A national resource for state-based organizations working for secure, accurate and transparent elections. VoteTrustUSA is a project of Verified Voting Foundation.
Minnesota
election officials are hand-counting millions of ballots, as they
perform a full recount in the ultra-close Senate race between Norm
Coleman and Al Franken. Minnesota Public Radio offers a fascinating gallery of ballots that generated disputes about voter intent.
A good example is this one:
A scanning machine would see the Coleman and Franken bubbles both
filled, and call this ballot an overvote. But this might be a Franken
vote, if the voter filled in both slots by mistake, then wrote "No"
next to Coleman's name.
Other cases are more difficult, like this one:
Do we call this an overvote, because two bubbles are filled? Or do we
give the vote to Coleman, because his bubble was filled in more
completely?
With a celebrity candidate and record-setting expenditures the race to represent Minnesota in the US Senate captured the nation’s attention even before the historically close margin was announced. An automatic, manual recount of the Minnesota U.S. Senate race that began could last until mid-December. As non-partisan, election integrity advocates in Minnesota, we welcome this attention and hope that one of the outcomes will be lessons learned that strengthen our democracy.
One reason for our optimism is that Minnesota’s election system minimizes problems and circumstances that have historically reduced voter confidence. The occurrence of such problems and circumstances in other states plagued the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The people, procedures, and technology comprising Minnesota’s election system are among the most respected in the nation. Minnesota’s election system has great potential to certify results that accurately reflect the will of the voters and in which voters can have confidence.
Legislation introduced today in the New Jersey Assembly threatens to undo a commitment to verified elections the state made nearly four years ago, VerifiedVoting.org warned today.
“New Jersey threatens to set a new standard for irresponsible delay with this bill,” said VerifiedVoting.org president Pamela Smith. “New Jersey's e-voting machines have reported inconsistent results in both the primary and the Presidential election, and have been found by top computer scientists to be insecure and inaccurate. Adopting a reliable, auditable, verifiable system is the only correct response.”
Following the publication last month of a severely critical study by Princeton University computer scientists, Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi acknowledged the machines' problems and encouraged voters to vote absentee rather than use the machines. In the February 2008 Presidential primary, machines in 8 New Jersey counties reported inconsistent totals in the internal memory and removable memory cartridges.
The bill introduced today by Assemblywoman Joan Quigley (A3458) would undo the state's present law requiring voter-verifiable paper records by January 2009. In its place, a pilot program for small jurisdictions in the June 2009 primary would study the “feasibility” of paper records, with the results evaluated over the summer. The timeline would all but guarantee that the 2009 gubernatorial election would be conducted on the state's current electronic machines.
For
years the U.S. has been sending observers oversees to monitor foreign
election processes and help assure that democratic principles are
followed abroad.
But given the problematic elections that took place at home in 2000 in
Florida and in 2004 in Ohio, it has seemed the height of irony to send
poll watchers abroad when the entity that seemed most in need of an
army of observers was the U.S. election system itself.
This year the country got exactly that in the form of a national
hotline staffed with thousands of volunteer legal experts and poll
watchers who answered questions, advocated voter rights and documented
how the world's leading democracy functioned or malfunctioned on November 4th, accomplishing something that no government entity seemed either interested or capable of doing before now.
The Election Protection Coalition,
a network of more than 100 legal, voting rights and civil liberties
groups was the force behind the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline, which provided
legal experts to answer nearly 87,000 calls that came in over 750 phone
lines on Election Day and dispatched experts to address problems in the
field as they arose.
All of this was aided by a back-end system and web site, OurVoteLive,
created and operated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which
logged calls that came in to the hotline and displayed problem reports
in near real time for the media and watchdog groups to observe. It was
largely due to this hotline that the public learned about Election-Day problems
in Florida, Virginia and elsewhere, and the site now offers the largest
database of records documenting election problems and inquiries in the
country. The database can be downloaded in its entirety or in report
form from the search reports page.
The idea for a real-time monitoring system was launched in 2004 when Verified Voting,
spurred by the 2000 election meltdown in Florida, built an open-source
system and coordinated with the Election Protection Coalition to track
reports that were coming in from the field about election-day problems
that year.
