Election Updates

This is from Macworld:

Poor software design, serious IT management inefficiencies and an untested deployment of a critical application were all major factors in last month’s Election Day problems in Denver, according to a scathing report from an IT consultant. The problems led to hours-long delays for voters looking to cast ballots and raised questions about the overall efficacy of e-voting.

The 32-page report, released Monday, concluded that the main reason for problems was the electronic poll book (ePollBook) software used by the independent Denver Election Commission (DEC) to oversee voting. The e-poll book software — an US$85,000 custom application created by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems — included the names, addresses and other information for all registered voters in Denver.

...

Instead, it led to massive problems on Election Day due to “decidedly subprofessional architecture and construction,” according to the report from consultants Fred Hessler and Matt Smith at Fujitsu Consulting in Greenwood Village, Colo. Fujitsu was hired by Denver shortly after the election to find out what went wrong and help to fix the problems.

“The ePollBook is a poorly designed and fundamentally flawed application that demonstrates little familiarity with basic tenets of Web development,” the report stated. “Due to unnecessary and progressive consumption of system resources, the application’s performance will gradually degrade in a limited-use environment and will be immediately and noticeably hampered with a high number of concurrent users.”

In other words, the more heavily it was used, the slower it worked.

“Moreover, it appears that this application was never stress-tested by the DEC or Sequoia,” other than using it in the spring primary as a test election, the report said. “It is at best naive to deploy enterprise software in an untested state. It is remarkably poor practice to deliberately choose a critical production event (the primary election) to serve as a test cycle.”

The Sequoia application was chosen over a tested ePollBook application already in use by Larimer County, Colo., that has been offered to other Colorado counties for free. The consultants recommend that the DEC either get the Sequoia application repaired or take a new look at the Larimer software to see whether it could be used effectively in Denver. The Larimer application uses a server-resident Microsoft Access front-end accessed via Citrix and an Oracle database on a dedicated server, as well as five application servers for access by election officials.

The voting center delays — with waits in some places of up to three hours — forced an estimated 20,000 voters to abandon their efforts to vote on Election Day, according to the report.

Other problems with the software include Web sessions that would not expire unless a user clicked a specific “exit” button to close the application, tying up system resources, according to the report. The problem, gleaned from user activity logs generated during the Nov. 7 election, was that 90 percent of user sessions that day were not ended using the special button but were closed by users who simply shut the browser. That did not free up resources, causing the system slowdowns.

I've not yet had a chance to read the official report, nor to see the response from the vendor, but will post that information when I dig it up.

Chock it up to advancing technology and lowering costs: some counties in Ohio are considering printing their own absentee ballots. They estimate sufficient cost savings so that the new systems will pay for themselves in just two election cycles. And counties hope to avoid the delays that caused problems in this year's election.

This one seems like a no-brainer. Most everyone knows how to handle laser printers these days. The only glitch in the ointment might be the software necessary to produce an optically-scannable ballot. I assume that companies like ES&S, which is the one that will lose the printing contract, may produce software for formatting and printing ballots. Hopefully these programmers will read the various blogs and research reports and avoid the ballot design problems we've seen in recent elections.

Read the story in the Beacon Journal

Doug Lewis of the Election Center testified before the EAC about Election 2006. The transcript of his testimony is here.

None of my co-bloggers have written yet about Friday's story in the New York Times on ballot problems and the 2008 election. It's a nice piece by two of the three NY Times reporters who seem to be on the "election" beat (the third is John Broder).

The gist of the story is that legislation expected in the next session of Congress will outlaw machines without a paper record--thus pushing the e-voting frontier farther away, perhaps vanishingly so. After the past two election cycles, it's not clear that citizens, election officials, or reformers have any stomach for electronic voting machines. Doug Chapin of electionline.org is quoted: "I think we'll see the kinds of sweeping changes that people expected to see right after the 2000 election."

But who is going to shoulder the cost of these changes? Many states have already spent tens of millions of dollars on electronic voting machines, only to be forced to replace these. (One piece of legislation proposes $150 million in federal aid--an amount that election officials say is far too small.) (The technical guidelines document that is referenced by the Times ought to be available at the EAC, but all I can find is the sunshine notice for the meeting where the guidelines were released.)

And forcing these changes now would put tremendous pressure on these same jurisdictions--the same kind of time pressure that creates a ripe environment for another round of electoral snafus.

Everyone here knows I monitor absentee and by-mail voting solutions particularly closely, and this story sounds awfully familiar to me. Many election officials are going to decide that buying a whole new round of machines is a waste of money. Instead, they'll opt for a time-tested solution: widespread, no-excuse absentee balloting.