Two additional reports of voter fraud

In addition to the reports of fraud that I wrote about in the past few days, there are two additional ones that I ran across this morning.

The first comes from New York, from a report in the Daily News:

An aide to former Queens Assemblyman Jimmy Meng was charged yesterday with rigging voter addresses during a primary battle in 2004.

Simon Ting, 42, who was registering voters for the Flushing Democrat, whited out the addresses of Asian-American voters who lived outside the district and replaced them with addresses inside the district, according to Queens prosecutors.

The fraud wasn’t hard to detect: dozens of legitimate addresses were replaced with one of two addresses – either Ting’s former home or a bookstore Meng owns in Flushing, prosecutors said.

The second comes from Virginia, as reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

A former Gate City mayor who used absentee ballots as if they were marked cards to deal himself a 2004 re-election victory will spend 196 days in jail.

Charles Dougherty, convicted of 29 felony counts of vote fraud in two separate trials last year, was also ordered by the court yesterday to pay $51,500 in fines.

The sentence, handed down in Scott County Circuit Court, brings to an end an election scandal that rocked the town of 2,300, upset the political order and exposed an election process that may have been corrupt for years. During one of Dougherty’s trials, one woman testified she had always been paid a bottle of liquor for her vote.

…

A panel of judges agreed the election results were suspicious, threw out the votes and appointed a new Town Council. The council then appointed Jenkins mayor, and a judge appointed Botetourt County Commonwealth’s Attorney Joel Branscom as special prosecutor.

Branscom charged Dougherty with more than three-dozen counts of election fraud. In two trials, jurors agreed with Branscom that Dougherty had duped voters, many of them elderly and residents of an assisted-living complex, into applying for absentee ballots even though they didn’t qualify for them.

Report on Denver electronic pollbook problems

Here’s a link to a copy of the report on the Denver electronic pollbook problems. We wrote about these problems as reported in the media in the 2006 midterm election in Denver.

Here’s the report’s executive summary:

The general election of November 7, 2006 in Denver was marred by significant technical and operational errors, as well as a seeming lack of needed oversight in some key areas. These errors and omissions led to unacceptably long waiting times for voters and an abandonment rate estimated at 18,000-20,000 voters (approximately 20% of the anticipated physical turnout on Election Day). In addition, seemingly preventable problems with the tabulation of absentee ballots led to significant operational stresses within the DEC and delayed reporting on key races and measures for several days.

The most direct cause of voter inconvenience on Election Day was the repeated failure of the “electronic poll book” (“ePollBook”) software, which hampered the efforts of election judges staffing voting centers to search for voters as they arrived, indicate that they had arrived to vote, and forward them to a machine to cast their votes. The ePollBook, developed exclusively for DEC use by Sequoia Voting Systems, is of decidedly sub-professional architecture and construction and appears never to have been tested in any meaningful manner by either the vendor or by the DEC. This software’s failure to accommodate Election Day traffic led to lengthy lines developing at the registration desks of voting centers while voting machines stood idle. Well-publicized media reports concerning line lengths were broadcast throughout the day and likely contributed to dampening turnout among voters without the time or determination to devote multiple hours to casting their votes.

While the ePollBook’s considerable shortcomings represent the most direct cause of Election Day angst in Denver, we must caution readers against assuming that merely repairing or replacing it will ensure the smooth conduct of future elections. That the ePollBook was deployed at all in such an unready state is symbolic of a consistent pattern of substandard information technology management within the DEC. Given the increasing dependence of election processes on technology, the state of technology management within the DEC must be recognized as an operational risk to the City and County as it looks toward future elections.