Voting machine issues and the confusion they caused compounded the delays faced by untold thousands of voters this fall.
This article was posted at AlterNet and is reposted here with permission of the author.
The electronic voting problems in the 2008 election are broader than
recently-publicized snafus such as machines not turning on, voter
databases omitting names, or touch screens not properly recording
votes, according to an analysis of 1,700 incident reports from the
nation's largest voter hotline.
Moreover, the voting machine
issues and the confusion they caused among poll workers appear to have
compounded the delays faced by untold thousands of voters this fall, a
preliminary analysis of 1-800-OUR-VOTE reports by Joseph Lorenzo Hall,
a researcher at Princeton University and the University of California,
has found.
"If we can do anything to improve the experience of
the average voter facing a machine problem, it should be reduce the
amount of time they spend in line," Hall wrote
this week, adding that voters who had machine problems and got back-up
paper ballots often were not confident that their votes would count.
"Another
curious feature of the data is the voters' uniformly negative attitudes
toward contingency or back-up plans," he said. "Voters are often upset
and mistrustful."
Hall's analysis is one of the first
assessments to look at electronic voting in the 2008 fall election.
Many voting rights groups have said the biggest problems this year were
inaccurate voter registration records, not enough early voting sites,
and planning that did not accommodate high turnout. Hall's findings
suggest that the voting machinery used exacerbated these very issues.
I've spent the past week looking over the voting equipment problems
captured by the Election Protection Coalition's 25 nationwide
call centers into the Our Vote Live database. There were
around 1900 such incidents in the database, although that number is
probably closer to 1700 taking into account duplicates.
Before I launch into the analysis, a few caveats:
This is voter-reported data, which means it can be inaccurate.
There has been no attempt to control for multiple reports from a
single precinct.
In many cases it is hard to tell what exactly happened as the
incident reports were taken by mostly non-technical legal volunteers
from mostly non-technical voters and volunteers in the field.
Given the unbelievable popularity of the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline, OVL
was unable to capture all incidents that people wanted to report.
There are undoubtedly incidents that were not reported to the OVL
hotline for a variety of reasons.
Bottom-line: This is useful for qualitative notions of what went
wrong on election day.
While I've worked to make this post accessible to an audience that
may not be familiar with the vagaries of voting technology, I just
don't have enough time to explain everything. In that sense, I
encourage you to ask questions () and I can
amend this document to clarify as needed.
Unlike many states, Minnesota has a solid idea of how well its
machines scan ballots because it randomly audits samples of votes. One
test found only one error out of 12,000 ballots. Another turned up as
many as 53 "discrepancies" -- between a machine's and a human's read --
out of 94,000.
That's impressively accurate for voting machines.
But it's not precise enough to predict who'll triumph in the U.S.
Senate race between Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al
Franken. They're currently separated by 206 votes out of 2.9 million
cast.
Coleman's unofficial lead amounts to .007 percent of the
vote, easily triggering Minnesota's required recount of any race closer
than .5 percent.
In a few days, election workers will begin
scrutinizing every single ballot cast in the race. Minnesota uses
optical scan ballots -- fill in the bubble -- so hanging chads are not
an issue.
The outcome has national stakes, as a Franken victory would move Democrats closer to a 60-vote super-majority in the Senate.
For
those interested in election reform, the recount promises added drama.
The pros know that no voting system designed, used and overseen by
humans can be perfect. Voters may not follow directions. Machines can
misread stray marks or just break. Workers typing up machine results
can leave off the "1" in "124" (that mistake got caught last week in
Minnesota).
Minnesota, however, has gotten unusually high marks
from experts for its record of election oversight. That record,
nonpartisan watchdogs say, stems largely from practices that other
states could import. The recount will test how well Minnesota's
procedures hold up under the closest scrutiny.
Philadelphia County Election Officials Fail To Meet Secretary of State’s Orders to Count Emergency Paper Ballots on Election Night - County Claims It Will Count Such Ballots on Friday
Lawyers for the NAACP-Philadelphia Branch and its member-voters are filing an emergency lawsuit against Philadelphia County this afternoon, seeking a court ruling requiring county election officials to count emergency paper ballots cast today at the close of polls. Despite orders from the Secretary of State, election officials have stated they do not plan to count these emergency ballots until Friday.
