladly spend taxpayers' money for such high-minded purposes as convincing losers of elections, and their supporters, that they really lost fair and square -- even given the amount of money already spent on the new voting systems.
But the voters of New York deserve more than just naive speculation about the ease of obtaining hand counts from a potentially partisan and cost-conscious judiciary. They deserve the actual hand counts if and when they are needed.
So what if the margin of victory happens to be slightly more than 1% (say 1% + 1 vote for example), and the courts deny the recount request? In that case the hand count reverts to only a 3% spot check, per Election Law § 9-211 -- part of the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 that brought us this mess in the first place. If there are no discrepancies found in the spot check, the election could be certified -- which is more than can be said for the voting systems that actually produced the election results.
Unfortunately, the math is unequivocal: in many elections, a 3% audit can reveal absolutely NO discrepancies, and the outcome of the elections can still be absolutely wrong. If that happens, no one will be the wiser.
One other potential safeguard remains for the million voters who will be subjected to this foolish experiment: the long-awaited and yet to be promulgated State Board of Elections auditing regulations known as Part 6210.18. For well over a year now, we have been involved in the drafting of these regulations. They offer the only hope for anything better than the ill-considered 3% spot checks in the Election Law.
A year ago, many of New York's good government groups wrote to the Board, asking for these regulations to reflect best practices. But so far, progress has been slow to non-existent in this area, even as the mad rush to run real elections using potentially fake voting systems continues.
All that said, while the value of certification has been greatly exaggerated, we think it might be fair to say that if done properly, certification can prove that a voting system can work -- not that it actually will work. This weak assurance is of course not sufficient, but it's better than no assurance at all. The only way to be sure to prevent the disenfranchisement of New York's voters by untrustworthy computers, is to hand count 100%, at least until the systems are certified.
We'll be following this story and reporting on efforts to fix this latest debacle and avoid the Floridization of New York's elections. We don't think this is what New Yorkers signed up for when the State accepted $50-million in federal funds to replace its lever voting machines under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The State has not been able to certify a voting system to replace the levers since then, and as always, it's important to read the law first.
In New York, the law has been decidedly anti-recount. So paper ballots or no paper ballots, the software counts will rule -- just as they did in Florida's 2000 election which brought us Bush v. Gore and ultimately, HAVA itself. Ironic, huh?
The Board did agree to present the matter to the State's Citizens' Election Modernization Advisory Committee. While their opinions are as yet unknown, and probably not binding, at least one member of the group has gone on record as favoring 100% hand counts of ALL votes counted by ANY uncertified voting system. This is in direct conflict with 3 out of the 4 State Board of Elections Commissioners who represent our two major political parties, but unfortunately may no longer be faithfully representing the voters of New York.
Editor's note: Election Transparency Coalition does not endorse op-scan counting with less than a 100% hand-count verification conducted at the polling place on election night.
ALBANY -- At a May 12th Commissioners' meeting, after collaborating with the US Dept. of Justice, the New York State Board of Elections cavalierly decided to risk the disenfranchisement of nearly a million of the state's voters, by allowing what one commissioner called a "huge pilot" of uncertified software-driven electronic vote-counting systems around the state in 45 of its 62 counties.
Here are the links to the Commissioners' resolution, and other documents containing the details of the plan:
* Authorizing Resolution 05/12/2009 (PDF 50KB)
* Pilot Plan Narrative 05/12/2009 (PDF 65KB)
* Timeline 05/12/2009 (PDF 492KB)
* County Participation Spreadsheet 05/12/2009 (PDF 42KB)
Over 900,000 voters (read: guinea pigs) could be affected by these irresponsible tests, which one county election commissioner, perhaps unwittingly, compared to filling out lottery tickets. Gambling with the votes of a million New Yorkers is hardly a way to instill public confidence.
The plan contains almost no provisions for manual recounts of the paper ballots to check the computer tallies, other than those that might be obtained through the courts. The only exceptions are for contests with a margin of victory of 1% or less. Full recounts of those contests will be conducted, but we bristle at the suggestion that the victory margin reported by the uncertified voting system will be the one used to determine whether or not the hand count to check the system will take place.
Commissioner Douglas Kellner made a motion at the May 12th meeting to allow any candidate to ask for and obtain a full hand recount. His fellow commissioners defeated it by a bipartisan 3 to 1 vote.
Apparently Kellner's colleagues believe that:
* any candidate can convince a judge that a voting machine didn't count her votes -- even without evidence to support such a claim;
* the judge will also believe that the paper ballots have been preserved inviolate and thereby allow them to be hand counted to find out who really won an election (contrary to a number of previous decisions by the highest court in the State -- not to mention the highest court in the land); and
* the court would gladly spend taxpayers' money for such high-minded purposes as convincing losers of elections, and their supporters, that they really lost fair and square -- even given the amount of money already spent on the new voting systems.
But the voters of New York deserve more than just naive speculation about the ease of obtaining hand counts from a potentially partisan and cost-conscious judiciary. They deserve the actual hand counts if and when they are needed.
So what if the margin of victory happens to be slightly more than 1% (say 1% + 1 vote for example), and the courts deny the recount request? In that case the hand count reverts to only a 3% spot check, per Election Law § 9-211 -- part of the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 that brought us this mess in the first place. If there are no discrepancies found in the spot check, the election could be certified -- which is more than can be said for the voting systems that actually produced the election results.
Unfortunately, the math is unequivocal: in many elections, a 3% audit can reveal absolutely NO discrepancies, and the outcome of the elections can still be absolutely wrong. If that happens, no one will be the wiser.
One other potential safeguard remains for the million voters who will be subjected to this foolish experiment: the long-awaited and yet to be promulgated State Board of Elections auditing regulations known as Part 6210.18. For well over a year now, we have been involved in the drafting of these regulations. They offer the only hope for anything better than the ill-considered 3% spot checks in the Election Law.
A year ago, many of New York's good government groups wrote to the Board, asking for these regulations to reflect best practices. But so far, progress has been slow to non-existent in this area, even as the mad rush to run real elections using potentially fake voting systems continues.
