The chair of the EAC, Paul DeGregorio, published an opinion piece today in the Tallahassee Democrat stating that the “hype” over hacking voting systems should not shatter confidence in voting. The bottom line for his analysis is this:

This election year is one of change, challenge and progress in how our citizens will vote. At least one-third of Americans will vote on new equipment, many contests may be close, and voters (hopefully) will turn out in great numbers at polling places throughout the nation. For the first time, thanks to the Help America Vote Act and modern voting equipment, many people with disabilities will have the ability to vote independently. Provisional voting is now available in every state. We have come a long way since 2000, but challenges related to the transition to new equipment remain. But changes along the way are a good thing, because it builds trust in election systems that can be verified to further empower confidence among voters.

Americans should be confident that their vote will be counted, whether they touch a screen or fill in an oval. The integrity of the system is not in hands of hackers, professors, interest groups or politicians in Washington – it is managed by local election officials, as it always has been. No one should be intimidated by the hype over hacking. Vote on Nov. 7. You can count on it.

Today, I am attending the “E-Voting: Lessons Learnt and Future Challenges” conference in Tallinn Estonia. The conference is sponsored by the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Council of Europe, and the e-Governance Academy. I am hearing the conference in both Estonian and translated English, which is an interesting experience to say the least! I will be blogging each of the four panels from the conference. At the outset, let me note that e-voting is Internet voting for the Estonians.

The Estonian Parliamentary leader is giving a keynote address and he noted that someone has to go first in the process of improving elections and trying new things. He said that there is a saying in Estonia when the young attempt to be smarter than the old that the egg is trying to be smarter than the chicken. Today he noted that in Estonia, there is the situation where the egg is smarter than the chicken because the e-voting is the young thing and offers much more to the population compared to the traditional voting methods. Estonian is a world leader with e-voting. The voters will elect the parliament in 2007 with e-voting being one of the channels for voting.

Voting has to be at the one hand confidential and on the other hand it has to be an auditable and controlled process. He notes that the information society has expanded across Estonia with internet connectivity throughout the state, as shown by the 58 percent of Estonians who have computers and internet access. In addition, Estonians have digital signatures as part of the national identification system. They have developed the habit of using e-services, with the young and old alike using the internet in everyday life. Using it for voting is an obvious next step.

This is the first of many stories we’ll see this election. Early voting appears to be way up in a number of states. This story reports on the first numbers coming out of Tennessee.

Let’s see… I see a girl … she’s a cute little brunette … WAIT! Her name is Sofia! Is that it? Is one of those attentive children named Sofia? Congrats, Mike. 😉

Election Updates: Teaching election administration … in kindergarten!

On Tuesday Oct 24, the topic of NPR’s Talk of the Nation was security of voting technology. Kimball Brace (Election Data Services), Paul DeGregorio (EAC) and Douglas James (Univ of Iowa) were the guest experts. As some of you know, Kim and Paul were both speakers at VTP’s recent conference on Voter ID and Voter Registration at MIT. The general sentiment from the callers was of distrust of electronic voting machines. Go to the webpage to listen.

On the same webpage, there is a link to a Voter’s Guide: From Absentee Ballots to Photos IDs. They must be following our lead! VTP’s Seven Steps to Making Your Vote Count.

I received this email from the Advancement Project this morning:

Advancement Project and our community-based partners have developed a resource – Poll Worker Palm Cards – to prevent disenfranchisement by giving election workers easy access to information they need at their fingertips.

Our voter protection program has found in many locales that inadequate poll worker training and support results in voter disenfranchisement in election after election. In many places, training does not ensure that poll workers can readily recall the most important information and rules. Dense training materials often do not include a detailed index, helpful summaries or frequently asked questions.

To help prevent errors that cause disenfranchisement and to assist poll workers in Detroit, Philadelphia, Florida and Ohio, we have developed palm cards with the top Ten Things Every Poll Worker Should Know. These cards contain city- and state-specific information in a compact and user-friendly format. They are each different — based on research and community input about the key problems and needs in those communities.