In addition to technology concerns, the DEC’s conduct of the 2006 elections suffered from inadequate contingency planning (some technical, some purely operational) and errors in logistical operations and assumptions, especially given the number of significant environmental changes with which the DEC was wrestling in preparing for this election. In 2006, the DEC was coping with new voting machines, new scanning equipment, software upgrades, vacant staff and leadership positions, new leadership, and a fundamental shift from traditional precinct-based polling places to voting centers, at which a voter from any part of the County may vote. These environmental changes, in addition to several others, represent an extremely complex problem set, and one might expect a cautious, if not ultra-cautious attitude to prevail among those responsible for the election’s conduct. Instead, planning and due diligence activities were less thorough than needed.

In analyzing the causes underlying the difficulties of 2006, it is tempting to search for a single factor, act, or error on which to place all blame. The purpose of this assessment, however, is not merely to diagnose what went wrong in 2006 but also to surface information of use to Denver in conducting future elections. In that light, it is critical that the failures of 2006 be viewed in an appropriately broad context that takes into account disparate factors such as planning, management, technology, interagency politics, and the degree of environmental change surrounding the conduct of the 2006 election cycle.

I’ve not seen an official response to this report from Sequoia Voting Systems, but I suspect at some point there will be a response and when it is available, I’ll post it here.

UPDATE (1-16-2007): Here is Sequoia’s response to the report.

Woman working for voter registration drive in Missouri accused of fraud and identity theft

This has circulated the past few days, here’s an AP report on the allegations:

She worked in August and September as a voter registration recruiter for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN. She is accused of using another woman’s Social Security number to get hired by ACORN and Project Vote.

Davis also is charged with causing three voter registration applications with false addresses to be filed with the Kansas City Board of Elections Commissioners.

Remember the March primary in Cook County? Report points fingers at clerk and vendor

We wrote a number of essays about problems in the March 2006 primary in Cook County. A review committee has produced a report (which I’m not seen yet), which according to this story in the Chicago Tribune, says both the Cook County Clerk David Orr and the Sequoia Voting Systems (the vendor) are to blame for the problems:

The group’s findings, documented in a 29-page report obtained by the Tribune, suggest that much work is needed if similar problems are to be prevented in the February and April municipal elections.

“Although technology problems occurring on Election Night constituted the primary cause of the reporting delays, operational shortcomings in the process leading up to Election Day also played a role in failing to understand and thus mitigate the risks,” the report said.

…

The report dealt only with issues experienced in suburban Cook County. Chicago had plenty of its own voting problems, but the city’s election officials built a more effective backup system to handle traffic when roughly half of the precincts were unable to wirelessly transmit results.

“The overall system was put together in a way that has not been tested for an election that is the scale of Cook County,” said panel member Xiaoping Jia, a software engineering professor at DePaul University. “A lot of failure occurred.”

Can Polls Be Staffed Like Walmart?

One of the things that is scary about the clique of us who study election administration is that we all often have the same thoughts reading things not directly related to elections. An example of this occurred last week, when the Wall Street Journal ran a story about its new fexible shift scheduling. The day the story came out, my former colleague Tova Wang emailed me to ask if I had seen the article and to question why we don’t do this in elections. I would have blogged it when the article came out, but the WJS is subscription-only. However, the story re-ran today in the Salt Lake Tribune, so I am blogging it now.

So what is WalMart doing that could possibly be of interest to election adminstrators? Well,

Early this year, Wal-Mart Stores, using a new computerized scheduling system, will start moving many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge retailer, but could be a major headache for employees.

Instead of having 100 people work from 7 am to 8:40 pm (or something similar), they might have 60 people work from 7-10 but ramp up to having 120 workers from 11 to 2 — the lunch time rush — ramp back down for mid-afternoon, then ramp up for after-school or post-work rushes. So a worker might still work 8 hours, but the shift might be 2 “rush” shifts (10-2 and 4-8).

If you have ever done election observation, many polling places have the same dynamic. Some polls are busy all day, but there are true rush periods, especially the morning of a major election. So the question Tova raised (and I too thought reading the WSJ story) was why don’t election officials do rush staffing of polls as well? You could have a core of, say, three poll workers, but have 3 or 4 additional workers who would work only during high volume periods. This would be cost-effective and provide enhanced staffing when it is needed.

