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E-voting Experts
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Service de Documentation du Conseil Constitutionnel
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| E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts | ||
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| Mise ý jour rÈussie | ||
| Description | evoting-experts.com | |
| Webmaster | ||
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| GÈnÈrateur | http://wordpress.org/?v=1.2.1 | |
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| Problems in Maryland Just Now Surfacing? | ||
| CatÈgorie | General | |
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| Description: | It appears, if this report pans out, that there were massive systemic failures across Maryland involving Diebold AccuVote-TS machines last November; problems including lost votes, multiple machine failures and even unreadable data cartridges. Why have we only heard about this now? It's unclear. From the first report ... plus... |
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| It appears, if this report pans out, that there were massive systemic failures across Maryland involving Diebold AccuVote-TS machines last November; problems including lost votes, multiple machine failures and even unreadable data cartridges. Why have we only heard about this now? It’s unclear. From the first report I’ve seen on this: Scoop: Emerging Scandal on MD Voting Machine Performance Montgomery County, Maryland. According to county election officials and other sources, all Maryland voting machines have been on ‘’lockdown'’ since November 2, 2004 due to statewide machine failures including 12% of machines in Montgomery County, some of which appear to have lost votes in significant numbers. The State Board of Elections convinced the media that Election Day went smoothly, when in fact there were serious statewide, systemic problems with the Diebold electronic voting machines – so serious that the SBE and Diebold still have not figured out how to prevent the loss of votes in the future. “Election Day was anything but smooth. Votes were lost, computer cards storing votes were unreadable, thousands of error messages were reported, machines froze in mid-voting and machines refused to boot up. The problems with the machines were so widespread and serious that efforts to hide the problems have failed,” said Linda Schade, director of TrueVoteMD.org. “It is not sufficient for Diebold and the SBE to investigate themselves. They have misled the public about this problem and an independent investigation is needed. Further, these problems indicate that the Diebold machines should be decertified as required by Maryland law and as provided for in the Diebold contract. This is an opportunity to correct the mistaken purchase of paperless electronic voting machines. Diebold should refund Maryland tax dollars and we should start anew with a system that voters trust because it can be independently audited and recounts can be meaningful.” We’ll need to see some corroboration of this report and what evidence is consistent across the report and what the Maryland elections officials have to say for themselves. I truly hope that this hasn’t been shrouded in secrecy for more than four months… that would be an unqualified disaster of the electoral system and responsibility would lie on the shoulders those we entrust to ensure our votes count. UPDATE [2005-03-09 17:03:57]: A bit more information on this situation has surfaced in an AP story and in a few critical documents on the TrueVoteMD website. Apparently, the Montogomery County Board of Elections just released a report, “2004 Presidential General Election Review - Lessons Learned”, which is the basis for the data cited in the story below. Note that the Maryland State Board of Elections claims to have not seen this report and disputes these numbers saying that only 12 out of approximately 3,000 machines in Montgomery County failed. TrueVoteMD has posted copies of the report (linked to above) and an internal memo, “Montgomery County Root Cause Failure Analysis”. These documents appear to be authentic (that is, no county official is yet disputing their authenticity). Here’s the skinny from the AP story: Report Shows Problems With Montgomery Voting Machines ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) - A review of voting machines used in Montgomery County on Election day found that 7 percent of the machines had problems such as frozen screens or failed to boot up. An additional 5 percent had vote tallies that were considerably lower than other machines used in the same precincts, causing elections officials to deem them “suspect,” according to the report drafted by the county in December for the local election board. […] [Montgomery] county’s review of the election concluded that 189 of the units failed. Of those, 58 would not boot up and 106 had the screen freeze. “In staff opinion, this is the most serious of the problems,” the report states of the screen freezes. An additional 122 units had results that were deemed suspect, meaning each had 25-50 votes recorded when all other units in a polling place had more than 150 votes. Margie Rohrer, spokeswoman for the county election board, said some of the machines have been sent to Diebold for testing. She referred all other questions to the state board. The report does not mention whether the vote tally was affected by the problems. […] |
