Election Updates

I met with a colleague this week, someone interested in beginning new research on voting technologies. He posed a question to me, which I thought I'd post here and see what sort of feedback I received. He wondered what are the five most important questions that election administrators should ask when acquiring a new voting technology. Or, as he posed the question:

With respect to a voting technology, what are the five most important questions that you need to know before acquiring a new voting system?

Of course, this is posed to election administrators, but I'd be interested in getting feedback from any readers. Please send email to alvarez.research@gmail.com.

There's a good article that came out this week in Technology Review, which provides and approachable discussion of the "scratch-and-vote" method developed by MIT VTP colleagues Ron Rivest and Ben Adida. Here's a short snip from the article describing the method:

The S&V approach makes this auditing process secure because it allows a ballot paper to be checked without having to involve an election official (who in theory could be corrupt and tamper with a ballot). When applied to the Prêt-à-Voter scheme, S&V adds a scratch surface on the side bearing the candidates' names, while the order of the candidates' names is encoded cryptographically beneath the tick boxes. "This scratch surface is exactly like a lottery card," says Adida.

To check that a ballot paper hasn't been rigged, the voter simply scratches off the surface to reveal a number that can be combined with a number corresponding to the order of the names and a publicly available encryption key. In theory, voters could use cryptographic software at the poll to perform these operations; but in practice, trusted third-party organizations could provide a means for voters to check their ballot papers. If the codes match, the "audit" ballot is legitimate, and it should be okay to vote with the other ballot.

It's exciting to see research and development efforts like these, because they do represent the future of voting technology. However, as Michael Shamos points out towards the end of the Technology Review article, the trick will be to get public and political acceptance of these novel approaches to balloting.

Recently a lengthy (398 page) report was issued regarding the spring primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. That election has been closely studied, and as part of the scrutiny of that election, many issues have been discussed about the voting equipment, pollworker training, procedural problems, and voter confusion. Here's the public report that has been issued (link from the Advancement Project). There is of course a lot here to digest, and above the problems that have been reported and discussed since the report was issued, so I'm not going to go into more detail on those points.

This report, in my mind, really points out the necessity that election officials work to undertake such comprehensive analyses of their election administration practices. The material released so far from the Cuyahoga study shows just how much data can be collected --- and how it might be studied --- to provide feedback to election officials as they seek to improve their administrative practices. For example, in the appendix of this report there are tables that provide preliminary analyses of incident reports filed by polling place workers and by election technicians. What a gold mine those datasets will be for administrators and researchers in the future!

Secondly, there are many important recommendations that are made in this report, in particular calls for better pre-election testing, procedural reform, and better training of pollworkers and election officials in future elections. No doubt, the comprehensive audit of the spring primary in Cuyahoga will provide much data for future audits in Cuyahoga, as well as baseline data for similar audits in other jurisdictions in the future.

Just a first reaction from the survey:

1) Probably most important--it looks like the EAC is going to distribute this to state election directors, and most of the questions are worded "statewide and by county/local jurisdiction." I wonder who will be actually doing the legwork (and paying the cost) of completing the survey.

2) The EAC is clearer about what they mean by "early voting" than they were in 2004 (from the instructions: Early voting refers to any voting that occurred prior to November 7, 2006, for which there were no eligibilty requirements. For example, the voter did not have to attest that he/she would be absent from the votÎng jurÎsdÎctÎon on the day of the election."). This will still result in all ballots from Oregon being reported as "at the polls" even though we don't have polls in this state. All the ballots are "counted" on election day, though.

3) Question 35 is going to be an administrative headache. I suspect that most election jurisdictions are not set up to record the reasons why provisional ballots were rejected, even the EAC is asking for that information.

4) Same point with Question 39. How many jurisdictions record the actual reason that an absentee ballot was rejected? Is this information reported to the state?

The EAC has released a draft version of their 2006 Election Administration and Voting Survey (previously called the "Election Day Survey").

It is now open for a 60 day public comment period, and I encourage all of our readers to take some time to look at the survey and send along thoughts to the EAC.

The 2004 version of the study (results reported here) had some flaws--the survey was distributed too close after a hotly contested election, when many officials had neither the time, or in many cases the information, needed to complete the survey. Some of the questions were worded imprecisely, or were intepreted unevenly, resulting in confusing survey results. And most worrisome, there are simply many large gaps in the dataset.

But as a continuing resource to monitor the march of election reform in the United States, the EAC survey is invaluable.