Now, not that WalMart has A LOT of data they are crunching to compute their worker needs. However, all the election official needs is data on how many voters cast ballots by hour, by precinct, for several election cycles to do the same thing. And in precincts with electronic voting or electronic precinct tabulation — such as in precinct based optical scan locations — such data could be garnered from the scanner or card encoders, if these devices have a cloc. (Note, the clock does not have to be set correctly either. You just need to know what hour was the zero hour and you can compute everything from that point.) With such data, basic operations management comes into play and the staffing solution is easy to calculate.

Voting technology, at six cents a pound

Following on Paul’s recent discovery of lever voting devices for sale on Ebay, a story from Pennsylvania caught my eye today:

A piece of Lackawanna County’s electoral history, however, could cost as little as 6 cents a pound.

That’s how much one company has offered the county to junk its decades-old voting machines, rendered surplus by the switch to touch-screen technology this year.

Weighing in at 800 pounds and up, the metallic monstrosities could render the taxpayers one final service by generating a profit through their demise. With more than 400 of them gathering dust, Lackawanna County could, at that rate, haul in more than $20,000 from their sale, majority Commissioner Robert C. Cordaro said.

“This is, we hope, just the first offer,” Mr. Cordaro said of the salvage bid submitted by DMS Shredding of Wilkes-Barre. There’s no deadline for selling them off.

Some 600 of Luzerne County’s lever machines were junked over the summer, netting about $30,000.

Yet Another Reasons to Not Have Voting in Schools

Mike and I have observed elections in numerous states and have always found that schools make bad polling places. Not only do teachers and students take up the parking spaces needed by voters, but schools are typically loud, often congested, and the voting location within the school is not always accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Today, the Louisville, KY Courier Journal has a story that illustrates yet another reason why schools are lousy polling places: they increase the threats to children attending the school. As the paper reports:

A Louisville poll worker who pleaded guilty last month to assaulting a voter on Election Day was in court again Tuesday on sex charges involving two young girls, ages 12 and 14……Steitz has also been charged with possession of child pornography and use of a minor in a sexual performance, after police said they found a roll of film in his home with nude pictures of the 12-year-old.

During the California primary in 2006, we talked with a principal at a school in an upscale section of Orange County and she was very adamant in her view that schools should not be polling places, especially elementary schools. She viewed the security threats as quite grave and she worried constantly about something happening to one of her students.

More on costs of election administration

There is little systematic data (or research) on the costs of election administration, and while questions have arisen since 2000 about how much various voting technologies “cost” (both in terms of acquisition and long-term use), we just don’t have much research on these questions to draw upon …

I want to echo Mike’s sentiments here. I have an email sitting in my inbox from a state legislator asking two things: 1) does early voting increase turnout, and 2) what are the cost implications. I’m going to do my best to help the legislator, but my ability to provide accurate answers is limited.

I have a good answer to the first question, but the second remains a mystery. There is a report from the State of Oregon which shows that full vote by mail elections save money compared to “mixed” systems (systems where large numbers of voters opt for absentee ballots), but no study that I have seen compares the costs of various combinations of in-person and by mail early voting, precinct place voting, and different balloting systems.

Warnings of vote fraud in Indiana

One of the most common questions I get about voting by mail is whether it will work in (Insert State or County here), where, didn’t I know, the rough and tumble of politics is nothing like in Oregon.

I’m never quite sure how to evaluate these claims. Mike and Thad are working on vote fraud, and perhaps have more to write on this, but everything I’ve seen indicates that outright vote fraud is really quite infrequent (see Tova Wang on this same point; John Fund’s book is the most commonly cited source on fraud).

Nonetheless, stories like this one out of Muncie, IN continue to disturb those who worry about absentee balloting and fraud. In this case, an egregious case of ballot fraud was uncovered in 2003 (and charged in 1999), and officials warn that they’ll be especially vigilant in 2007.