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| Exit Poll Post Mortem | ||
| CatÈgorie | General | |
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| Description: | Paul Velleman at left2right has an interesting analysis of the exit poll data from the November presidential election. His conclusions: (1) Discrepancies between exit polls and votes cannot be explained by random chance, so the discrepancies must have had a systematic cause. (2) Explanations given by ... plus... |
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| Paul Velleman at left2right has an interesting analysis of the exit poll data from the November presidential election. His conclusions: (1) Discrepancies between exit polls and votes cannot be explained by random chance, so the discrepancies must have had a systematic cause. (2) Explanations given by the exit pollsters are not statistically plausible. (3) We don’t yet have an adequate explanation. Perhaps we’ll find one after the exit pollsters release their precinct-by-precinct data. |
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| ?Christopher Danielsen?s Voting Experience and The Nature Of Accessibility [and Human Factors]? | ||
| CatÈgorie | General | |
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| Description: | Christopher Danielsen, the editor of NFB's The Voice of the Nation's Blind, describes his experience casting a ballot on a Sequoia AVC Advantage (a full-face button-matrix DRE) with a braile template and instructions ("On My Voting Experience and The Nature Of Accessibility"). In addition to highlighting how difficult it ... plus... | |
| Christopher Danielsen, the editor of NFB’s The Voice of the Nation’s Blind, describes his experience casting a ballot on a Sequoia AVC Advantage (a full-face button-matrix DRE) with a braile template and instructions (“On My Voting Experience and The Nature Of Accessibility”). In addition to highlighting how difficult it is to vote with tactile templates, it provides some stark illustrations of human factors issues such as environmental conditions and voter fatigue (which can be particularly heightened with the lengthy process of reading braille… not to mention that braille literacy rates have been dropping): The ability of a blind person to vote privately and independently does not consist merely of being able to identify which button to press, or which oval to mark, or which hole to punch in order to make a candidate selection. Sighted voters receive confirmation that their vote has been cast, and on newer equipment they are told whether they have over-voted or under-voted a race and so forth. Blind people should receive responses from the voting terminal which tell us what we have accomplished. Similarly, we should be able to navigate through contests and ballot questions at our own pace, and we should be able to review our ballot before casting it as sighted voters can. A static template can?t replace this interactive voting experience, whether that template is laid over a punch card or optically scanned ballot or a touch-screen machine. We must have response from the machine to indicate that the voting machine is accurately recording our choices and that our ballot is cast as we intended. Otherwise, we will be left only with the option of having a poll worker or a person of our choice review the ballot with us to make sure our votes are cast as we intend. While blind voters should certainly be permitted to retain the option of using assistance from another individual of our choice if we so desire, the chance to have a completely private and secret voting experience must not be denied to any blind voter. It is available to every sighted voter, and thus true equality for the blind will not be achieved in voting unless it is also available to us. |
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| More Information Surfaces About ES&S ?Counting Backwards? Feature/Bug | ||
| CatÈgorie | General | |
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| Description: | More information has surfaced in a letter from ES&S to Guilford County, NC, Board of Elections (provided by Joyce McCloy, PDF here and text here): We would like to explain in further technical detail what caused this issue, should you or others at the county have questions. the 32,767 capacity limitation ... plus... |