In partnership with state and local civic engagement efforts in Philadelphia, Detroit and several counties in Ohio and Florida, we have asked election officials to give these cards, or a similar resource, to their poll workers. At our suggestion, the City of Philadelphia has agreed to put much of the information contained in our Palm Card on a poster that will be taped to the check-in table in every Philadelphia polling site. Other cities and counties are considering the idea of distributing these palm cards to their poll workers.

Time is short! Please help Advancement Project prevent errors at the polls by putting critical information at the fingertips of election workers. You can make a difference by:

Calling or writing election officials in Philadelphia, Detroit and counties in Florida and Ohio, asking that they distribute the Palm Card to their poll workers.
Giving a palm card to any poll worker that you know.

Asking political parties or other organizations that typically recruit poll workers to distribute these card.

Creating Poll Worker Palm Cards for use in other cities, counties and states.

Additional details are available at the Advancement Project’s website, including links there to the palm cards they have developed for Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Over the years, I’ve been asked to give many public addresses, research presentations, and other public appearances. But few have been to as demanding, and difficult, an audience as I faced this morning — a classroom of 25 kindergarteners!

So here is what we did, which I’d highly recommend as a method of teaching the basics of elections and election administration to kids of this age (it worked really well!).

I brought into the classroom a real voting booth. I painted a small box red, and brought some prepared paper ballots with me to class.

We started off by passing around some ballots I reproduced from Melanie Goodrich’s study of historic paper ballots from the Huntington Library, including two from Lincoln’s 1864 election.

We then read “Duck for President”, which the kids loved!

After that, we got into the process of voting.

I announced the rules of the election. Every kid would have a chance to cast one ballot — for either shiny butterfly stickers or for sports stickers. Here is a photo of the ballots. Once we were done casting ballots, we would count them up, and which ever received the most votes would be the sticker type that all of the students in the class would receive.

I then had two volunteers help me put the ballot booth together, and then two other volunteers helped me tape the red ballot box shut with bright blue tape. I then had a third set of two volunteers help me select small groups from the class to go to the ballot booth and grab a ballot, and then put it in the ballot box.

Finally, two volunteers helped me unseal the box, and then one by one they pulled out the ballots and announced what each ballot was to the class (showing the ballot to the class, of course). One of the teachers helped tabulate the ballots on the board.

Here’s the interesting thing about the result. Despite the fact that there are more boys than girls in the class, the shiny butterflies won — 14 to 11!

The kids had a great time, I had fun, and I think they all learned a little about how democracy works and how elections are run.

By Anthony Leonard

My wife, Gretchen, and I were poll workers for the first time for the June 6 primary. Luckily we were assigned to our own precinct at the Pasadena Aquatic Center near the Rose Bowl.

The Saturday before we went to a briefing put on by the County Clerk’s office at the Westminster church in Pasadena for pollworkers. It was overcrowded but the County person did a fine job of covering the issues. It was announced that they still needed another hundred pollworkers in Pasadena alone.

On June 6 we arrived at the polling place at 6:30 am. The inspector and another clerk had set up the booths the day before.

According to our inspector approximately 900 registered voters are in our precinct and 200 to 300 of those had requested absentee ballots. In the end 144 regular ballots were cast along with six provisional ballots. A number of people also appeared to cast their absentee ballots. Two ballots were destroyed in the process of voting.

Of those casting provisional ballots, three were listed as being absentee voters who claimed that they did not receive their absentee ballots and the other three were not registered but claimed they should have been.

Every voter seemed to have no problem in getting the correct ballot and using the correct polling booth including the nonpartisan voters. A few (maybe five) had problems with the InkaVote system, either not inserting the ballot properly or trying to use the pen in the wrong spot.