All that said, while the value of certification has been greatly exaggerated, we think it might be fair to say that if done properly, certification can prove that a voting system can work -- not that it actually will work. This weak assurance is of course not sufficient, but it's better than no assurance at all. The only way to be sure to prevent the disenfranchisement of New York's voters by untrustworthy computers, is to hand count 100%, at least until the systems are certified.
We'll be following this story and reporting on efforts to fix this latest debacle and avoid the Floridization of New York's elections. We don't think this is what New Yorkers signed up for when the State accepted $50-million in federal funds to replace its lever voting machines under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The State has not been able to certify a voting system to replace the levers since then, and as always, it's important to read the law first.
In New York, the law has been decidedly anti-recount. So paper ballots or no paper ballots, the software counts will rule -- just as they did in Florida's 2000 election which brought us Bush v. Gore and ultimately, HAVA itself. Ironic, huh?
The Board did agree to present the matter to the State's Citizens' Election Modernization Advisory Committee. While their opinions are as yet unknown, and probably not binding, at least one member of the group has gone on record as favoring 100% hand counts of ALL votes counted by ANY uncertified voting system. This is in direct conflict with 3 out of the 4 State Board of Elections Commissioners who represent our two major political parties, but unfortunately may no longer be faithfully representing the voters of New York.
Editor's note: Election Transparency Coalition does not endorse op-scan counting with less than a 100% hand-count verification conducted at the polling place on election night.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
ES&S Withdraws Op-Scans from Erie County Test Run
Election officials in Erie County (Buffalo, NY area) agree that lever voting machines are more accurate and reliable than the electronic voting technologies. However, in anticipation of the state-mandated change to electronic voting machines, the county Board of Elections arranged with Election Systems and Software (ES&S) to test their new DS200 optical scan voting machines through their use in eight village elections in March 2009.
These optical scanners are currently undergoing certification testing by the State Board of Elections, but last year optical scan machines made by ES&S failed pre-election tests in one Michigan county and produced conflicting vote totals in other areas. Election officials reported that the same ballots run through the same machines yielded different results each time.
The Erie County Board of Elections worked for two months with ES&S and election officials in the eight villages on arrangements to use the machines in the March elections. They were prepared to conduct 100% hand counts if necessary to correct scanner errors. But, a week before the election, ES&S abruptly withdrew their offer to make the op-scan machines available. Instead the elections were conducted on the traditional lever machines.
In a press release dated March 11th, Erie County Election Commissioner Ralph Mohr concluded that, "Unfortunately, the fact that the manufacturer pulled out of the pilot project at the last minute indicates to me a lack of confidence in its own system...The lever style machines will afford voters and candidates the confidence in the integrity and accuracy of the voting process during this election."
Mohr told the Election Transparency Coalition that his county had also experienced problems with the vendor's configuration of the AutoMark accessible ballot marking devices (BMDs) in last year's primaries. He said the order in which the contests were presented on the screen, and via the audio headsets used by voters with visual disabilities, differed from that required by the Election Law and correctly printed on the paper ballots. The county ended up correcting these problems on their own for the general election.
The same voting systems have been selected by New York City, Rockland, Albany and Schenectady counties. The AutoMark has the advantage of being a non-tabulating BMD, which at least would not put vote tallies at risk. It's less than half the price of the riskier tabulating BMD that also counts the votes. But the vendor's refusal to run a pilot election with their ballot counting scanners casts doubt on the State Legislature's decision to replace the lever voting machines with computers in the first place.
ES&S is one of two vendors who have submitted Optical Scan machines for state certification review. The other vendor is Sequoia Voting Systems whose ImageCast BMD was deployed by many New York counties in the November 2008 elections. However, as Election Transparency Coalition and the E-Voter Education Project revealed last August, the optical scan portion of the ImageCast contains at least one serious and obvious flaw -- a hole which enables stuffing of the locked ballot box. (See this link for video and a legal analysis.)
These optical scanners are currently undergoing certification testing by the State Board of Elections, but last year optical scan machines made by ES&S failed pre-election tests in one Michigan county and produced conflicting vote totals in other areas. Election officials reported that the same ballots run through the same machines yielded different results each time.
The Erie County Board of Elections worked for two months with ES&S and election officials in the eight villages on arrangements to use the machines in the March elections. They were prepared to conduct 100% hand counts if necessary to correct scanner errors. But, a week before the election, ES&S abruptly withdrew their offer to make the op-scan machines available. Instead the elections were conducted on the traditional lever machines.
In a press release dated March 11th, Erie County Election Commissioner Ralph Mohr concluded that, "Unfortunately, the fact that the manufacturer pulled out of the pilot project at the last minute indicates to me a lack of confidence in its own system...The lever style machines will afford voters and candidates the confidence in the integrity and accuracy of the voting process during this election."
Mohr told the Election Transparency Coalition that his county had also experienced problems with the vendor's configuration of the AutoMark accessible ballot marking devices (BMDs) in last year's primaries. He said the order in which the contests were presented on the screen, and via the audio headsets used by voters with visual disabilities, differed from that required by the Election Law and correctly printed on the paper ballots. The county ended up correcting these problems on their own for the general election.
The same voting systems have been selected by New York City, Rockland, Albany and Schenectady counties. The AutoMark has the advantage of being a non-tabulating BMD, which at least would not put vote tallies at risk. It's less than half the price of the riskier tabulating BMD that also counts the votes. But the vendor's refusal to run a pilot election with their ballot counting scanners casts doubt on the State Legislature's decision to replace the lever voting machines with computers in the first place.
ES&S is one of two vendors who have submitted Optical Scan machines for state certification review. The other vendor is Sequoia Voting Systems whose ImageCast BMD was deployed by many New York counties in the November 2008 elections. However, as Election Transparency Coalition and the E-Voter Education Project revealed last August, the optical scan portion of the ImageCast contains at least one serious and obvious flaw -- a hole which enables stuffing of the locked ballot box. (See this link for video and a legal analysis.)
- Joanne Lukacher
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Sequoia's Sinking Ship
by Rady Ananda
Cross posted at OpEdNews
"Right now, there is not a single voting system on the market or in use anywhere in the country that meets current federal voting standards, and very few people realize it." ~ Douglas Kellner, New York State Board of Elections Commissioner (AP)
From New York to New Jersey, from D.C. to Florida, Sequoia Voting Systems continue to fail. Vendor response is, we're not at fault and don't you dare study our product. That's because experts tell us in report after report these machines are fatally flawed by design, lacking the most basic security protocols. Yet, election managers continue to use them, and "voter advocacy" groups continue to support their use. A recent University of California (Santa Barbara) paper by the Computer Security Group warned that "the very core of our democracy is in danger."
