E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts

Problems in Maryland Just Now Surfacing?

It appears, if this report pans out, that there were massive systemic failures across Maryland involving Diebold AccuVote-TS machines last November; problems including lost votes, multiple machine failures and even unreadable data cartridges.

Why have we only heard about this now? It’s unclear. From the first report I’ve seen on this:

Scoop: Emerging Scandal on MD Voting Machine Performance

Montgomery County, Maryland. According to county election officials and other sources, all Maryland voting machines have been on ‘’lockdown'’ since November 2, 2004 due to statewide machine failures including 12% of machines in Montgomery County, some of which appear to have lost votes in significant numbers. The State Board of Elections convinced the media that Election Day went smoothly, when in fact there were serious statewide, systemic problems with the Diebold electronic voting machines – so serious that the SBE and Diebold still have not figured out how to prevent the loss of votes in the future.

“Election Day was anything but smooth. Votes were lost, computer cards storing votes were unreadable, thousands of error messages were reported, machines froze in mid-voting and machines refused to boot up. The problems with the machines were so widespread and serious that efforts to hide the problems have failed,” said Linda Schade, director of TrueVoteMD.org. “It is not sufficient for Diebold and the SBE to investigate themselves. They have misled the public about this problem and an independent investigation is needed. Further, these problems indicate that the Diebold machines should be decertified as required by Maryland law and as provided for in the Diebold contract. This is an opportunity to correct the mistaken purchase of paperless electronic voting machines. Diebold should refund Maryland tax dollars and we should start anew with a system that voters trust because it can be independently audited and recounts can be meaningful.”

We’ll need to see some corroboration of this report and what evidence is consistent across the report and what the Maryland elections officials have to say for themselves. I truly hope that this hasn’t been shrouded in secrecy for more than four months… that would be an unqualified disaster of the electoral system and responsibility would lie on the shoulders those we entrust to ensure our votes count.

UPDATE [2005-03-09 17:03:57]: A bit more information on this situation has surfaced in an AP story and in a few critical documents on the TrueVoteMD website.

Apparently, the Montogomery County Board of Elections just released a report, “2004 Presidential General Election Review - Lessons Learned”, which is the basis for the data cited in the story below. Note that the Maryland State Board of Elections claims to have not seen this report and disputes these numbers saying that only 12 out of approximately 3,000 machines in Montgomery County failed.

TrueVoteMD has posted copies of the report (linked to above) and an internal memo, “Montgomery County Root Cause Failure Analysis”. These documents appear to be authentic (that is, no county official is yet disputing their authenticity).

Here’s the skinny from the AP story:

Report Shows Problems With Montgomery Voting Machines

ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) - A review of voting machines used in Montgomery County on Election day found that 7 percent of the machines had problems such as frozen screens or failed to boot up.

An additional 5 percent had vote tallies that were considerably lower than other machines used in the same precincts, causing elections officials to deem them “suspect,” according to the report drafted by the county in December for the local election board. […]

[Montgomery] county’s review of the election concluded that 189 of the units failed. Of those, 58 would not boot up and 106 had the screen freeze.

“In staff opinion, this is the most serious of the problems,” the report states of the screen freezes.

An additional 122 units had results that were deemed suspect, meaning each had 25-50 votes recorded when all other units in a polling place had more than 150 votes.

Margie Rohrer, spokeswoman for the county election board, said some of the machines have been sent to Diebold for testing. She referred all other questions to the state board. The report does not mention whether the vote tally was affected by the problems. […]

Exit Poll Post Mortem

Paul Velleman at left2right has an interesting analysis of the exit poll data from the November presidential election.

His conclusions:
(1) Discrepancies between exit polls and votes cannot be explained by random chance, so the discrepancies must have had a systematic cause.
(2) Explanations given by the exit pollsters are not statistically plausible.
(3) We don’t yet have an adequate explanation. Perhaps we’ll find one after the exit pollsters release their precinct-by-precinct data.