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| More information has surfaced in a letter from ES&S to Guilford County, NC, Board of Elections (provided by Joyce McCloy, PDF here and text here): We would like to explain in further technical detail what caused this issue, should you or others at the county have questions. the 32,767 capacity limitation at a singled precinct level is a function of the design and definition of the results database used by ERM. The data storage element used to record votes at the precinct level is a two byte binary field. 32,767 is 2 to the 15th power, which is the maximum number held by a two byte word (16 bits) in memory, where the most significant bit is reserved as the sign bit (a plus or minus indicator). Additionally, ERM precinct count level data is stored in a binary computer format known as two’s complement. Data on ERM results reports are printed as the absolute value of the two’s complement of the associated data in the ERM database. This means that once the 32,767 limitation is reached, additional incremental tallies of vote results would not be printed correctly (32,768 through 65,536 would actually be represented as 65,536 to 32, 768). While this value, 32,767 is certainly higher than any practical value that could be tabulated in a single election day precinct, the consideration of reporting all absentee ballots or early voting into a single absentee or “One Stop” precinct does hold the possibility of yielding much higher totals than what may be possible in single election day precincts. This appears to be a case where a local jurisdiction used voting equipment out of the context of the vendor’s design. If they had used an unsigned 16-bit integer variable, they could have reported 65,536 votes. |
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| 561 Votes found in Washington | ||
| CatÈgorie | General, Washington | |
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| Description: | Washington is in its third vote-count. There was the initial count, then a recount and now a third hand count. King county has been particularly fluctuant in its reported numbers in each of these counts. Now -- where the margin of victory in the Governor's race is ... plus... | |
| Washington is in its third vote-count. There was the initial count, then a recount and now a third hand count. King county has been particularly fluctuant in its reported numbers in each of these counts. Now – where the margin of victory in the Governor’s race is 42 votes according to the second recount and 88 votes counting votes found in the current recount – King County has found 561 ballots that were improperly disqualified because signatures of a few hundred registered voters had not made it into their registration database (these signatures existed on the hard-copy registration cards) (from the Seattle Times, “Error discovery could give Gregoire election”): The King County error came to light Sunday when Larry Phillips, chairman of the Metropolitan King County Council, was looking over a list of voters from his neighborhood whose ballots had been disqualified. Phillips spotted his own name on the list, prompting an investigation by King County elections workers that turned up 561 improperly disqualified ballots. King County Elections Director Dean Logan said that when workers were verifying signatures on absentee ballots, they erroneously disqualified voters whose signatures hadn’t been entered into a computer system. Instead, Logan said, they should have double-checked with signatures on voters’ registration cards on file with the county. This is yet another reminder that the voting system is exactly that, a system. There are many points of failure outside of the polling place and even the central tabulation activities. Any part of this system can potentially affect the outcome of the race, by accident or on purpose. |
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| More e-voting problems | ||
| CatÈgorie | General, Ohio, California, Texas, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina | |
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| Description: | (I am just going to update this post as I hear of more problems as they are reported in the press...) These are courtesy of VotersUnite!: Columbus, OH ? An error while a Danaher / Guardian ELECTronic 1242 was plugged into a laptop to download results gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes.: ... plus... |
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| (I am just going to update this post as I hear of more problems as they are reported in the press…) These are courtesy of VotersUnite!: Columbus, OH ? An error while a Danaher / Guardian ELECTronic 1242 was plugged into a laptop to download results gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes.: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/evoting/2004-11-06-ohio-evote-trouble_x.htm Carteret Co., NC ? More early voters voted on Unilect Inc.?s Patriot voting system than the system could handle resulting in the loss of more than 4,500 votes.: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/2004-11-04-votes-lost_x.htm Broward Co., FL ? ES&S software on their machines only reads 32,000 votes at a precinct then it starts counting backwards (see this update): http://www.news4jax.com/politics/3890292/detail.html Guilford Co., NC - ES&S equipment “could report only about 32,600 early and absentee results". This seems very similar to the case above, (see this update) save that Guilford Co. uses optical scan for it absentee voting and may use the older Votronic system for early voting (although it would make a more consistent story if they used optical scan for all absentee and early voting).: http://newsobserver.com/news/story/1852104p-8179802c.html Wichita Co., TX ? Nearly 6,900 of 26,000 total early votes had ?undervote? for President. Human error to blame. County has software problems that need ES&S to fix before they can run ballots: http://www.timesrecordnews.com/trn/local_news/article/0,1891,TRN_5784_3303816,00.html Lancaster Co., SC ? Unilect Patriot voting machines were used and failed. Printouts of votes had to be taken from the machines memories and hand-counted: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/10094349.htm Mecklenburg Co., NC ? More votes registered than voters: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/politics/10094165.htm Volusia Co., FL ? Diebold optical-scan machines had another failure with 6 machines having memory card failures. ?Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor in Leon County, said officials with Diebold told him that the new, higher-capacity memory cards tend to have more glitches than older cards.?: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/elections/orl-asecvolusiaglitches04110404nov04,1,3289659.story?coll=orl-news-headlines Craven Co., NC - Software glitch forces a recount which changes the outcome in one race.: http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local San Francisco, CA - A glitch in the new tabulation software made by ES&S to handle IRV/RCV voting (more here) stopped the counting and forced a recount of 81,000 ballots.: http://www.internetweek.com/allStories/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=52200321 Sarpy County, NE - 3000 “phantom votes” show up after an audit reveals that some tabulation equipment counted votes twice. (I’m not sure if this is optical scan or some other system… they used optical scan in 2002): http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html Willacy County, TX - Human error in reading results reports causes presidential votes for John Kerry to be counted twice and subsequently misreported to the Texas Secretary of State.: http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/10123432.htm?1c 10 Counties in North Carolina - Fidlar & Chambers optical-scan equipment database error counts straight-party Democratic votes as Libertarian.: http://www.indystar.com/articles/0/194113-4600-102.html Utah County, UT - 33,000 straight-party ballots are not counted due to a programming error in punchcard counting equipment.: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595105309,00.html LaPorte County, IN - A bug in ES&S’ software causes each precinct to be reported as only having (exactly) 300 voters each; all reports add up to 22,000 voters in a county that has more than 79,000 registered voters.: http://www.heraldargus.com/content/story.php?storyid=5304 Gastonia, NC - Equipment failed to count 12,000 early votes due to an ?interrupted download? error and failed to count 1,200 votes due to human error at one poll site.: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/10192340.htm?1c UPDATE: Over half of Gaston’s polling places recorded too few or too many votes when compared to the number of registered voters who signed the registration poll books.: http://newsobserver.com/news/ncwire_news/story/1839095p-8157912c.html Brown and Carroll Cos., IN - In Brown County, 63 optical-scan ballots were cast without a single vote; this figure is much higher than in past elections but the vote is already certified so nothing can be done. In Carrol County, ES&S software failed to conform to a strange Indiana election law (whereby a single vote for a candidate of another party on a straight-party ballot renders all votes but the deviant vote void) and all ballots had to be recounted for a county council race.: http://www.pal-item.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160333/1008 Sandusky Co., OH - Some ballots counted twice due to human error, likely putting count ballots next to uncounted ballots.: http://www.thenews-messenger.com/news/stories/20041116/localnews/1601347.html UPDATE: “Tuckerman explained that a computer disk containing votes was accidentally backed up into the voting machines twice by an election worker, causing it to look like there was an overcount.” from: http://www.portclintonnewsherald.com/news/stories/20041125/localnews/1649165.html . Pinellas Co., FL - A ballot box containing 268 ballots was misplaced. The county has to formally request to change their official totals.: http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/16/Tampabay/Pinellas_ballot_box_s.shtml Escambia Co., FL - “A problem with the way [optical-scan] tabulation machines [fed] information into the computer system” caused the total number of voters that cast votes to be inflated.: http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/16/State/Escambia_voters_had_a.shtml Gray’s Harbor Co., WA - Counting went smoothly, but some computer disks were downloaded twice after the counting, inflating the reported results and forcing a recount.: http://www.kgw.