Tim Hugo's Future Chaos

A lot can be said about Delegate Tim Hugo, but one thing people in both parties agree on is he is a very responsive elected official.  Sometimes responsive to the point of pandering.

That was the case in the 2007 session, when Hugo at the request of Clifton's Democratic Womens Club introduced a bill doing away with electronic voting in the Commonwealth.  Basically the bill said localities could not purchase any new electronic machines, forcing them to begin phasing the machines out and returning to a paper ballot system.  Unfortunately as often happens in Richmond, a bad idea passed the House, then the Senate, and was signed into law by Governor Kaine.

Are we really that computer phobic that we think elections are being stolen and our election officials are too stupid to be able to get machines and programs that have enough safeguards in place to avoid these kinds of problems?

Up in Minnesota, we are getting a preview of the kind of chaos that Tim will have brought back into our election system.  Check this link out from Minnesota Public Radio.  It features a number of different ballots between Norm Coleman and Al Franken that are being examined by hand.  It's like Florida with every ballot being challenged for bizarre reasons ranging from thumbprint to size of check-marks.

Thanks Tim.  Instead of having quick recounts with clear results in the future, you have managed to take our election system back to something similar to what we had 100 years ago. 

Any legislators want to introduce a bill to repeal this absurdity?

Comments

[Dan]

With regard to a recount, the problem with the electronic machines is that there is absolutely NOTHING to recount. All you can do is run another tape with the totals. If the machine has been hacked you are simply looking at the same bogus numbers.

It has been very conclusively proven that these machines can indeed be hacked. And in a couple of cases it seems quite likely that this has happened.

I am not a conspiracy theorist and there are plenty of folks in both parties (primarily in areas where the other party is dominant) who are suspicious and skeptical of these machines and the vendor driven process that has caused them to proliferate.

It has nothing to do with being computer phobic. And most election officials are conscientious and are not stupid. They don't however, have unlimited time or budgets and in many cases they have been misinformed and misled by companies who couldn't give a damn about an honest vote count if it may cut into their profit margin to insure adequate security.

Of course we should ultimately leave paper ballots behind and move to an electronic system. But if you think the systems currently in use in much of the country are secure then you are either incredibly naive or you haven't been paying attention.

[Not Larry Sabato]

I think the machines are fine. The examples of hacking all had the vendor code- what many localities began doing was changing the code after the vendors turned the machines over so no one outside of the election process would have the code that they needed to get into the parts of the system with votes. Also many of the systems take an electronic picture of each ballot as it is cast and save it, so technically if you wanted to you could print all the ballots and recount that way. But that would be silly.

[Dan]

It has been demonstrated that you can change vote totals on the diebold machines via back door methods that bypass the password protected front door. The key cards were demonstrated to have executable code when the company said they did not. You can load votes for a favored candidate and load an equivalent number of negative votes for the non favored candidate so that when the machine is fired up it shows a zero total just like it should.

There are major issues with many systems that we are using in this country right now. And localities struggling with budget shortfalls aren't likely to be spending money on this very real problem.

There may be adequate systems available, but deeply flawed systems are being widely used and elections can be pretty easily stolen with them.

People are right to be deeply skeptical.

[Dan]

As to vendor code, many companies hold that the code is proprietary and the election officials don't have access to independently test it. The outfits that test and certify are something of a joke.

As I say, we have to move into the 21st century. But adopting these easily compromised systems isn't progress.

[Not Larry Sabato]

But Dan, the way these machines work is they have buckets. For example a vote for John McCain might go in bucket 12, one for Obama might go in bucket 45. So as long as the election officials pick which bucket to assign to which candidate and keep that information secure, no one even with passwords can change the results because they wouldnt know who they were adding or subtracting votes from.

(I am making this a little more simple than it is, but in simple terms that is pretty close to what the machines are doing).

[Dan]

I wish I shared your faith in them, but I have watched them be subverted in independent tests. I am not arguing for the eternal use of paper ballots. I am saying we need secure, verifiable systems. Too many of the systems in use today are neither.

I would suggest that you need to look more closely into this. It is shocking how open to corruption these machines are. I started out thinking the folks railing against the electronic systems were paranoid. They are not. We need to pay attention to them.

What in the world is wrong with optical scanners. They are fast, automated and produce a paper trail. I have never heard a downside.

[red dem]

Maybe I'm way too trusting, but I was an Election Official this year,and I can tell you that OEs take that responsibility VERY SERIOUSLY. We were representatives from both parties, but we took oaths, and I watched everyone there go to every possible length to make sure the votes were fair and honest.

There are always those willing to cheat the system, but I didn't see it on election day, and I'm willing to bet that was true in the most of the polling places.

An optical scan ballot is a tangible, physical thing that can be kept, looked at, and counted. You know you've cast a vote when you complete an optical scan ballot and put it in the machine. In the 15 minutes I stood in line at my precinct this November, I watched at least 5 people walk away from the machines without having clicked the "cast ballot" button and have to be called back by the officer of election who checked to make sure the machine was clear before calling the next voter up. You don't have that problem with an optical scan ballot.