Designed-to-be-hacked is what we discovered in our own investigation. The physical security of Sequoia's optical scan ballot marking device is designed with a slotted hole that allows up to ten cardstock ballots to be stuffed at once into the locked ballot box. Here's exclusive video.
New York's state level election officials also tend to blame election workers when Sequoia's machines fail. New York tested out its shiny new $12,000 Ballot Marking Device made by Sequoia-Dominion in the September 9th election. When state election commissioners tried to vote on the machines, the BMDs didn't work. At the Sept. 17th NY SBOE meeting, Anna Svizzzero, Director of Election Operations, advised better training of poll workers was needed.
Of 3,350 BMDs deployed in the Sept. 9th election, only 1,333 people voted on them. Only one voter used the BMD in Ulster County – John Decker (D-Highland), who complained that he first watched the 20-minute instructional video and then it took another 20 minutes to vote on the machine. McClatchy reports:
In Nassau County, 126 BMDs were deployed but only twelve voters used them, reported Nassau County Elections Commissioner, William Biamonte. Making his job even tougher, Sequoia failed to deliver the BMD's privacy materials until the Saturday before the election – after the machines had already been deployed. Twenty technicians had to be dispatched to deliver and install the materials.
Faulty design, hackable software, lengthy voting process and an inability to accurately count the votes won't stop the League of Women Voters of New York State from insisting these machines be used, and promoted for use.
Tempers flared at the end of Friday's NY SBOE meeting when the NY LWV accused election officials in four counties of dissuading voters from using the new software driven optical scan ballot marking devices. Naming Buffalo, Binghamton (Broome), Utica, and Albany, they charged:
Phew, smart commissioners, even if they are violating state-mandates that all voters can use the BMDs. Maybe they're avoiding hand counts. This year, NY election officials must hand count the ballots cast on BMDs since Sequoia still hasn't been certified for use in NY.
Sequoia admits to hundreds of document discrepancies – that's where they provide one thing but the document says something else; or they provide and document something that New York specifically forbids.
The League also reported that the Albany County LWV co-president "was asked to produce evidence of disability." Because she's not disabled, she lied in order to use the new BMD. Not a smart admission to make in the public record, especially after accusing counties of violating NY election rules.
The NY SBOE was highly skeptical of the League's reports, prompting another LWV rep to became hostile. Commissioner Evelyn Aquilla practically called them liars:
The New York League of Women Voters wholly supports the use of software driven optical scanners, despite scientific condemnation. They must have been ignoring the papers, too, that amplified our breaking story on July 1st when we reported that Sequoia's BMD failure rate in Nassau County stood at 85%. Two weeks later, Wired.com reported a 50% statewide failure rate. Failure rate be damned, the League wants these machines in use. But then, the League of Women Voters also supported paperless touchscreen voting systems until June of 2004.
Sequoia Fails around the Nation
Florida's Palm Beach County, right now, reports that 12,000 votes were not counted by Sequoia's optical scanners in its unending nightmare of conflicting results from the August election. That's where 3,400 votes (or 3500, depending on which news article you read) went missing, then were found, and now 12,000 more ballots have been found that the machines didn't count. This is an ongoing fiasco. Today's manual recount of 12,000 ambiguous votes "turned up an additional 159 uncounted ballots." South Florida's Sun Sentinel reported that "software issues" with Sequoia's optical scanners were to blame.
But the Palm Beach Post reports today that election officials will run another recount through the $5.5 million voting system:
John Gideon of VotersUnite.org summarizes the situation this way:
The August vote count troubles follow the June snafu, also in Palm Beach County, when the scanners failed to count 14% of the ballots. At that time, Palm Beach officials were looking to pay Sequoia more money to take over more of the ballot counting process. In January's presidential primary, "defective cartridges" prevented Palm Beach from posting results for several hours. Yet, still, no one in Palm Beach is considering junking the machines, although voters reportedly did dump Elections Director, Arthur Anderson.
Washington, D.C. election officials have had enough, and have subpoenaed Sequoia records to explain why over 12,000 "phantom votes" appeared in the software driven results from this month's primary. When D.C. officials ran the supposedly "faulty cartridges” through the same software, three different results were produced. When they hand counted three precincts, none of the totals matched Sequoia's reported totals.
Better to seize the machines and run a forensic investigation; although, that didn't work out too well when New Jersey tried it earlier this year.
In New Jersey's February 5th primary, Sequoia's AVC Advantage touchscreen voting system produced conflicting vote totals from its own internal memory. When the numbers didn't add up, Union County officials sought the expertise of Princeton University computer security scientists. They caught errors in 60 precincts. Computer scientist Ed Felten produced the tapes showing those errors, and refutes Sequoia's explanations (blaming the pollworkers) for why their computer can't add. Felten concludes:
New Jersey officials seized the machines via subpoena, which Sequoia sought to prevent. Sequoia threatened to sue Union if they studied the machines that Union owns. Union County dropped the investigation. Better to have expensive, faulty counting devices than an expensive lawsuit, I guess. Ed Felten explains this case in the second video embedded in this article, starting at about 4:23.
A month later, Sequoia's website was hacked and defaced.
The Computer Security Group at UCSB may be in trouble for posting that How-to-Hack Sequoia video, but only democracy loyalists would warn the public so instructionally. No doubt, the November 2008 election will be determined by computer hackers, or enough citizens will show up to hand count the ballots after the next round of ridiculous totals are reported. Let's not forget the negative 25 million votes reported for John Kerry in one precinct in Youngstown, Ohio in 2004. That had to be a red flag sent up by a loyalist.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia plan to use Sequoia Voting Systems in what is shaping up to be the third questionable presidential "election" in a row.
Note from the editor:
Is the prospect of yet another questionable "election" result at all related to the following report from the Army Times (via democracynow.org.):
Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations
Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.