Mike and Thad have already done their part (read the report here). I recently received funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to supplement and extend the 2004 study (more on that soon). I hope the policy making and academic community can help the EAC make the survey as effective as possible.

There are "sore loser" stories abounding today and not just in Connecticut. There, Senator Lieberman has announced he is running as an Independent for the cleverly-named "Connecticut for Lieberman" Party, as reported in Time online. The state has a history of sore losers, as has been reported in several stories, including this one in The Washington Post. And as Bruce Shapiro writes in The Nation:

By continuing to run as an independent, Lieberman leaves behind John Bailey's Democratic Party once and for all. He is pinning his hopes, ironically enough, on Connecticut voters' willingness more than a decade ago to embrace Lowell Weicker's independent candidacy for governor after his Senate defeat. He's counting, too, on the weakness of little-known Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger.

Lieberman in a sober moment might instead think back to 1970, the year he entered the state legislature. That year, with the country divided by Vietnam, three-term, once-invulnerable Connecticut cold war hawk Thomas Dodd, censured by the Senate for taking illegal campaign contributions and in failing health, decided to forgo a Democratic primary altogether. Instead, he entered the general election as an independent against Democratic nominee Joseph Duffey. Just enough of Dodd's old supporters followed him out of the party to insure that both he and Duffey went down in flames. Dodd's Senate seat went to an unknown Republican--Lowell Weicker.

Connecticut has a history with sore losers who run again. The Secretary of State wants to put an end to this, as reported on NPR, by passing a "sore loser" law that would ban losers in primaries from running in the general election.

Ironically, just such a law is creating headaches for Republicans in Ohio. There, the candidate that Republicans have selected to run for the seat held by Bob Ney is a primary loser from this year and questions are being raised about whether she is covered by that state's "sore loser" law. As the Associated Press reported,

The leading Republican candidate to replace scandal-scarred Rep. Bob Ney on the November ballot may be ineligible, party officials said Tuesday, complicating GOP efforts to assure a smooth transition for the fall campaign.

In stepping down, Ney threw his support to Padgett, who also said she had been encouraged by House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, to run. One Republican strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity, said lawyers had concluded Padgett was likely covered by the so-called political sore loser's law and thus would not be eligible to run.

But Bob Bennett, the state party chairman, said he didn't believe the law applied to her, and said he would seek a formal ruling from the secretary of state. One official said the legal controversy arose at least in part because the law as drafted differed from what lawmakers had said they intended which was to prevent a primary loser from later filing as a candidate in the same race.

Gov. Bob Taft is expected to set a date for a primary to fill the ballot vacancy.

Georgia has a "sore loser" law, which means that losing incumbent House member Cynthia McKinney cannot run as an independent.

In the "If I lose, it must have been fraud" department, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a story about Cynthia McKinney alleging fraud in her election defeat. The paper reports:

The McKinney Web site noted voting machines not working or mysteriously casting incorrect ballots, “insecure” voting equipment, police harassment, and poll workers refusing to hand out Democratic ballots.

At one campaign stop Tuesday, McKinney said, “We also had a problem at Midway [elementary school polling place], where my name was not on the ballot,” McKinney said.

“My opponent’s name was on the ballot. … We are disappointed that the secretary of state’s office has not dealt adequately with these electronic voting machines and the deficiencties. Also, polling places have opened up and some of the machines were not zero-counted out. … And that is a problem. That is a serious problem.”

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office kept an eye on the elections, with 15 roving monitors on the ground in the 4th District, said spokeswoman Kara Sinkule. Sinkule noted that the complaints were only coming from the McKinney campaign. “We are not having voters saying we are having equipment malfunctions,” Sinkule said.

McKinney has always held a distrust of the state’s new touch-screen voting machines. She has appeared at events promoted by activists opposed to electronic voting in Georgia. One of her congressional aides, Richard Searcy, was one of the most outspoken critics of Georgia’s electronic voting platform before taking a job in McKinney’s office.

When McKinney beat out five opponents in the Democratic primary in 2004 to re-claim her congressional seat, she did not question the voting machines’ accuracy or the results. On Tuesday, she was anything but silent on the issue.

The AP reported small problems in the Michigan primary election related to both optical scan and DREs. I blog this mainly because I found the optical scan problem intriguing (there are no details about the nature of the DRE problems in the story, just that there were problems). The story states:

Scattered problems reported Tuesday included a scanner that was rejecting all ballots in one precinct in Oakland County's West Bloomfield Township. Township Clerk Sharon Law said she sent out an employee, who quickly resolved the problem.