You don't know whether a DRE machine has been zeroed out before the election. You don't even know that it has the correct ballot for that precinct. Did you pay no attention to the RTD's list of problems on election day? There were precincts listed that had machines with the wrong ballot for the precinct. If they had that problem where a county is split between Congressional districts, how bad could it get when there are multi-district local government elections and overlapping legislative elections in 2009 and (worse still because of overlapping Senate races) 2011? You don't have that problem with optical scan ballots, because they're sealed in clear cellophane in groups. Each sealed package has the same number of ballots. You can count the number of unopened/uncast ballots at the end of the night, compare them to the number of cast/spoiled ballots, and know that you finished with the same number you started with.

In a close election, like the one in Minnesota, everyone can see what the ballots look like and who voted for whom. Yeah, there can be issues with who the voter voted for on the ballot when they're manually recounted, but that only happens when it's a close election. On the other hand, if you're relying on DRE machines, there's *nothing* to recount. You simply have to trust the machine. Which is better? A pile of optical scan ballots where you can look and see what the voter did (even if it some voters--a vast minority--aren't very clear about what they wanted) or a black hole of nothingness because all the votes are "inside the machine"?

You're only worried about how long it takes the results to come out on election night. You're worried that you won't be able to pore over your laptop or Blackberry watching the results come in and call the race as quickly. Well, ya know, in a tight race where a recount is warranted, you're not going to be able to call the race that way anyway, because by definition it's too close to call. So how about backing off the selfish ego trip and letting people cast votes they have faith in? Would it be better to have known on election night whether Franken or Coleman won, even if there was no confidence in the outcome because all the votes were "in the machines" or better to know in December that one person won, with confidence, because we had tangible, physical evidence and it had been publicly reviewed and scrutinized?

[Not John S. Mosby]

Another massive advantage to optical readers and paper ballots is speed. You can process around 600 voters per hour on one single optical reader. On a DRE, you'll be lucky to get 60-90 an hour. So like in western Fairfax, where over half the people vote early morning at opening, you can have dozens of people filling out their ballots at the same time, then a quick line to enter them into the machine. If the machine breaks, you have a lockbox and deposit your ballot the old-fashioned way and it will be counted later. You simply can't do this on DREs. If you have 10 machines, 10 people max can vote at any time. If they take a while, the lines grow. And I believe there is just as much confusion on the DREs than on the paper ballot.

The downside you're talking about with paper ballots is in the relatively rare case that there's a recount. Personally, I would rather put in the work in those rare cases and do it the hard way vs not having that safeguard in place, i.e. just doing what the PC running the DRE says happened.

I do think that DREs are fairly safe and accurate, but they are much slower and much more expensive. The general consensus from everyone this past election day - voters I asked but more importantly, Elections folks and my Democratic poll watchers - is that the optical system kicks ass. Lines that would have taken an hour to an hour and a half 4 years ago took about a half hour this past election, all because of optical.

It would be nice if we could get some sort of receipt from these electronic machines (e.g. a paper trail) to show who we voted for. That is the one thing we are missing now with the current system.

9:48 AM doesn't support the current electronic voting machines because the declining **rural** base of support for the GOP is massively incompetent when it comes to technology (e.g. McCain = Blackberry = NOT).

[Kevin]

I'm personally trusting of electronic voting machines, but as many posters above have pointed out, paper ballots have proven to be much more reliable overall. If an optical scanner fails, you have the recourse of hand counting the ballots. If an electronic voting machine fails, well you just lost X number of votes with zero chance of recovering them.

11:12,

I don't see anything in 9:48's comment that indicates he or she is either Republican, rural, or technologically imcompetent. Where are you getting the basis for that claim of bias?

[t]

We all must pray for a Norm Coleman victory.

I refuse to contemplate the alternative.

Norm Coleman: "Roe vs. Wade is the law of the land. I'm not going to overturn the Senate."

"Are we really that computer phobic that we think elections are being stolen and our election officials are too stupid to be able to get machines and programs that have enough safeguards in place to avoid these kinds of problems?"

Yes, as evidenced by the Democrat reactions in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 when they whined that the elections were stolen from them by electronic machines.

It is certainly interesting to read Dan's claims about these machines, but no evidence supporting them. Sorry, Dannyboy, but I'm calling bullshit.

[VA-voter]

The reason that Hugo was the Delegate who sponsored this legislation is that the most notorious DRE fiasco in VA occurred in Fairfax about 5 years ago, in a school board election. Fairfax Republicans were convinced that their candidate lost because of misbehaving touch-screen machines (probably due to drifting calibration). It was not a case of fraud or hacking, but of hardware problems.

The most likely place where fraud might occur is not in DRE machines in precincts, but in central tabulating systems, and they are definitely vulnerable.

Virginia had an extremely close statewide election only three years ago, with a margin of only about 325 votes out of several hundred thousand ballots cast. The 'recount' was a farce, because so many of the precincts in the state did not have any paper trail at all. Furthermore, state law prevented optical scan ballots from being recounted! Subsequently that law was changed.

