Though electronic voting issues are not the ones I consider most important, I have been trying to understand them. Going from immersion in Civil Rights Movement history to reading about voting technology and exit polls is like waking from dreams of a more perfect democracy to swirling wisps of anecdote and statistical analysis. Civil Rights Movement history has everything to do with our current concerns about voting, but today it's not my focus. Instead, I'm a little more concerned with simply following and understanding the news. Many of the developments are about technology and statistics and are shot through with quotes from academic experts. It can be difficult to keep a handle on the sound bite versions of lengthy studies. Sometimes I wish I had Morpheus from The Matrix to hand me a red pill and guide me to truth.
To help sort things out, I'm going to look at some of the analysts and studies, especially the oft-cited Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, but let's start with some not so recent news.
Bev Harris, Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne uncovered a major election fraud story more than a week ago, and nobody in the mainstream press seems to care. Harris reported their findings in Volusia County on Tuesday night, November 16. There has been minimal coverage in Florida newspapers (here, here, here, and (a good editorial) here) and none as of yet in a newspaper with national circulation. Thom Hartmann at the progressive news website Common Dreams is the only nationally syndicated journalist who is actually reporting the details.
"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."
When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable.
"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud."
That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."
You should read the whole thing and listen to the audio of Hartmann's interview with Harris (though his writing is superior to his interviewing style).
Until there's more coverage of this story, Hartmann's somewhat sensationalistic tones (though with material like this, what's sensational?) test the validity of Keith Olbermann's well-documented dismissal of claims that the media is ignoring election fraud stories. Nonetheless, you have to appreciate Olbermann's healthy blend of skepticism and a genuine, hard-nosed truth-seeking. His Bloggerman posts tend to include a good blend of media analysis and round ups of news about election problems. To his credit, Olbermann looks beyond possible election hacking scandals to other things as well, like the problems with provisional ballots and unreasonably high undervote numbers in Ohio.
Though Olbermann is covering a range election problems, his examples of other coverage in the mainstream press are primarily around machine failures and possible tampering. These stories, while undeniably urgent, appeal to our 21st century Matrix-inspired paranoia that the whole system is an illusion. As long as electronic voting technologies are not transparent and verifiable, such paranoia is well founded. But if journalists and activists only get as far as waking the general public to the need for DREs with paper trails and open source software, then their consciousness-expanding red pill is really the blue pill Morpheus offered Neo: if you take it, "the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe," but your elections are no closer to being democratic.
This is why the organization Demos, which has a broader agenda than Harris' Black Box Voting (and more measured tones), is "concerned that a preoccupation with whether the vote was hacked will detract attention from some of the very real problems that plagued Election 2004." Here's the Demos Election 2004 post-mortem on Ohio and Florida:
In Ohio, election officials have started counting the 155,337 provisional ballots cast in that swing state. On November 10 -- their first day of wading through a total of 24,788 provisional ballots -- officials in Cuyahoga County said they found 1,749 valid and 917 invalid ones. But most counties are not keeping, or at least publicly disclosing, a running tally of the provisional ballots being counted. It is unlikely that we will know how many of these votes will actually count until December 1, the official date for certifying Ohio's election results.
Meanwhile, reports from Florida suggest that the majority of provisional ballots cast in that state have been rejected -- many cast by people voting in the wrong precinct. "I was not happy with rejecting the ballots of those people who went to all the trouble to register, went to the polls and went through all the other hoopla and then, because they voted in precinct 1028 instead of 1064, their vote didn't count," said Judge Barry Cohen, Chair of the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board. "The law is clear, but the law is not right," he said. Florida Senator Robert Klein concurred. "We're in a computer age. You should be able to vote in any precinct," he said. "We're acting like we're in the dark ages because we can't overcome technology issues. To me this is elementary computer technology. These things can easily be fixed."
And here's the Demos short-list of serious problems in those two states and elsewhere:
1. Long lines at the polls -- waits of 3-5 hours in Ohio were not uncommon -- which effectively disenfranchised many people.
2. A shortage of voting machines, which exacerbated delays at the polls.
3. Absentee ballots that were never received by thousands of voters.
4. Problems with voters being erroneously purged from the rolls.
5. Differential standards for voter ID, and for accepting voter registrations and provisional ballots.
6. Persistent attempts at voter intimidation and suppression.
Yet in their vehemence to keep us focused on problems that lie outside the technological, Demos gets vertiginously close to falling back into the Matrix. Their able minded Neo who would lead them out is actually the shape shifting agent of the Matrix, Mr. Smith. To support their position, Demos tells us
a new report on Election 2004 by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project [pdf] concludes that, "there is no evidence that electronic voting machines were used to steal the 2004 election for George Bush. The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet appear to be selectively chosen to make the point. Much of that analysis appears to rest on early exit poll results, which were bound to be highly volatile, given the nature of exit poll methodology."