Cross posted at OpEdNews
"Right now, there is not a single voting system on the market or in use anywhere in the country that meets current federal voting standards, and very few people realize it." ~ Douglas Kellner, New York State Board of Elections Commissioner (AP)
From New York to New Jersey, from D.C. to Florida, Sequoia Voting Systems continue to fail. Vendor response is, we're not at fault and don't you dare study our product. That's because experts tell us in report after report these machines are fatally flawed by design, lacking the most basic security protocols. Yet, election managers continue to use them, and "voter advocacy" groups continue to support their use. A recent University of California (Santa Barbara) paper by the Computer Security Group warned that "the very core of our democracy is in danger."
Designed-to-be-hacked is what we discovered in our own investigation. The physical security of Sequoia's optical scan ballot marking device is designed with a slotted hole that allows up to ten cardstock ballots to be stuffed at once into the locked ballot box. Here's exclusive video.
New York's state level election officials also tend to blame election workers when Sequoia's machines fail. New York tested out its shiny new $12,000 Ballot Marking Device made by Sequoia-Dominion in the September 9th election. When state election commissioners tried to vote on the machines, the BMDs didn't work. At the Sept. 17th NY SBOE meeting, Anna Svizzzero, Director of Election Operations, advised better training of poll workers was needed.
Of 3,350 BMDs deployed in the Sept. 9th election, only 1,333 people voted on them. Only one voter used the BMD in Ulster County – John Decker (D-Highland), who complained that he first watched the 20-minute instructional video and then it took another 20 minutes to vote on the machine. McClatchy reports:
"Decker said he couldn't believe that it took him so long to vote and would like to see the county retain the older lever pull machines."
In Nassau County, 126 BMDs were deployed but only twelve voters used them, reported Nassau County Elections Commissioner, William Biamonte. Making his job even tougher, Sequoia failed to deliver the BMD's privacy materials until the Saturday before the election – after the machines had already been deployed. Twenty technicians had to be dispatched to deliver and install the materials.
Faulty design, hackable software, lengthy voting process and an inability to accurately count the votes won't stop the League of Women Voters of New York State from insisting these machines be used, and promoted for use.
Tempers flared at the end of Friday's NY SBOE meeting when the NY LWV accused election officials in four counties of dissuading voters from using the new software driven optical scan ballot marking devices. Naming Buffalo, Binghamton (Broome), Utica, and Albany, they charged:
"The counties are actively discouraging voters who are not disabled from using the ballot marking devices."
Phew, smart commissioners, even if they are violating state-mandates that all voters can use the BMDs. Maybe they're avoiding hand counts. This year, NY election officials must hand count the ballots cast on BMDs since Sequoia still hasn't been certified for use in NY.
Sequoia admits to hundreds of document discrepancies – that's where they provide one thing but the document says something else; or they provide and document something that New York specifically forbids.
The League also reported that the Albany County LWV co-president "was asked to produce evidence of disability." Because she's not disabled, she lied in order to use the new BMD. Not a smart admission to make in the public record, especially after accusing counties of violating NY election rules.
The NY SBOE was highly skeptical of the League's reports, prompting another LWV rep to became hostile. Commissioner Evelyn Aquilla practically called them liars:
"We'd like to have that in writing, because, you know what? We didn't see that anywhere. Not any place.... To say that every single commissioner did that, across the state, I don't know if that's true or not, because we saw, I saw four different ... counties, and I never saw that anywhere. I went into at least twelve places."
The New York League of Women Voters wholly supports the use of software driven optical scanners, despite scientific condemnation. They must have been ignoring the papers, too, that amplified our breaking story on July 1st when we reported that Sequoia's BMD failure rate in Nassau County stood at 85%. Two weeks later, Wired.com reported a 50% statewide failure rate. Failure rate be damned, the League wants these machines in use. But then, the League of Women Voters also supported paperless touchscreen voting systems until June of 2004.
Sequoia Fails around the Nation
Florida's Palm Beach County, right now, reports that 12,000 votes were not counted by Sequoia's optical scanners in its unending nightmare of conflicting results from the August election. That's where 3,400 votes (or 3500, depending on which news article you read) went missing, then were found, and now 12,000 more ballots have been found that the machines didn't count. This is an ongoing fiasco. Today's manual recount of 12,000 ambiguous votes "turned up an additional 159 uncounted ballots." South Florida's Sun Sentinel reported that "software issues" with Sequoia's optical scanners were to blame.
But the Palm Beach Post reports today that election officials will run another recount through the $5.5 million voting system:
County Commissioner Jess Santamaria questioned the reliability of the machines the county bought from Sequoia Voting Systems.
"I do have serious concerns," said Santamaria, who also serves on the canvassing board. "My concern affects this election and the November election as well. I don't see how we can have confidence in this system."
John Gideon of VotersUnite.org summarizes the situation this way:
“The county now wants to do another machine recount of the recount of the recount and may also ask to do another hand recount of the newly requested machine recount.”
The August vote count troubles follow the June snafu, also in Palm Beach County, when the scanners failed to count 14% of the ballots. At that time, Palm Beach officials were looking to pay Sequoia more money to take over more of the ballot counting process. In January's presidential primary, "defective cartridges" prevented Palm Beach from posting results for several hours. Yet, still, no one in Palm Beach is considering junking the machines, although voters reportedly did dump Elections Director, Arthur Anderson.
Washington, D.C. election officials have had enough, and have subpoenaed Sequoia records to explain why over 12,000 "phantom votes" appeared in the software driven results from this month's primary. When D.C. officials ran the supposedly "faulty cartridges” through the same software, three different results were produced. When they hand counted three precincts, none of the totals matched Sequoia's reported totals.
Better to seize the machines and run a forensic investigation; although, that didn't work out too well when New Jersey tried it earlier this year.
In New Jersey's February 5th primary, Sequoia's AVC Advantage touchscreen voting system produced conflicting vote totals from its own internal memory. When the numbers didn't add up, Union County officials sought the expertise of Princeton University computer security scientists. They caught errors in 60 precincts. Computer scientist Ed Felten produced the tapes showing those errors, and refutes Sequoia's explanations (blaming the pollworkers) for why their computer can't add. Felten concludes:
"Sequoia's own explanation makes clear that they made an engineering error that caused the voting machine to behave incorrectly."