This brings up an interesting issue that comes up often in debates about Internet voting but not in debates about polling place voting, which is a denial of service attack. Mike and I noted in our book Point, Click, and Vote that the attacks that are brought up as criticisms of Internet voting can be perpetrated in non-Internet settings, and this is a case in point. If you can take down a scanner--or a paperless DRE, jam a printer on a DRE with a VVPAT--you can create your own precinct-based denial of service attack. Granted it is more localized, but if well targeted, could cause havoc for one party or another in an election, especially a small local race.

Tom Delay "unstuck" himself today and issued a statement whereby he removed himself from the ballot in Texas. As The Washington Post noted,

DeLay was forced to act after Republicans lost several court fights to remove his name from the ballot in the Houston-area district and replace him with a GOP-chosen nominee. Republicans ended their legal battles Monday when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused to hear their case, letting the appeals court decision stand.

This means that the ballot will have no Republican candidate listed. Intead, the party is expected to rally behind a write-in candidate. Under Texas law, a write-in must declare candidacy and pay a fee or submit required signatures by Aug. 29. The Post noted that

Four men have been elected to Congress as write-in candidates. In 1954, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina won the state's Democratic nomination using fliers showing voters how and where to write his name More recently, in May, Charlie Wilson, an Ohio legislator, won the Democratic primary nomination for the House through a write-in campaign heavily financed by his party.

For those of you who want extra credit, Chapter 146 of the Texas Election Code covers the eligibility of write-in candidates. For the counting rules, you can look to Chapter 65 of the Election Code, which reads:

§ 65.008. TALLYING WRITE-IN VOTES. (a) In an election in which write-in voting is permitted, the name of a write-in candidate shall be entered on the tally list and votes for that candidate shall be tallied in the same manner as votes for a candidate whose name appears on the ballot. (b) A write-in vote may not be counted if a sticker containing a candidate's name is affixed to the ballot by the voter.

The Mexican election controversy is growing more heated in the streets. As the LA Times reports,

Runner-up presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told thousands of supporters Sunday that he would step up his civil disobedience campaign, starting with a mass rally today in front of the election tribunal that rejected his demand for a national recount. After a week of living on the street and enduring nightly rainstorms, many protesters waiting for Lopez Obrador to appear at Sunday's rally were angry over the tribunal's decision. Some chanted, "Airport! Airport!" calling for a blockade of streets surrounding Mexico City's international airport. Others yelled for a takeover of the congressional building or of the National Palace, the official seat of the executive branch. Some suggested a boycott of businesses allegedly in league against Lopez Obrador. For a few minutes, the rally had the trappings of a town hall meeting. Jesusa Rodriguez, an actress coordinating entertainment at the street camps, responded to the calls for more dramatic actions against the government from the giant stage set up in the Zocalo. "Violence is the easy way; that's what they use," she said over the massive public address system. "We have to use our heads…. In peaceful civil resistance, people have to ask, 'What is the best idea?' … You have to think of consequences." When Lopez Obrador finally took the stage, two hours after the rally was to begin, he covered familiar themes: the election was corrupt, the government is corrupt, and the future of Mexico is at stake. Then he asked the crowd to support a rally in front of the tribunal offices.

Given the closeness of recent elections here and the contentiousness that has developed in debates over election reform, I am beginning to wonder if something like this could happen in the U.S. in the future.

I am re-posting the EAC RFQ's. The study related to Internet voting has been clarified in its title as the "UOCAVA Internet Voting Study."

EAC Requests for Quotations (RFQ)

Please see the following links for RFQ details and instructions on submitting quotations and proposals. Deadlines and other protocol for submitting inquiries may be found in the "Combined Synopsis/Solicitation" posted for each particular RFQ .

Solicitation Number	Title	NAICS Code	Opening Date	Closing Date
RFQ-1435-04-06-RQ-62764	USEAC UOCAVA Internet Voting Study	541910	7/31/2006	8/17/2006
RFQ-1435-04-06-RQ-62766	USEAC Free Absentee Ballot Return Postage Study	541910	8/1/2006	8/24/2006
RFQ-1435-04-06-RQ-62947	USEAC 1st Time Voters Study	541910	8/1/2006	8/22/2006
RFQ-1435-04-06-RQ-62946	USEAC Social Security Study	541910	8/2/2006	8/29/2006

For additional information, please contact the following.