The folks at Demos would do well to read the rebuttals to the Caltech/MIT report (here and here). More to the point, the folks at Demos should take a look at the 2001 final report [pdf 652KB] of Florida Governor Jeb Bush's Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, Standards and Technology, which led to the electoral reforms Florida undertook after the debacle of the 2000 election. One of the recommendations of that report is that Florida counties adopt optical scan voting machines as a uniform technology throughout the state. The chief basis for the Task Force recommendation is none other than an earlier report by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project [pdf 44KB], which found that optical scan voting machines have "the best average performance of the newer methods." Scrutiny of Florida's 2004 election returns by Kathy Dopp has left many observers wondering if Florida's optical scan machines were hacked. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project might be feeling a little defensive right now.
If I sound a little glib, then it may be worth burrowing a little deeper down the rabbit-hole. On the one hand, the Florida Task Force report overstates the strength of the Caltech/MIT preference for optical scan technology. On the other hand, the problem is not what machines they recommend but that their focus is so narrowly limited to a single aspect of technological function. While their research is valuable, and has been the basis of an important study at Harvard, it only evaluates the integrity of optical scan and DRE voting machines from the standpoint of observable ballot spoilage (ballots cast but not counted). As the Harvard study has shown, the spoilage data call into question the integrity of our democracy. But this data does not tell us what we need to know about the reliability of electronic voting machines.
While the Caltech/MIT report acknowledges that the ballot spoilage rate for "electronic devices is forty to seventy percent higher than the incidence of residual votes [i.e., spoiled ballots] with the other technologies," such as the older lever machines, the researchers believe that the differences in machine performance
reflect how people relate to the technologies, more than actual machine failures. State and federal voting machine certification tolerate very low machine failure rates: no more than 1 in 250,000 ballots for federal certification and no more than 1 in 1,000,000 ballots in some states. Certification serves as an important screen: machines that produce failure rates higher than these tolerance levels are not certified or used. We believe that human factors drive much of the “error” in voting, because the observed differences in residual voting rates that are attributable to machine types are on the order of 1 to 2 out of 100 ballots cast. Given the stringent testing standards for machinery in use, these differences are unlikely to arise from mechanical failures. (17)
In other words: See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.
There is ample evidence that both optical scan and DRE machines are subject to failures that are not detectable by the current testing standards. EllenTheisen of VotersUnite.org has carefully researched the role of the ballot definition file (BDF), essential for every election, which is never subjected to outside review:
BDFs are unique for each election and define all the races and candidates for each precinct. BDFs tell the voting machine software how to interpret a voter's touches on a screen or marks on an optical scan ballot (including absentee ballots), how to record those selections as votes, and how to combine them into the final tally.
Programming election data is a very complex process, especially in counties with hundreds of different ballot styles, and a single error can jeopardize the outcome of an election. Some election districts lack the technical expertise to prepare BDFs, and instead depend on the vendor or outside programmers for the preparation. Others prepare the BDFs themselves. In both cases, however, BDFs undergo very little testing and no independent audit before being used to determine the results of an election. Little wonder that many serious election disruptions have been caused by ballot definition errors. Other BDF errors have probably gone unnoticed, and some may have affected election outcomes. . . .
If BDFs are flawed, a hand recount of the original ballots is the only way to detect the error. Recounting optical scan ballots by running them through an optical scanner a second time typically shows the same results as the initial tally. But recounts cannot be conducted for DRE systems, because there are no original ballots to recount.
Accurate election results require accurate BDFs. Some counties have hundreds of ballot styles, and each one must be programmed correctly since a human error in any definition could be magnified by the number of voters using that ballot.
Pre-election testing is completely inadequate. Optical scanners are tested by running a small set of test ballots —hardly enough to test every possible combination for every ballot style. Testing on DREs may involve simply pressing each button on the screen to make sure they all work correctly. Testing has failed to detect the many election data errors that have disrupted many optical scan elections. If an error occurs during an election, new data is created and used to tally the final result, but there is no way of knowing if the new data is correct.
The extreme complexity of election definition data, the complete lack of security procedures used to create them, the hopelessly inadequate testing: these problems raise serious questions about the accuracy of electronic vote counting — on both DREs and optical scanners.