Post election checks: (1) We counted 146 signatures. This should have equaled the number of regular ballots (144). The speculation was that two people who cast provisional ballots had signed in but weren’t supposed to. This could have been checked but wasn’t. (2) The number of regular ballots plus the number of provisional ballots plus the number of destroyed ballots plus the number of unused ballots should have equalled the number ballots originally supplied by the county. But we were missing one.

Our inspector was very experienced and efficient. We were done at 8:30pm.

Anthony Leonard is Professor (emeritus) at Caltech. Anthony wrote this essay and emailed it to me shortly after the June 6 primary, and in all honesty it got lost in my email … but he has promised to provide a similar essay after the November general election, as he is again going to to be working at a polling place in our area this fall. Thanks, Tony!

I began my 2006 election observations at an early voting location in LA County — the East LA County Regional Library, a location where I had observed early voting before in LA County. Some quick observations:

• This particular early voting location (seen here from the street) is still very difficult to access. The parking lot associated with the library was full as of 10AM (an hour before early voting was going to start), and given the heavy construction in the area it is hard to park on the nearby streets. One of the early voters (I was there for about an hour of voting) complained about the lack of parking, and it was a problem that the election judge in this location also commented on. This is an obvious concern for those who worry about polling place accessibility, and also is a potential problem for denial-of-service threats to polling places (it would be very easy in this location to fill up all of the nearby parking locations).
• Unfortunately, I was not allowed to observe the setting up of the polling place, in particular, the generation of the zero tapes nor the sealing of the voting machines used in the polling place. I arrived at 10:10am (again, it took me some time to find a parking place!), and the doors were closed to the polling place (a marked difference relative to the last time I was at this location, when the doors were open and I was given free access to observe the polling place set-up operation). At about 10:35 the judge noticed I was there, and opened the door; when I asked to come inside to observe I was told (nicely) that “we’re still setting up”. At about the same time an official from the county library (nicely) asked me what my business was, and he said that it was okay for me to stand in a public building, as long as the election workers knew what I was doing. In all honesty, I don’t know exactly whether the public is allowed to witness the setting up of an early voting location, but in my opinion, we should be able to witness it!
• When they opened up the polling place (11:05am) it was apparent that two of the eight voting machines were not quite ready for action. By the time I left an hour later, one of the voting machines was still not functioning, and three of the pollworkers were working hard to get it operational.
• In the first hour of operation, the site had six voters (about one every ten minutes), and as we have a long ballot, they were averaging about 9 minutes and thirty seconds to cast their ballots. One voter took a relatively long time (almost 11 minutes, but he was someone who was admittedly unfamiliar with the technology).
• I learned some good news, though, once the first few voters had cast their ballots and I had a chance to talk with the pleasant and helpful election judge in this early voting site. She showed me the voting machines, and I noticed that the plastic flap that was on the Diebold VVPAT device the last time I observed early voting in LA County had been removed from all of the voting machines used in this early voting location (including the one set up for disabled voters). Here are some pictures of the Diebold Accuvote TSx I took at IACREOT, showing the VVPAT flap closed, open, and partially open. This was something I wrote about earlier, and which I brought to the attention of the vendor and the LA County election officials … glad to see that they seem to have fixed this particular problem.
• Last, the judge in this early voting location had developed one innovation. Typically all of the paperwork for the voting machines (especially the logs of activity regarding the devices) in the past have been in huge binders, and I’ve noticed in the past that poll workers have had to spend considerable time finding the logs for specific machines. Here the judge had separated all of the logs for each machine into an independent folder, making it much easier for the election workers to locate and deal with the paperwork for specific machines. She was quite proud of this innovation!

More from other early voting sites in the coming days!

Another excellent podcast on the 2006 Elections from the team at NOW (PBS). This week’s story examines whether “clean” elections in Arizona have changed campaigns in that state, and whether such limits place unreasonable restrictions on free speech.

Click Votes for Sale? Clean Elections to hear the story or download the podcast.