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D86D7FA80.html Pulaski Co., AR - Results entered by hand by the county clerk differ from results transmitted electronically to the Secretary of State. Human error suspected or an remarkably unusual amount of provisional ballots.http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg§ion=National&storyid=99872 Elko County, NV - 271 votes from three PCMCIA cards from Sequoia AVC Edge machines were not found until recently (10 December 2004). Election officials found the discrepancy when comparing the number of voters and the number of votes cast. http://www.elkodaily.com/articles/2004/12/08/news/local/news1.txt Cuyahoga County, OH - (Note: this is not an e-voting problem, but a ballot usability problem.) When punchcard ballots for one precinct were mistakenly inserted into voting equipment for another precinct in a split-precinct polling place, the mandatory per-precinct rotation of the names on the ballot caused voters to mistakenly cast around 942 votes for third-party presidential candidates. http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1102674912293811.xml |
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| NRC on Electronic Voting | ||
| CatÈgorie | General | |
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| Description: | The Committee for Electronic Voting - under the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC) - recently issued a call for papers for input on what questions policy makers should be thinking about given the current state of electronic voting. Here are the ... plus... | |
| The Committee for Electronic Voting - under the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) - recently issued a call for papers for input on what questions policy makers should be thinking about given the current state of electronic voting. Here are the whitepapers submitted (listed alphabetically by author/organization): Making Each Vote Count: A Research Agenda for Electronic Voting, report of an AAAS workshop on electronic voting, October 2004 The Need for Usability of Electronic Voting Systems: Questions for Voters and Policy Makers, ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), U.S. Public Policy Committee Voting, Vote Capture and Vote Counting Symposium: Electronic Voting Best Practices, Jean Camp, Allan Friedman, and Warigia Bowman, Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, June 2004 Electronic Voting Machines in South Carolina, Duncan Buell and Carter Bays, University of South Carolina Electronic Voting, David Dill and Will Doherty, Verified Voting Foundation Accessibility and Auditability in Electronic Voting, Electronic Frontier Foundation Electronic Voting Machines and the Standards-Setting Process, Eddan Katz and Rebecca Bolin, Yale University School of Law Putting People First: The Importance of User-Centered Design and Universal Usability to Voting Systems, Sharon Laskowski, National Institute of Standards and Technology; and Whitney Quesenbery, Whitney Interactive Design LLC Illustrative Risks to the Public in the use of Computer Systems and Related Technology, Excerpt: Election Problem Cases as of [November] 25, 2004, Peter G. Neumann, SRI International Preliminary Analysis of E-Voting Problems Highlights Need for Heightened Standards and Testing, Deirdre Mulligan and Joseph Lorenzo Hall, University of California, Berkeley Electronic Voting Systems: The Good, the Bad, and the Stupid, Barbara Simons |
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| Hand Recount of Computer Results | ||
| CatÈgorie | General, Washington | |
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| Description: | Two Washington counties are going to recount e-voting results by printing them out from a computer and then counting the printouts by hand, according to an AP story. The e-voting technology stores each vote in an electronic cartridge. These cartridges will be used to create a PDF file for each ... plus... |
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| Two Washington counties are going to recount e-voting results by printing them out from a computer and then counting the printouts by hand, according to an AP story. The e-voting technology stores each vote in an electronic cartridge. These cartridges will be used to create a PDF file for each ballot, which will be printed, thus allowing a hand recount of paper ballots. This makes no sense, obviously. If the electronic cartridges are the only available records of how people voted, then the print-then-recount-by-hand procedure can only introduce further errors. (Of course, recounting voter-verified paper ballots, had their been any, would have given us useful information about how votes were cast.) So why is this charade going on? Presumably because Washington state law requires a recount of paper voting records when recounting a very close election, such as this year’s gubernatorial election. Perhaps the current law was adopted back before anybody foresaw the possibility of computerized voting. This kind of problem isn’t unique to Washington state. I understand that New Jersey election laws require election machines to be examined by mechanical engineers. That made sense back when all such machines were mechanical, but it’s the wrong approach for computerized machines. Technology has moved much faster than voting law. UPDATE (Dec. 7): One of the two affected counties (Snohomish) has asked for permission to transfer the machine votes onto computer tape, and then use a computer to recount the records on the tape, according to a Seattle Times |