“Christopher Danielsen’s Voting Experience and The Nature Of Accessibility [and Human Factors]”

Christopher Danielsen, the editor of NFB’s The Voice of the Nation’s Blind, describes his experience casting a ballot on a Sequoia AVC Advantage (a full-face button-matrix DRE) with a braile template and instructions (“On My Voting Experience and The Nature Of Accessibility”). In addition to highlighting how difficult it is to vote with tactile templates, it provides some stark illustrations of human factors issues such as environmental conditions and voter fatigue (which can be particularly heightened with the lengthy process of reading braille… not to mention that braille literacy rates have been dropping):

The ability of a blind person to vote privately and independently does not consist merely of being able to identify which button to press, or which oval to mark, or which hole to punch in order to make a candidate selection. Sighted voters receive confirmation that their vote has been cast, and on newer equipment they are told whether they have over-voted or under-voted a race and so forth. Blind people should receive responses from the voting terminal which tell us what we have accomplished. Similarly, we should be able to navigate through contests and ballot questions at our own pace, and we should be able to review our ballot before casting it as sighted voters can. A static template can’t replace this interactive voting experience, whether that template is laid over a punch card or optically scanned ballot or a touch-screen machine. We must have response from the machine to indicate that the voting machine is accurately recording our choices and that our ballot is cast as we intended. Otherwise, we will be left only with the option of having a poll worker or a person of our choice review the ballot with us to make sure our votes are cast as we intend. While blind voters should certainly be permitted to retain the option of using assistance from another individual of our choice if we so desire, the chance to have a completely private and secret voting experience must not be denied to any blind voter. It is available to every sighted voter, and thus true equality for the blind will not be achieved in voting unless it is also available to us.

More Information Surfaces About ES&S “Counting Backwards” Feature/Bug

More information has surfaced in a letter from ES&S to Guilford County, NC, Board of Elections (provided by Joyce McCloy, PDF here and text here):

We would like to explain in further technical detail what caused this issue, should you or others at the county have questions. the 32,767 capacity limitation at a singled precinct level is a function of the design and definition of the results database used by ERM. The data storage element used to record votes at the precinct level is a two byte binary field. 32,767 is 2 to the 15th power, which is the maximum number held by a two byte word (16 bits) in memory, where the most significant bit is reserved as the sign bit (a plus or minus indicator). Additionally, ERM precinct count level data is stored in a binary computer format known as two’s complement. Data on ERM results reports are printed as the absolute value of the two’s complement of the associated data in the ERM database. This means that once the 32,767 limitation is reached, additional incremental tallies of vote results would not be printed correctly (32,768 through 65,536 would actually be represented as 65,536 to 32, 768).

While this value, 32,767 is certainly higher than any practical value that could be tabulated in a single election day precinct, the consideration of reporting all absentee ballots or early voting into a single absentee or “One Stop” precinct does hold the possibility of yielding much higher totals than what may be possible in single election day precincts.

This appears to be a case where a local jurisdiction used voting equipment out of the context of the vendor’s design. If they had used an unsigned 16-bit integer variable, they could have reported 65,536 votes.

561 Votes found in Washington

Washington is in its third vote-count. There was the initial count, then a recount and now a third hand count. King county has been particularly fluctuant in its reported numbers in each of these counts. Now – where the margin of victory in the Governor’s race is 42 votes according to the second recount and 88 votes counting votes found in the current recount – King County has found 561 ballots that were improperly disqualified because signatures of a few hundred registered voters had not made it into their registration database (these signatures existed on the hard-copy registration cards) (from the Seattle Times, “Error discovery could give Gregoire election”):

The King County error came to light Sunday when Larry Phillips, chairman of the Metropolitan King County Council, was looking over a list of voters from his neighborhood whose ballots had been disqualified.

Phillips spotted his own name on the list, prompting an investigation by King County elections workers that turned up 561 improperly disqualified ballots.