New Jersey officials seized the machines via subpoena, which Sequoia sought to prevent. Sequoia threatened to sue Union if they studied the machines that Union owns. Union County dropped the investigation. Better to have expensive, faulty counting devices than an expensive lawsuit, I guess. Ed Felten explains this case in the second video embedded in this article, starting at about 4:23.
A month later, Sequoia's website was hacked and defaced.
The Computer Security Group at UCSB may be in trouble for posting that How-to-Hack Sequoia video, but only democracy loyalists would warn the public so instructionally. No doubt, the November 2008 election will be determined by computer hackers, or enough citizens will show up to hand count the ballots after the next round of ridiculous totals are reported. Let's not forget the negative 25 million votes reported for John Kerry in one precinct in Youngstown, Ohio in 2004. That had to be a red flag sent up by a loyalist.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia plan to use Sequoia Voting Systems in what is shaping up to be the third questionable presidential "election" in a row.
Note from the editor:
Is the prospect of yet another questionable "election" result at all related to the following report from the Army Times (via democracynow.org.):
Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations
Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.
-jl
Friday, July 25, 2008
Op-Scans Unlikely to Meet Certification Testing Deadline
As our readers know, New York State is under federal court order to adhere to a schedule for testing and certifying the software driven electronic optical scanners which will replace our lever machines as a means of counting our ballots. The deadline for certification testing is October 1st 2008. Earlier this month we noted that 85% of the Sequoia Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) purchased by Nassau County were defective. Now, in a public letter, New York State Election Commissioner Douglas Kellner reveals why it is increasingly unlikely that the two Op-Scan systems ordered by New York counties, Dominion Voting Systems Image Cast (marketed by Sequoia Pacific ) and the ES&S DS-200, will meet state certification standards by the target date.
Leaving aside for now the consensus of the scientific community that software based voting machines can never reach acceptable levels of reliability and security, Mr. Kellner's letter, outlining examples of specific problems with these machines, reveals the low to non-existent quality control standards and irresponsible business ethics of the vendors, an assessment which is perfectly consistent with the pattern of behaviour we have discussed previously in these pages.
We can also discern from this letter that the State may soon be under increasing pressure to lower or ignore its own testing standards in the interest of time. We urge the Legislature and the Attorney General to continue to stand firm against such pressure and to use this opportunity to re-examine the legal and/or practical necessity for abandoning the immutable technological genius of our lever machines.
Leaving aside for now the consensus of the scientific community that software based voting machines can never reach acceptable levels of reliability and security, Mr. Kellner's letter, outlining examples of specific problems with these machines, reveals the low to non-existent quality control standards and irresponsible business ethics of the vendors, an assessment which is perfectly consistent with the pattern of behaviour we have discussed previously in these pages.
We can also discern from this letter that the State may soon be under increasing pressure to lower or ignore its own testing standards in the interest of time. We urge the Legislature and the Attorney General to continue to stand firm against such pressure and to use this opportunity to re-examine the legal and/or practical necessity for abandoning the immutable technological genius of our lever machines.
-- Joanne Lukacher
From: Douglas A. Kellner
Date: Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 6:36 PM
Subject: Systest Report on NY Certification Progress
To: "Douglas A. Kellner"
As most of you know, the New York State Board of Elections is doing certification testing on two precinct based digital optical scanning systems, the Dominion Voting System ImageCast (marketed in New York by Sequoia Pacific) and the ES&S DS-200. I believe that ours is the most comprehensive testing anywhere, including that done by the EAC.
The court ordered timetable provides for completion of certification testing by October 1, 2008, which appears to be increasingly unrealistic. The weekly report from SysTest, New York's independent testing authority, excertped below shows just how difficult it would be to meet this target date.
What is particularly distressing is discussion that New York should consider overlooking what some are describing as hundreds of "de minimis" discrepancies from the VVSG or NY regulations. In my view, if they are really de minimis, I do not understand why the vendors cannot address them. I am trying to keep an open mind, but I believe that this may become a major issue within a couple of months as pressure mounts to have us overlook the shortcomings in the interest of replacing the lever machines in 2009. The industry and the Department of Justice will argue that if every other state is using equipment that does not comply with current federal standards, why should New York be the exception?
I believe that there is still strong bi-partisan consensus within New York that we should stick to our policy that newly purchased voting equipment meet all of the currently applicable standards.
This is an excerpt from the SysTest Weekly Report to the New York State Board of Elections:
SCHEDULE RISKS: Time and schedule continue to be the major constraint and risk to the successful completion of this project. SysTest Labs remains committed to providing thorough and complete functional testing, as well as initiating the run-for-the-record test pass in accordance with the current schedule and timeline. However; NYSBOE's ability to meet its court-mandated timeline for complete and thorough testing is at significant risk for the reasons described below.
Issue 1: Test Case Execution. With only 16 working days until the commencement of the run-for-the-record test pass, there remains insufficient time for a complete test pass through the entire test case suite for both initial and regression test passes. Our risk mitigation strategy is to configure five test labs for each vendor, allowing us to execute test cases in parallel. The likely outcome, however, is that not all of the test cases will be completed within the remaining allotted time, and the Vendor's will be unable to address all of the discrepancies discovered.
Issue 2: Documentation Discrepancies. Numerous documentation discrepancies, caused in large part by missing information from both Vendors' documentation, prevent us from finalizing the test procedures in all of the test cases. As of close of business on Tuesday, July 22, Sequoia/Dominion has 148 open documentation discrepancies and ES&S has 414 open documentation discrepancies. Without timely receipt of this missing information and documentation discrepancy fixes, thorough and complete testing cannot be accomplished per the schedule.
Issue 3: Functional Discrepancies. Based on our experience, both as an ITA/VSTL and with the current NYSBOE test project, we anticipate that a large number of discrepancies will be discovered as part of the functional test effort. There is a significant risk, given the remaining allotted time, that the Vendors will be able to address all of the expected discrepancies and SysTest Labs will have sufficient time to regression test the fixes. If a significant number of discrepancies are uncovered, the run-for-the-record test pass will have to proceed with these remaining open.
Issue 4: Hardware/Software Deliveries. SysTest Labs does not yet have all of the necessary hardware and software, which is still being delivered by the Vendors. Moreover, as we configure the voting systems, we are discovering additional documentation and procedural discrepancies.
