Election Updates

The AEI/Brookings Election Reform Project is hosting a conference on Friday September 22, "The 2006 Elections--Are We Ready?" The event will take place at the American Enterprise Institute, 1150 Seventeenth St. NW, Washington, DC from 8 AM to 12:30 PM. The agenda includes a keynote address by Congressman Rush Hole (D-NJ), and panels on 'Progress and Pitfall in Voting Technology' and 'HAVA-What Has Been Done? What Remains to Do?'

• Registration webpage


• Agenda
  

Just got this from the EAC.

There were two supporting documents: Statement of Work, and the solicitation.

Here is information from the SOW on the objective of the study:

Objective. To provide information to the States and the Congress on the feasibility and advisability of using alternative days, times, and places to conduct Federal elections, the EAC seeks assistance in (1) developing case studies that examine States’ and/or particular jurisdictions’ experience conducting Federal elections on different days, in different places, and at different hours; and (2) surveying voters and to better understand their motivations and perceptions of impediments to voting. Case studies will provide insight into the successes and challenges to instituting changes in elections practices, while a voter and non-voter survey will provide insights into the public’s perceptions of particular aspects of the voting process.

Interesting stuff ...

There is a research study out from Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten that examines in detail security issues associated with the Diebold AccuVote-TS. This team is associated with the Center for Information Technology and Department of Computer Science (Feldman and Halderman) and the Woodrow Wilson School (Felten) at Princeton University.

Here is the executive summary from their paper:

The Diebold AccuVote-TS and its newer relative the AccuVote-TSx are together the most widely deployed electronic voting platform in the United States. In the November 2006 general election, these machines are scheduled to be used in 357 counties representing nearly 10% of registered voters. Approximately half these counties — including all of Maryland and Georgia — will employ the AccuVote-TS model. More than 33,000 of the TS machines are in service nationwide.

This paper reports on our study of an AccuVote-TS, which we obtained from a private party. We analyzed the machine's hardware and software, performed experiments on it, and considered whether real election practices would leave it suitably secure. We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.

Computer scientists have generally been skeptical of voting systems of this type, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), which are essentially general-purpose computers running specialized election software. Experience with computer systems of all kinds shows that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure the reliability and security of complex software or to detect and diagnose problems when they do occur. Yet DREs rely fundamentally on the correct and secure operation of complex software programs. Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected.


Previous security studies of DREs affirm this skepticism, but to our knowledge ours is the first public study encompassing the hardware and software of a widely used DRE. The famous paper by Kohno, Stubblefield, Rubin, and Wallach studied a leaked version of the source code for parts of the Diebold AccuVote-TS software and found many design errors and vulnerabilities, which are generally confirmed by our study. Our study extends theirs by including the machine's hardware and operational details, by finding and describing several new and serious vulnerabilities, and by building working demonstrations of several security attacks.

Main Findings The main findings of our study are:

Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

The website associated with their project also contains a demonstration video discussing their research. I've only begun to digest their study, but suspect it will add to growing list of procedural reforms and technological innovations for improving the security of voting systems.

Adding to the reports of problems in Maryland yesterday are reports of at least two different types of procedural problems in voting yesterday in Milwaukee. According to reports in the Milwaukee Journal Standard, voters were confused by the primary election procedures and voters were provided the wrong ballots:

Throughout the area, some voters were confused and frustrated by the restriction at requires them to vote for candidates from one party only.

Voters, for example, couldn't cast a ballot for Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. in the Democratic primary for sheriff and then vote for a candidate in the Republican race for attorney general. Ballots with crossover votes are rejected by the tabulators, or counting machines, and voters are given a new ballot and instructions to follow the one-party rule

At 15 to 20 polling places in Milwaukee, workers mistakenly distributed to the general voting public special ballots used for people with disabilities, said Sue Edman, executive director of the City Election Commission. The tabulators won't accept the auto-mark ballots, which are a different size than the standard voting form. Technicians scrambled to assist poll workers once the rejected ballots started to pile up, and election officials quickly hit on the source of the problem.

On Milwaukee's east side, voters in at least one ward missed the opportunity to vote in the 7th District Senate race when the printing on disability ballots failed to include the candidates' names.

Confusion by pollworkers and voters regarding primary election procedures has been reported in early primaries. For example, we saw such confusion in our observation study of the June primary in Orange County (California), and in the analysis of the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) primary. Given that confusion over primary election procedures seeems so widespread, it is clear that more research is needed to document the extent of these procedural problems and to figure out how to better inform pollworkers and the electorate about primary election procedures.

For additional coverage of the Wisconsin primary and the various snafus that cropped up, see Electionline Today.