King County Elections Director Dean Logan said that when workers were verifying signatures on absentee ballots, they erroneously disqualified voters whose signatures hadn’t been entered into a computer system.

Instead, Logan said, they should have double-checked with signatures on voters’ registration cards on file with the county.

This is yet another reminder that the voting system is exactly that, a system. There are many points of failure outside of the polling place and even the central tabulation activities. Any part of this system can potentially affect the outcome of the race, by accident or on purpose.

NRC on Electronic Voting

The Committee for Electronic Voting - under the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) - recently issued a call for papers for input on what questions policy makers should be thinking about given the current state of electronic voting. Here are the whitepapers submitted (listed alphabetically by author/organization):

Making Each Vote Count: A Research Agenda for Electronic Voting, report of an AAAS workshop on electronic voting, October 2004
The Need for Usability of Electronic Voting Systems: Questions for Voters and Policy Makers, ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), U.S. Public Policy Committee
Voting, Vote Capture and Vote Counting Symposium: Electronic Voting Best Practices, Jean Camp, Allan Friedman, and Warigia Bowman, Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, June 2004
Electronic Voting Machines in South Carolina, Duncan Buell and Carter Bays, University of South Carolina
Electronic Voting, David Dill and Will Doherty, Verified Voting Foundation
Accessibility and Auditability in Electronic Voting, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Voting Machines and the Standards-Setting Process, Eddan Katz and Rebecca Bolin, Yale University School of Law
Putting People First: The Importance of User-Centered Design and Universal Usability to Voting Systems, Sharon Laskowski, National Institute of Standards and Technology; and Whitney Quesenbery, Whitney Interactive Design LLC
Illustrative Risks to the Public in the use of Computer Systems and Related Technology, Excerpt: Election Problem Cases as of [November] 25, 2004, Peter G. Neumann, SRI International
Preliminary Analysis of E-Voting Problems Highlights Need for Heightened Standards and Testing, Deirdre Mulligan and Joseph Lorenzo Hall, University of California, Berkeley
Electronic Voting Systems: The Good, the Bad, and the Stupid, Barbara Simons

Hand Recount of Computer Results

Two Washington counties are going to recount e-voting results by printing them out from a computer and then counting the printouts by hand, according to an AP story.
The e-voting technology stores each vote in an electronic cartridge. These cartridges will be used to create a PDF file for each ballot, which will be printed, thus allowing a hand recount of paper ballots.

This makes no sense, obviously. If the electronic cartridges are the only available records of how people voted, then the print-then-recount-by-hand procedure can only introduce further errors. (Of course, recounting voter-verified paper ballots, had their been any, would have given us useful information about how votes were cast.)

So why is this charade going on? Presumably because Washington state law requires a recount of paper voting records when recounting a very close election, such as this year’s gubernatorial election. Perhaps the current law was adopted back before anybody foresaw the possibility of computerized voting.

This kind of problem isn’t unique to Washington state. I understand that New Jersey election laws require election machines to be examined by mechanical engineers. That made sense back when all such machines were mechanical, but it’s the wrong approach for computerized machines. Technology has moved much faster than voting law.

UPDATE (Dec. 7): One of the two affected counties (Snohomish) has asked for permission to transfer the machine votes onto computer tape, and then use a computer to recount the records on the tape, according to a Seattle Times

“>story by Keith Ervin. (They asked for, and were denied, permission to “recount” the results by reading them directly from the computer cartridges where they were originally recorded.)

Changes Found in Alabama Recount

Changes found in segregation amendment recount

The statewide recount on a measure to remove segregation-era language from Alabama’s constitution is turning up variations from the official canvass, with changes exceeding 100 votes in at least three counties.

These three counites (Hale, Macon and Madison) all use the same type of voting technology - ES&S’s Optech-III Eagle optical scan machine. (Note that 75% of all of Alabama counties use the same technology… 95% of counties use optical scan (different models)).