Furthermore, in order to ensure the accuracy of ballot data, an independent review must be performed on every BDF for every election in every voting district for as many years as the machines are in use. Since each election-specific BDF is created immediately before each election, both the time constraints and the costs are significant. (emphasis in original)
One might want to allow that the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project came out with its report in 2001 and Theisen's work came out just this year. But Theisen's study, and other documentation of flaws in electronic voting machines, seem to have had little influence on the recent work of the Voting Technology Project. In September, as we approached this year's election, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project came out with an "Online petition for American voters." It reads:
We, American election workers, election supply vendors, voting technology researchers and advocates have worked hard for the last 4 years to improve election accuracy, integrity and security. We are convinced that there is no precinct in America now that has not put effort into making their voting technology and process more careful and transparent than in the past. Most of the worst technologies have been replaced. Where they have not new processes arein [sic] place to help ameliorate problems.
Our public debate shows that none of us think the job is done, still, we all believe it is the best it has ever been. While we expect and work to uncover problems, we are convinced that the crucial work for all of us now is to turn out and vote. Work with us to make this the greatest turnout voting year in the history of America.
As far as the Caltech/MIT folks are concerned, the broken system has been fixed—not perfectly, but pretty well: the observable problems that led to public concern after the elections in 2000 were all technological and were therefore easily remedied by changes in equipment. According to these scientists, the largest problem is not the integrity of the system, but that the voters screw up because they don't have confidence in the available technology. The main thing, therefore, is to shut away our fears and turn out and vote.
Scientists who study the internal security mechanisms of the software, rather than the externally observable failure rates, have been singing a different tune. In the week before election day, Avi Rubin, the first computer scientist to gain access to the Diebold proprietary (i.e., secret) source code, sounded this alarm:
Technical glitches and malfunctioning machines - the kinds of problems that occur with any computer system - could result in the loss of votes in unrecoverable ways. Worse, these fully electronic machines could be rigged - undetectably, because of the complexity of the software that runs them.
While we can never eliminate the possibility of tampering with elections, the impact of an attack on a DRE system would likely be more serious than the results of tampering with traditional mechanical voting machines or paper-based systems, such as optically scanned ballots. This is because a bug in the software of an electronic voting system, whether accidental or intentional, has the potential to skew results in more than an isolated polling place or two. It could impact the vote totals on many thousands of machines in hundreds of precincts.
While Neo uses his mind to engage in superhuman combat against programs inside the Matrix, it is both a source of power and an essential vulnerability that his mortal body is back on Morpheus' ship, the Nebudchadnezzar. As in key moments in the movie, the answer to how we can reach our desired end is a human rather than technological one. The problems with the machines that I've been discussing are not with the technology itself but with sloppy implementation. In fact, the technologies, whether lever, punch card, optical scan or DRE, are all only as good as implementation allows. According to one of the studies commissioned for the Carter-Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform, even punch card ballots—which Caltech/MIT calls the "worst" technology—can be quite reliable:
Although Los Angeles widely used the notorious punch card ballots, the city initiated an intensive voter education program in the wake of the 2000 experience and succeeded in reducing the number of residual ballots in the 2001 mayoral election to about 1 percent, down from the national average of about 2 percent the previous year. Virginia, which already had an uncounted ballot rate below the national average in 2000, also cut its level in half in 2001, largely by instituting new technology that enabled voters to verify and correct their ballot choices if necessary, even if they used punch card systems. . . .
Thus, the 2001 elections reinforce evidence that the type of voting machinery employed is not necessarily the most significant factor affecting the rate of spoiled ballots. Even the alleged main culprit of the 2000 debacle, punch card ballots, performed well when voter education efforts were undertaken in Los Angeles and when they included technology that allowed a voter to double check and correct his or her vote, as in Virginia. By contrast, only New Jersey replaced punch card machines with little apparent effect. New York City was able to improve the performance of its thirty-eight-year-old lever machines to some extent by investing in poll workers. (emphasis added)
There are potential logistical and financial challenges to implementing any of the technologies in question. Careful study is indeed necessary to determine the method(s) most practical for our needs at all levels of the electoral process, precinct, county, state and nation. It ought to be the case that what we already know about the routine malfunction of democracy in our elections—bad machine standards, wildly disproportionate rates of ballot spoilage for African Americans, voter roll purges, vote suppression, understaffed polls, poorly trained poll workers, language and accessibility barriers—would be cause for universal alarm, a declared state of emergency. As with other injustices inside our own borders, the basic problems of practicality and cost are a barrier to swift remedy, while Bush has a free hand to allocate billions of dollars and tremendous human resources for the machinery war. The 2002 Help America Vote Act was announced as a broad scale remedy, yet it has not been properly implemented or funded, and the letter of the law is being twisted to thwart the spirit of the law. Short of proper reforms, grassroots activity can go a long way towards redeeming the mechanisms of our democracy: droves of non-partisan poll watchers and citizens asking their local elections officials to implement responsible protocols for voting machine operations. The One who can destroy The Matrix is, in fact, The Many.
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