Adam W. Lowery
Senior Contract Specialist
adam.lowery@mms.gov
(703) 787-1541 (phone)
(703) 787-1106 (fax)

Today, Bob Ney dropped his bid for reelection to the House, but after winning his party primary election. Why can he do this but Tom Delay is stuck on the ballot in Texas? The answer is, you have to follow state rules. As the Christian Science Monitor reports today:

Under Ohio election law, the party faced an Aug. 23 deadline to put a replacement candidate on the ballot. According to the Associated Press, state Sen. Joy Padgett has agreed to take Ney's place on the ballot. Senator Padgett told the AP that both Ney and House majority leader John Boehner(R) of Ohio asked her to run.

By dropping out before the deadline, Ney has avoided the situation faced by Republicans in Texas seeking to hold on to former Rep. Tom DeLay's seat. Mr. DeLay, another embattled Republican with legal troubles, resigned from Congress after winning his primary and has lost attempts in court to remove his name from the ballot. He is now appealing to the US Supreme Court, but in the meantime, former Rep. Nick Lampson (D) is running for the seat unopposed.

Today, as I drove to get a Starbucks coffee, NPR did their mid-show news headlines and they mentioned issues with tests of electronic voting machines in Michigan that were done in preparation for the primary on Tuesday. But the story talked about ballots getting jammed in the machines, which made me realize that they were talking about issues with both DREs and electronic tabulators for optical scan ballots.

The media has a tendency to confligrate these two technologies--and even mention electronic poll books as "electronic voting." (Mike and I found this in our research for our book on electronic voting that will come out next year from Princeton University Press). Everything with power running through it is often called electronic voting, even though there are very different issues associated with these different technologies.

In Michigan, the testing of the equipment has shown problems, which is why both pre-election testing and post-election auditing are so important. This Associated Press article details the different problems that have arisen.

New touch-screen voting machines to help disabled people are failing in test runs ahead of next week's primary, Ingham County's top election official said Thursday. Clerk Mike Bryanton said the faulty equipment -- which can be used by all voters -- could cause longer lines during Tuesday's primary. But he stressed all ballots would be counted by hand if there are problems. [Note: Michigan has a VVPAT requirement so they can count the VVPATs.]

On Tuesday, voters in each of Michigan's 5,216 precincts will be using an optical-scan ballot system, marking a standard ballot and then feeding it into an electronic tabulator. All polling sites will have new equipment for the disabled so they can vote in privacy without assistance....Bryanton warned of problems because humidity has swollen up test ballots, which then haven't fit into the optical-scan tabulators. He also complained that Election Systems & Software, which the state paid $34 million for 4,300 of the touch-screen machines, has provided little training.

I would point out, by the way, that humidity is a problem nationally with paper ballots.

It would be helpful if the media could be clearer what they are referring to when they discuss electronic voting though.

The New York Times has an article that is about two things--voter registration rules and election governance. The Times reports:

In the last year, six states have passed [voter registration] restrictions, and in three states, including Ohio, civic groups have filed lawsuits, arguing that the rules disproportionately affect poor neighborhoods.

But nowhere have the rules been as fiercely debated as here, partly because they are being administered by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the secretary of state and the Republican candidate in one of the most closely watched governor’s races in the country, a contest that will be affected by the voter registration rules. Mr. Blackwell did not write the law, but he has been accused of imposing regulations that are more restrictive than was intended.

Under the law, passed by the Republican-led state legislature in January 2006, paid voter registration workers must personally submit the voter registration cards to the state, rather than allow the organizations overseeing the drives to vet and submit them in bulk.

By requiring paid canvassers to sign and put their addresses on the voter registration cards they collect, and by making them criminally liable for any irregularities on the cards, the rules have made it more difficult to use such workers, who most often work in lower-income and Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, where volunteers are scarce.

The problem, of course, is that the elected Secretary of State, who runs elections, is running for governor and this seems as though he is creating rules surrounding the law and its enforcement that are biased to his benefit.

Mike and I have written a paper on election governance with Morgan Llewellyn, a graduate student at Caltech. From the national survey we have conducted, we find that the public supports having an elected election representative, but would prefer they be nonpartisan and that the election be run not by a single person but by a board.

These ideas for requiring individuals to be responsible for registration forms cuts both ways. In 2004, there were allegations in several states of Republican operatives not filing registration forms when registrants were Democrats. However, creating barriers to registration obviously is problematic, as the Ohio case shows. The question is, how do you create a sense of responsibility among those who register voters without creating disincentive to register people?