Issue 5: NYSBOE Approval of Deliverable 7. Based on direction from the NYSBOE, SysTest Labs cannot begin testing without formal approval of Deliverable 7, Voting System Specific Test Plans. Therefore, without timely approval, the start of functional testing will be delayed.
Issue 6: Required NYSBOE Policy Guidance. SysTest Labs requested from NYSBOE policy guidance with respect to the configuration files for both Sequoia/Dominion and ES&S. At issue here is whether the State will allow changes to configurations in set-up parameters for individual counties or whether a single configuration will be mandated. This decision impacts vendor-specific test case development and thus will effect test schedules.
The following is a sample of the Vendor-specific delays that are keeping us from beginning functional testing:
Sequoia/Dominion:
It was discovered while configuring the Sequoia/Dominion EED computer that the election setup procedures do not match the documentation. Sequoia/Dominion reports that the procedures were changed, but the documentation was not updated. Discrepancies have been entered.
Because we do not have documentation from Sequoia/Dominion that tells us how to set up a single tower as a standalone system (all documentation still references the network), the Sequoia/Dominion rep had to walk us through several hours of the installation to get to a point where we could proceed with the current documentation. This document does NOT address several necessary printer drivers and Adobe configurations. Discrepancies are being entered.
Sequoia/Dominion is still delivering and building the voting systems for Lot 1. This is impacting the configuration of the test labs and the start of functional testing.
We are still waiting for Sequoia/Dominion to deliver the COTS software to be installed on the voting test computers. This is impacting the configuration of the test computers and the start of functional testing.
Please reference the risks in the Vendor-specific progress report below. SysTest Labs is still waiting for Sequoia/Dominion to send source code mapping, information concerning crypto algorithms, additional test hardware, and additional documentation.
ES&S:
ES&S provided expired licenses for RM COBOL. They are in the process of activating the licenses, but this is impacting the configuration of the test computers and the start of functional testing.
ES&S has pulled all of the VAT A200-00 units from testing. We are waiting for ES&S to deliver updated A200 units for testing.
Some of the equipment for the test computers delivered from ES&S failed (i.e. 2 test computers, keyboards, mouse, and switches). ES&S is replacing the failing equipment, but this is delaying the configuration of the test labs.
The installation of COTS software has been slowed because of missing and/or incomplete documentation and instructions. This is resulting in multiple emails and calls to ES&S and is delaying the configuration of the test computers.
There is no documentation or instructions from ES&S concerning what COTS software is to be installed on the AIMS computer.
Please reference the risks in the Vendor-specific progress report below. SysTest Labs is still waiting for ES&S to send compilers for augmented source code review, information concerning crypto algorithms, additional test hardware, and additional documentation.
I have no objection if you post or forward this e-mail. If you want a copy of the full Systest Weekly Report, please send me an e-mail.
Douglas A. Kellner
Co-Chair
New York State Board of Elections
Tel. (212) 889-2121
Fax (212) 684-6224
Date: Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 6:36 PM
Subject: Systest Report on NY Certification Progress
To: "Douglas A. Kellner"
As most of you know, the New York State Board of Elections is doing certification testing on two precinct based digital optical scanning systems, the Dominion Voting System ImageCast (marketed in New York by Sequoia Pacific) and the ES&S DS-200. I believe that ours is the most comprehensive testing anywhere, including that done by the EAC.
The court ordered timetable provides for completion of certification testing by October 1, 2008, which appears to be increasingly unrealistic. The weekly report from SysTest, New York's independent testing authority, excertped below shows just how difficult it would be to meet this target date.
What is particularly distressing is discussion that New York should consider overlooking what some are describing as hundreds of "de minimis" discrepancies from the VVSG or NY regulations. In my view, if they are really de minimis, I do not understand why the vendors cannot address them. I am trying to keep an open mind, but I believe that this may become a major issue within a couple of months as pressure mounts to have us overlook the shortcomings in the interest of replacing the lever machines in 2009. The industry and the Department of Justice will argue that if every other state is using equipment that does not comply with current federal standards, why should New York be the exception?
I believe that there is still strong bi-partisan consensus within New York that we should stick to our policy that newly purchased voting equipment meet all of the currently applicable standards.
This is an excerpt from the SysTest Weekly Report to the New York State Board of Elections:
SCHEDULE RISKS: Time and schedule continue to be the major constraint and risk to the successful completion of this project. SysTest Labs remains committed to providing thorough and complete functional testing, as well as initiating the run-for-the-record test pass in accordance with the current schedule and timeline. However; NYSBOE's ability to meet its court-mandated timeline for complete and thorough testing is at significant risk for the reasons described below.
Issue 1: Test Case Execution. With only 16 working days until the commencement of the run-for-the-record test pass, there remains insufficient time for a complete test pass through the entire test case suite for both initial and regression test passes. Our risk mitigation strategy is to configure five test labs for each vendor, allowing us to execute test cases in parallel. The likely outcome, however, is that not all of the test cases will be completed within the remaining allotted time, and the Vendor's will be unable to address all of the discrepancies discovered.
Issue 2: Documentation Discrepancies. Numerous documentation discrepancies, caused in large part by missing information from both Vendors' documentation, prevent us from finalizing the test procedures in all of the test cases. As of close of business on Tuesday, July 22, Sequoia/Dominion has 148 open documentation discrepancies and ES&S has 414 open documentation discrepancies. Without timely receipt of this missing information and documentation discrepancy fixes, thorough and complete testing cannot be accomplished per the schedule.
Issue 3: Functional Discrepancies. Based on our experience, both as an ITA/VSTL and with the current NYSBOE test project, we anticipate that a large number of discrepancies will be discovered as part of the functional test effort. There is a significant risk, given the remaining allotted time, that the Vendors will be able to address all of the expected discrepancies and SysTest Labs will have sufficient time to regression test the fixes. If a significant number of discrepancies are uncovered, the run-for-the-record test pass will have to proceed with these remaining open.
Issue 4: Hardware/Software Deliveries. SysTest Labs does not yet have all of the necessary hardware and software, which is still being delivered by the Vendors. Moreover, as we configure the voting systems, we are discovering additional documentation and procedural discrepancies.