“This is a direct violation of what the Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth has ordered and does not follow the recent ruling issued by the federal court on this matter,” said John Bonifaz, legal director for Voter Action and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “Emergency paper ballots must be treated as regular ballots and must be counted on election night. Philadelphia County’s plans to count these ballots on Friday will undermine the fundamental right of voters to have their votes counted equally with all other votes.”
A coalition of Pennsylvania voters and civil rights groups won a lawsuit last week when Federal Judge Harvey S. Bartle III ruled today that emergency paper ballots must be made available when fifty percent or more voting machines fail at polling locations across Pennsylvania. Judge Bartle, who is the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, issued the ruling in favor of plaintiffs who had argued that voters could be disenfranchised by having to wait hours in line due to voting machine breakdowns.
“Voters who cast emergency paper ballots should not be treated differently than any other voters,” said Jennifer Clarke, executive director of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “The United States Constitution requires no less.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs include the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, Voter Action, and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady. The firm served as plaintiffs’ counsel in the recent federal court case.
Pamela Smith, a longtime critic of electronic voting machines, is worried more about long lines on Tuesday, election day in the U.S.
Any
kind of equipment breakdown in places like Pennsylvania and Virginia
could cause problems, said Smith, president of Verified Voting, an
advocacy group focused on improving voting systems. Those two states
don't have polls open for early voting, and there has been a record
number of new voter registrations in many parts of the country,
particularly among Democrats energized by presidential candidate Barack
Obama's campaign.
Several states have already reported long lines
during early voting. "This is an election that will sort of stress-test
the [election] systems," Smith said. "Any problem that's going to come
up is going to be amplified."
Several states do not have adequate
numbers of voting machines in place to back up malfunctioning
equipment, Smith said. The problem will be most acute in states with
touch-screen machines; in places with optical scan machines, voters can
continue to cast ballots on paper if the scanning machine goes down.
In
addition to having no early voting, Pennsylvania and Virginia do not
require paper-trail backups with touch-screen electronic voting
machines. Critics of e-voting say that without a paper trail, there's
no way to audit the results of a touch-screen machine, often called
DREs, or direct recording electronic machines.
Tomorrow,
as everyone knows, is Election Day in the U.S. With all the controversy
over electronic voting, and the anticipated high turnout, what can we
expect to see? What problems might be looming? Here are my predictions.
Long lines to vote: Polling places will be strained by the
number of voters. In some places the wait will be long – especially
where voting requires the use of machines. Many voters will be willing
and able to wait, but some will have to leave without casting votes.
Polls will be kept open late, and results will be reported later than
expected, because of long lines.
Registration problems: Quite a few voters will arrive at the
polling place to find that they are not on the voter rolls, because of
official error, or problems with voter registration databases, or
simply because the voter went to the wrong polling place. New voters
will be especially likely to have such problems. Voters who think they
should be on the rolls in a polling place can file provisional ballots
there. Afterward, officials must judge whether each provisional voter
was in fact eligible, a time-consuming process which, given the
relative flood of provisional ballots, will strain official resources.
Voting machine problems: Electronic voting machines will fail
somewhere. This is virtually inevitable, given the sheer number of
machines and polling places, the variety of voting machines, and the
often poor reliability and security engineering of the machines. If
we’re lucky, the problems can be addressed using a paper trail or other
records. If not, we’ll have a mess on our hands.
How serious the mess might be depends on how close the election is.
If the margin of victory is large, as some polls suggest it may be,
then it will be easy to write off problems as “minor” and move on to
the next stage in our collective political life. If the election is
close, we could see a big fight. The worse case is an ultra-close
election like in 2000, with long lines, provisional ballots, or voting
machine failures putting the outcome in doubt.
Regardless of what happens on Election Day, the next day --
Wednesday, November 5 -- will be a good time to get started on
improving the next election. We have made some progress since 2004 and
2006. If we keep working, our future elections can be better and safer
than this one.