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| Changes Found in Alabama Recount | ||
| CatÈgorie | General | |
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| Description: | Changes found in segregation amendment recount The statewide recount on a measure to remove segregation-era language from Alabama's constitution is turning up variations from the official canvass, with changes exceeding 100 votes in at least three counties. These three counites (Hale, Macon and Madison) all use the same type of voting technology ... plus... |
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| Changes found in segregation amendment recount The statewide recount on a measure to remove segregation-era language from Alabama’s constitution is turning up variations from the official canvass, with changes exceeding 100 votes in at least three counties. These three counites (Hale, Macon and Madison) all use the same type of voting technology - ES&S’s Optech-III Eagle optical scan machine. (Note that 75% of all of Alabama counties use the same technology… 95% of counties use optical scan (different models)). Not surprisingly, the totals in the counties that used DRE equipment didn’t change. That’s not the kind of thing that inspires much confidence in our crowd. If they had recounted a slew of voter-verified audit trail documents and compared to a retally of electronic ballots, that would be begin to be a proper audit… as Doug Jones, pointed out in his October 2004 CACM piece, “Auditing Elections”, One important aspect to examine is the chain of custody for each piece of evidence pertaining to the election. What machinery produced this data, who collected it from the machine, and how was it preserved? What we need is analogous to the documentation for the chain of custody required to bring evidence to court in a criminal case. |
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| New Study of E-Voting Effects in Florida | ||
| CatÈgorie | General, Ohio, Florida | |
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| Description: | Yesterday, a team of social scientists from UC Berkeley released a study of the effect of e-voting on county-by-county vote totals in Florida and Ohio in the recent election. It's the first study to use proper social-science modeling methods to evaluate the effect of e-voting. The study found counties ... plus... |
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| Yesterday, a team of social scientists from UC Berkeley released a study of the effect of e-voting on county-by-county vote totals in Florida and Ohio in the recent election. It’s the first study to use proper social-science modeling methods to evaluate the effect of e-voting. The study found counties with e-voting tended to tilt toward Bush, even after controlling for differences between counties including past voting history, income, percentage of Hispanic voters, voter turnout, and county size. The researchers estimate that e-voting caused a swing in favor of Bush of up to 260,000 votes in Florida. (A change of that many votes would not be enough to change the election’s result; Bush won Florida by about 350,000 votes.) No e-voting effect was found in Ohio. The study looks plausible, but I don’t have the expertise to do a really careful critique. Readers who do are invited to critique the study in the comments section. Regardless of whether it is ultimately found credible, this study is an important step forward in the discourse about this topic. Previous analyses had shown differences, but had not controlled for the past political preferences of individual counties. Skeptics had claimed that “Dixiecrat” counties, in which many voters were registered as Democrats but habitually voted Republican, could explain the discrepancies. This study shows, at least, that the simple Dixiecrat theory is not enough to refute the claim that e-voting changed the results. Assuming that the study’s authors did their arithmetic right, there are two possibilities. It could be that some other factor, beyond the ones that the study controlled for, can explain the discrepancies. If this is the case, we can assume somebody will show up with another study demonstrating that. Or it could be that e-voting really did affect the result. If so, there are several ways this could have happened. One possibility is that the machines were maliciously programmed or otherwise compromised; I think this is unlikely but unfortunately the machines are designed in a way that makes this very hard to check. Or perhaps the machines made errors that tended to flip some votes from one candidate to the other. Even random errors of this sort would tend to affect the overall results, if e-voting counties different demographically from other counties (which is apparently the case in Florida). Another possibility is that e-voting affects voter behavior somehow, perhaps affecting different groups of voters differently. Maybe e-voting scares away some voters, or makes people wait longer to vote. Maybe the different user interface on e-voting systems makes straight party-line voting more likely or less likely. This looks like the beginning of a long debate. |
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