Issue 5: NYSBOE Approval of Deliverable 7. Based on direction from the NYSBOE, SysTest Labs cannot begin testing without formal approval of Deliverable 7, Voting System Specific Test Plans. Therefore, without timely approval, the start of functional testing will be delayed.
Issue 6: Required NYSBOE Policy Guidance. SysTest Labs requested from NYSBOE policy guidance with respect to the configuration files for both Sequoia/Dominion and ES&S. At issue here is whether the State will allow changes to configurations in set-up parameters for individual counties or whether a single configuration will be mandated. This decision impacts vendor-specific test case development and thus will effect test schedules.
The following is a sample of the Vendor-specific delays that are keeping us from beginning functional testing:
Sequoia/Dominion:
It was discovered while configuring the Sequoia/Dominion EED computer that the election setup procedures do not match the documentation. Sequoia/Dominion reports that the procedures were changed, but the documentation was not updated. Discrepancies have been entered.
Because we do not have documentation from Sequoia/Dominion that tells us how to set up a single tower as a standalone system (all documentation still references the network), the Sequoia/Dominion rep had to walk us through several hours of the installation to get to a point where we could proceed with the current documentation. This document does NOT address several necessary printer drivers and Adobe configurations. Discrepancies are being entered.
Sequoia/Dominion is still delivering and building the voting systems for Lot 1. This is impacting the configuration of the test labs and the start of functional testing.
We are still waiting for Sequoia/Dominion to deliver the COTS software to be installed on the voting test computers. This is impacting the configuration of the test computers and the start of functional testing.
Please reference the risks in the Vendor-specific progress report below. SysTest Labs is still waiting for Sequoia/Dominion to send source code mapping, information concerning crypto algorithms, additional test hardware, and additional documentation.
ES&S:
ES&S provided expired licenses for RM COBOL. They are in the process of activating the licenses, but this is impacting the configuration of the test computers and the start of functional testing.
ES&S has pulled all of the VAT A200-00 units from testing. We are waiting for ES&S to deliver updated A200 units for testing.
Some of the equipment for the test computers delivered from ES&S failed (i.e. 2 test computers, keyboards, mouse, and switches). ES&S is replacing the failing equipment, but this is delaying the configuration of the test labs.
The installation of COTS software has been slowed because of missing and/or incomplete documentation and instructions. This is resulting in multiple emails and calls to ES&S and is delaying the configuration of the test computers.
There is no documentation or instructions from ES&S concerning what COTS software is to be installed on the AIMS computer.
Please reference the risks in the Vendor-specific progress report below. SysTest Labs is still waiting for ES&S to send compilers for augmented source code review, information concerning crypto algorithms, additional test hardware, and additional documentation.
I have no objection if you post or forward this e-mail. If you want a copy of the full Systest Weekly Report, please send me an e-mail.
Douglas A. Kellner
Co-Chair
New York State Board of Elections
Tel. (212) 889-2121
Fax (212) 684-6224
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Mark Crispin Miller and Hacking Democracy
Mark Crispin Miller is a NYU professor and author of several books and plays including Fooled Again, an account of the theft and the cover-up of the theft of the 2004 election. Here he weighs in on the op-scan controversy in New York State:
NO op-scans in New York!
As a friend of Bo Lipari, and longtime champion of New Yorkers for Verified Voting (NYVV), I do regret that I must disagree profoundly with them on the matter of how New York casts its votes. While they call for replacing this state's lever system with op-scans, I see op-scans as unacceptable. As computerized machines, they don't permit the sort of open vote-count that democracy requires, but only partial and belated audits--a lousy substitute for the simplest and most honest counting method of them all: one that we can all observe together.
Moreover, those op-scans are manufactured and maintained by the same suspicious private companies that make and service DRE's: Diebold/Premier, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and the latest incarnation of Sequoia. These companies are as opaque as the machines themselves; and they're in bed with the Republicans. If they were in bed with the Democrats, they would be no more acceptable. The fact is that their very source is tainted, so they have no place here in New York (or anywhere else).
Finally--and unsurprisingly--those suckers can be hacked with ease, and clearly have been. (The New Hampshire primary, where Clinton won the op-scan-counted votes by some five points, while Obama won the hand-counted ballots by a little over six, is only one of many instances of fishy outcomes where they use op-scans instead of DRE's.) As Andi Novick reminds us...the hackability of op-scans was made crystal-clear in HBO's great documentary Hacking Democracy.
Hacking Democracy will be shown on Sunday, July 13th at 2:00 pm at The Muddy Cup, 305 Main Street, Poughkeepsie, NY. Andi Novick will be on hand to answer question about the NY VOTERS litigation and to sign up volunteers.
Mark Crispin Miller will be speaking at Vassar College on September 8th, 2008 in an event sponsored by Vassar College American Studies Program and Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition. Watch these pages for further information.
NO op-scans in New York!
As a friend of Bo Lipari, and longtime champion of New Yorkers for Verified Voting (NYVV), I do regret that I must disagree profoundly with them on the matter of how New York casts its votes. While they call for replacing this state's lever system with op-scans, I see op-scans as unacceptable. As computerized machines, they don't permit the sort of open vote-count that democracy requires, but only partial and belated audits--a lousy substitute for the simplest and most honest counting method of them all: one that we can all observe together.
Moreover, those op-scans are manufactured and maintained by the same suspicious private companies that make and service DRE's: Diebold/Premier, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and the latest incarnation of Sequoia. These companies are as opaque as the machines themselves; and they're in bed with the Republicans. If they were in bed with the Democrats, they would be no more acceptable. The fact is that their very source is tainted, so they have no place here in New York (or anywhere else).
Finally--and unsurprisingly--those suckers can be hacked with ease, and clearly have been. (The New Hampshire primary, where Clinton won the op-scan-counted votes by some five points, while Obama won the hand-counted ballots by a little over six, is only one of many instances of fishy outcomes where they use op-scans instead of DRE's.) As Andi Novick reminds us...the hackability of op-scans was made crystal-clear in HBO's great documentary Hacking Democracy.