Not surprisingly, the totals in the counties that used DRE equipment didn’t change. That’s not the kind of thing that inspires much confidence in our crowd. If they had recounted a slew of voter-verified audit trail documents and compared to a retally of electronic ballots, that would be begin to be a proper audit… as Doug Jones, pointed out in his October 2004 CACM piece, “Auditing Elections”,

One important aspect to examine is the chain of custody for each piece of evidence pertaining to the election. What machinery produced this data, who collected it from the machine, and how was it preserved? What we need is analogous to the documentation for the chain of custody required to bring evidence to court in a criminal case.

New Study of E-Voting Effects in Florida

Yesterday, a team of social scientists from UC Berkeley released a study of the effect of e-voting on county-by-county vote totals in Florida and Ohio in the recent election. It’s the first study to use proper social-science modeling methods to evaluate the effect of e-voting.

The study found counties with e-voting tended to tilt toward Bush, even after controlling for differences between counties including past voting history, income, percentage of Hispanic voters, voter turnout, and county size. The researchers estimate that e-voting caused a swing in favor of Bush of up to 260,000 votes in Florida. (A change of that many votes would not be enough to change the election’s result; Bush won Florida by about 350,000 votes.)

No e-voting effect was found in Ohio.

The study looks plausible, but I don’t have the expertise to do a really careful critique. Readers who do are invited to critique the study in the comments section.

Regardless of whether it is ultimately found credible, this study is an important step forward in the discourse about this topic. Previous analyses had shown differences, but had not controlled for the past political preferences of individual counties. Skeptics had claimed that “Dixiecrat” counties, in which many voters were registered as Democrats but habitually voted Republican, could explain the discrepancies. This study shows, at least, that the simple Dixiecrat theory is not enough to refute the claim that e-voting changed the results.

Assuming that the study’s authors did their arithmetic right, there are two possibilities. It could be that some other factor, beyond the ones that the study controlled for, can explain the discrepancies. If this is the case, we can assume somebody will show up with another study demonstrating that.

Or it could be that e-voting really did affect the result. If so, there are several ways this could have happened. One possibility is that the machines were maliciously programmed or otherwise compromised; I think this is unlikely but unfortunately the machines are designed in a way that makes this very hard to check. Or perhaps the machines made errors that tended to flip some votes from one candidate to the other. Even random errors of this sort would tend to affect the overall results, if e-voting counties different demographically from other counties (which is apparently the case in Florida). Another possibility is that e-voting affects voter behavior somehow, perhaps affecting different groups of voters differently. Maybe e-voting scares away some voters, or makes people wait longer to vote. Maybe the different user interface on e-voting systems makes straight party-line voting more likely or less likely.

This looks like the beginning of a long debate.

Election Verification Project Press Conference Thursday 11/18 in DC

There will be an important press conference this Thursday in DC (“Election Verification Project Press Conference”). Here’s the skinny (from Kim at the CVF):

WHAT:

A national coalition of voting rights and computer security experts will hold a post-election press conference to provide a preliminary analysis of electronic voting problems and solutions, and their implications for increasing voters’ confidence in the legitimacy of elections.

WHO:

Kim Alexander, California Voter Foundation

Lillie Coney, National Committee for Voting Integrity/Electronic Privacy Information Center

David Dill, Ph.D., Verified Voting Foundation

Will Doherty, Verified Voting Foundation/Election Incident Reporting System

Chellie Pingree, Common Cause

Matt Zimmerman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

WHEN:

Thursday, Nov. 18, 10:30 a.m. to 12 Noon

WHERE:

Cabinet Room
Beacon Hotel and Corporate Quarters (formerly Governor’s House Hotel)
1615 Rhode Island Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.

(Metro Stop: Dupont Circle or Farragut North)

———-
The Election Verification Project is a coalition of technology, legal and voting rights organizations promoting transparency and accountability in the voting process. The Project advances reforms that reduce computerized voting risks, and fosters public confidence in the integrity and accuracy of the electoral process.