The Washington Post has additional coverage of the extension of polling hours in Montgomery County (Maryland). The lack of contingency planning for problems in polling place voting has led to amazing (or horrifying) stories of pollworkers who were forced to improvise:

Police officers were dispatched to polling stations where election officials hadn't been able to reach precinct judges by telephone in order to instruct them to stay open an extra hour, according to Board of Elections lawyer Kevin Karpinski. He said that, in some cases, precinct judges were being asked to give voters a sample ballot and let them vote by filling out a sheet of paper indicating their choices.

...

At Piney Branch Elementary School in Takoma Park, officials quickly ran out of paper ballots and began telling voters to use scraps of paper, said Kathryn Desmond, whose husband Dennis was voting with the makeshift paper ballots. Officials, she said, "were calling out the names on the ballot," Kathryn Desmond said. About 50 people, Dennis Desmond estimated, were voting the same way after electronic balloting ended around 8 p.m. He said that election officials dispatched a worker to a nearby CVS to buy envelopes and masking tape so the makeshift ballots could be enclosed and sealed. "Voters were pretty patient. With each new announcement, you had to laugh. It got more and more ludicrous," he said. He arrived at Piney Branch at 7:45 and according to what election board officials had promised, Desmond should have been able to vote electronically because he was in line before 8 p.m. But that was not the case. At 8:02 p.m. election judges said they were ending electronic voting and turning to provisional ballots. But they quickly ran out of ballots, Desmond said.

How all of this will be figured out as the evening progresses (and we get into the post-election canvass tomorrow) is anyone's guess.

In the recent study of Cuyahoga County's (Ohio) experiences with the implementation of new voting machines in their recent primary, issues associated with the voter authorization and machine memory cards were identified as sources of confusion and problems. And recently the National Academy of Science electronic voting committee issued a report alerting election officials to plan for contingencies and problems this fall.

So this morning I had a sense of deja vu, when I read in the Washington Post that voters in Montgomery County (MD) were not able to use electronic voting machines this morning, not because of issues with voter authorization cards themselves --- but because election officials did not deliver cards to the 238 precincts in the county. According to this story, voters were being told to use provisional ballots instead, but in many cases there were not sufficient quantities of provisional ballots available.

Memo to election officials: plan for contingencies!

While I hate to say I told you so, I was interested to read the front page of the Los Angeles Times this morning and see the following story: "Parties Battle Over New Voter ID Laws." Here's the lead:

Little noticed by voters, a nationwide melee has broken out pitting liberal and conservative groups in a duel over new laws that could determine who wins close elections in November and beyond.

The dispute, which is being fought in disparate and often half-empty courtrooms in as many as nine states, concerns new state laws and rules backed primarily by Republicans that require people to show photo identification in order to vote and, in some cases, proof of citizenship and identification when registering to vote.

And here is some of the argument of the story:

The legal battle reflects a deep partisan divide, with Republicans arguing that the new requirements are needed to prevent voting fraud and boost confidence in election results, and Democrats charging that they disenfranchise seniors, minorities, students and others who tend to vote Democratic.

Hundreds of thousands of votes are potentially at stake in some of the most contested congressional races this year and the 2008 race for the White House, making the court cases the latest battle in a broader war over election policies that has been raging since the 2000 Florida recount.

As readers know, we've been making the argument since 2000 that voter registration issues are the primary source of election problems. While HAVA was intended to improve the situation, as we are still very much in the midst of a massive set of policy changes across the nation regarding voter registration and authentication, things are in flux and these issues will be contested and fought this fall --- and certainly as we move toward the 2008 presidential election.

The LA Times story also had this wonderful graphic, that depicts the important changes in election law regarding voter registration and authentication in Arizona, Missouri, Georgia, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, New Mexico, and Wisconsin.

Also, couldn't image a better plug and motivation for the upcoming VTP conference on voter registration and identification; for details, go to the conference website.

In the recent past, we witnessed controversy over the early voting locations. Both times, Republicans accused Democratically controlled elections offices, mostly located in urban areas, of partisan bias in choosing the number, and location, of early voting centers. In many cases, the disparities are a result of state laws requiring that early voting locations be at government offices--most commonly, in the most populated, urbanized, and Democratically leaning areas in a county or state.

For instance, during the Illinois primary, suburban and downstate Republicans claimed that Cook County officials unfairly benefitted urban voters. County officials claimed that there were more locations in urban locales because there were more voters there. They also encountered some difficulty finding cooperative property owners in suburban areas.

The same accusations were made in Maryland, prior to the end of early voting by court decree.

The Albuquerque , NM Tribune reports a similar set of charges. Polling places are at or near county courthouses, and officials report difficulty in finding property owners in suburban locations who were willing to rent their facilities for a short period of time.

The "Young Voter Strategies" program, run by the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, has released a useful guide for mobilization tactics for getting young voters out to the polls. While short, it is full of research-tested strategies for the best ideas on how to get young voters out to the polls.