Hacking Democracy will be shown on Sunday, July 13th at 2:00 pm at The Muddy Cup, 305 Main Street, Poughkeepsie, NY. Andi Novick will be on hand to answer question about the NY VOTERS litigation and to sign up volunteers.
Mark Crispin Miller will be speaking at Vassar College on September 8th, 2008 in an event sponsored by Vassar College American Studies Program and Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition. Watch these pages for further information.
- Joanne Lukacher
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Lever Machines - Who Says They Are Illegal?
One of the first questions most people will ask when confronted with warnings about Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Touch Screen voting machines and Optical Scan ballot counters (Op-scans) is: "But aren't these analogous to banking at the ATM, and aren't scanners used to mark standardized tests? Both are used on a regular basis without a problem." Indeed, one vendor/manufacturer of ATMs is also a purveyor of Touch Screen and Op-Scan voting systems, although both the Touch Screens and the Op-Scans are generally much more shoddily made and engineered than your average ATM. The difference is transparency. If your money suddenly and unexpectedly disappears you are immediately aware of the loss. If your vote is lost or changed, you would never know. A little thing called the secret ballot really complicates things!
Two simple and comparatively reliable alternatives to computerized vote counting are the hand counting of paper ballots (HCPB) and the continued use of lever machines. Most presentations on HAVA (Help America Vote Act of 2002) compliance begin with the assertion that Lever Machines are now illegal and must be replaced by electronic voting machines. However, according to 2004 testimony by New York State Board of Elections Commissioner Doug Kellner:
The federal Help America Vote Act, 42 USC §§15301 et seq., will require substantial changes in election administration for the 2006 elections. In particular, 42 USC § 15481, sets minimum standards for voting machines. Our lever machines satisfy all but one of those standards, that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is 'accessible for individuals with disabilities, including non-visual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.
Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) which will comply with HAVA's standards for disability access and will produce a paper ballot for the disabled voter have now been approved for use in New York State. As required by HAVA one such device will be available at each polling place for the November 2008 elections. Non-disabled voters will continue to use the lever machines in November 2008 or may choose to use the BMD . These BMD paper ballots will be hand-counted in 2008 but most county election commissioners are anticipating the use of Op-Scans to count paper ballots for all voters beginning in 2009.
ReMediaETC in upcoming posts will be demonstrating the risks to our democracy posed by computerized vote counting and, in challenging the security and lack of transparency of Op-Scans, will argue that the continued use of lever machines is legal under HAVA and should be used until it is determined that New York is in need of some other transparent and secure means of counting our ballots
Here is Commissioner Kellner in an interview from 2005:
Machines similar to today's lever machines were at the center of a voter-fraud scandal in the 1940s. The machines had mechanical counters similar to odometers that recorded how many votes were cast for each candidate. Some of the people responsible for counting the votes used pen knives to change the counters and thus the votes. Similarly, the counters used on today's machines could be adjusted prior to the opening of polls to provide an artificial advantage to a candidate. Unlike e-voting machines, which have all of its inner-workings hidden away as code, the working parts of lever machines are exposed to the world. The fraud of the 1940s was uncovered because volunteers from the polling stations noticed that the numbers on their machines at the counting location were not the same as when they left the polling station. Similarly, any tampering with a lever machine today would be plainly visible to the volunteer preparing it for poll opening. Becoming aware of fraud on an e-voting machine would be much more difficult, because so much of their inner-workings are invisible to all but the software programmers.
Fighting fraud carried out by code is also particularly expensive. Some e-voting systems run on 150,000 lines of code and to uncover whether fraud has occurred, or by whom and how, requires an army of programmers, a number of years, and millions of dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that their examination will produce results.
The Hand Counted Paper Ballot Alternative will be discussed in an upcoming post.
Two simple and comparatively reliable alternatives to computerized vote counting are the hand counting of paper ballots (HCPB) and the continued use of lever machines. Most presentations on HAVA (Help America Vote Act of 2002) compliance begin with the assertion that Lever Machines are now illegal and must be replaced by electronic voting machines. However, according to 2004 testimony by New York State Board of Elections Commissioner Doug Kellner:
The federal Help America Vote Act, 42 USC §§15301 et seq., will require substantial changes in election administration for the 2006 elections. In particular, 42 USC § 15481, sets minimum standards for voting machines. Our lever machines satisfy all but one of those standards, that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is 'accessible for individuals with disabilities, including non-visual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.
Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) which will comply with HAVA's standards for disability access and will produce a paper ballot for the disabled voter have now been approved for use in New York State. As required by HAVA one such device will be available at each polling place for the November 2008 elections. Non-disabled voters will continue to use the lever machines in November 2008 or may choose to use the BMD . These BMD paper ballots will be hand-counted in 2008 but most county election commissioners are anticipating the use of Op-Scans to count paper ballots for all voters beginning in 2009.
ReMediaETC in upcoming posts will be demonstrating the risks to our democracy posed by computerized vote counting and, in challenging the security and lack of transparency of Op-Scans, will argue that the continued use of lever machines is legal under HAVA and should be used until it is determined that New York is in need of some other transparent and secure means of counting our ballots
Here is Commissioner Kellner in an interview from 2005:
Machines similar to today's lever machines were at the center of a voter-fraud scandal in the 1940s. The machines had mechanical counters similar to odometers that recorded how many votes were cast for each candidate. Some of the people responsible for counting the votes used pen knives to change the counters and thus the votes. Similarly, the counters used on today's machines could be adjusted prior to the opening of polls to provide an artificial advantage to a candidate. Unlike e-voting machines, which have all of its inner-workings hidden away as code, the working parts of lever machines are exposed to the world. The fraud of the 1940s was uncovered because volunteers from the polling stations noticed that the numbers on their machines at the counting location were not the same as when they left the polling station. Similarly, any tampering with a lever machine today would be plainly visible to the volunteer preparing it for poll opening. Becoming aware of fraud on an e-voting machine would be much more difficult, because so much of their inner-workings are invisible to all but the software programmers.
Fighting fraud carried out by code is also particularly expensive. Some e-voting systems run on 150,000 lines of code and to uncover whether fraud has occurred, or by whom and how, requires an army of programmers, a number of years, and millions of dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that their examination will produce results.
The Hand Counted Paper Ballot Alternative will be discussed in an upcoming post.
- Joanne Lukacher
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