What we need is *paper* ballots, with optical scanners in precincts (so that improperly marked ballots can be rejected and corrected in the precincts), and with hand-count audits done on a random sample of precincts after *every* election. The audits will be a defense (generally a preventative measure) against a wide variety of potential fraudulent activity, and will also disclose any problems with scanner technology or procedures.

[GOPHokie]

For all of you folking clamoring over recounts, isn't the purpose of electronic voting machines to avoid such a thing? The purpose of a recount is not to try and change the outcome of the election, it is simply to reaffirm it. Laws requiring an automatic one for 0.05% or whatever, are made b/c that is the expected margin of error in the system. Obviously, people counting them manually (like in the old days) or even a machine counting them now has a margin of error. Electronic machines have no margin of error. They by definition only count what the determinant for a vote is. The only reason for a recount at all with electronic machines is to make sure anything that is manually entered (by humans) was correct.

The charge of hacking is a good one, except that many more elections have been "stolen" by stuffing a paper ballot box than an electronic one. The chance for that kind of fraud exists under any system.

I just wish a democratic executive would have made these machines, then no one would question their validity.

GOP,
I would suggest that the reason that "many more elections have been stolen by .. paper ballot" is because the democrats have yet to figure out how to steal with electronic machines.
Give them some time and they will figure out how to find an extra "machine" hiding in an election official's trunk.

9:56,

It sounds to me like your gripe is with election officials (justifiably or not), not with ballots. If they can stick some ballots for their guy in their car to whip out later if their guy needs them, or cart some ballots for the other guy out to their car to keep them from getting counted, what's to stop them from tinkering with the machines? Nothing.

I don't trust DREs because there's no audit trail. I worked long enough in software quality assurance to distrust any software that doesn't have an extrinsic audit trail. It's not that the programmers or election officials are corrupt. It's that the programmers and election officials are human and fallible. That means the machines will be fallible. It means their pre-election formatting and set-up is fallible. And when it comes to human fallibility, I'd rather have it in the open and subject to public scrutiny, and not tucked around in a buggy line of code 16,373 lines in. (By the way, the software source code isn't subject to public inspection. That may be a good thing to keep hackers from exploiting it, but it's a bad thing as far as transparency goes. Which is more important? That's a subjective question--but it's wholly avoided when you opt for optical scan instead.)

[Fancy Gap]

In 2004 in North Carolina, we had a statewide race where the margin was 4,000 votes. Also, that same year, Carteret County, on the coast, lost 4,000 votes that were cast electronically using the same system used by my family in Galax. They were just gone. It took months to resolve it, and later the legislature passed a bill requiring a paper trail of some sort. Now, our counties have one of two types of equipment - either optical scan or a DRE that shows a paper receipt behind glass for each voter cast.

I remember visiting a polling place in Galax in 2007 and noticing the same setup as Carteret County. I don't have a conspiracy mindset, but after having seeing it happen to us, it isn't hard to imagine those machines crashing or worse and having your elections thrown into uncertainty.

In many cases, the DRE machines have problems due to stupid people who don't know how to use them; that's the main thing behind the nutjobs saying "I touched Obama and it said I picked McCain" horseshit.

Just put a paper audit on the DRE machines and STFU.

As to the dumbasses who think opscan doesn't have these problems...I can only say that they don't pay attention to the news. In many areas (like Virginia), only the output from the machine can be examined. The individual ballots can't.

10:38 is, unsurprisingly, wrong. Code § 24.2-802(D)(3):

"For optical scan tabulators, the recount officials shall rerun all the ballots through a tabulator programmed to count only the votes for the office or issue in question in the recount and to set aside all ballots containing write-in votes, overvotes, and undervotes. The ballots that are set aside, any ballots not accepted by the tabulator, and any ballots for which a tabulator could not be programmed to meet the programming requirements of this subdivision, shall be hand counted using the standards promulgated by the State Board pursuant to subsection A."

[Jeremy In Fairfax]

There's a here that I'd like to respond to.

(1) This wasn't Hugo kissing up to the Clifton Women's Club - they had nothing to do with it. As one of the people behind the bill, I can promise you that. It was grass roots organizers who saw the machines fail all over the country, and wanted to save Virginia money and get more accurate results.

(2) There are numerous examples of the "infallible" touchscreen machines failing, and not just from calibration problems. Unfortunately, it's just about impossible to figure out what went wrong, because the most-used machine in Virginia (AVS WinVote) has never been through a government certification, has never been examined by anyone independent, and is out of business.

(3) The vast majority of computer scientists have taken a position against the electronic voting machines, because we know how software fails.

(4) The analyses that looked for software failures did (in some cases) look at the source code, but that's only to make it faster/cheaper to do the analysis. Every problem that was found through source analysis can be found without it; it just takes a little more time. If you don't believe that, consider that (nearly) every problem in Microsoft Windows that requires installing patches and rebooting has been found without source code. And this has been going on for close to 10 years. Why do you think that Microsoft can't get their code right but Diebold/AVS/Sequoia/etc can?

(5) The Virginia code allows some level of "true" recounts as noted by 05:59 - but that's only because the same people who pushed through the Hugo bill also pushed through improvements to the recount law.

(6) It's (effectively) illegal in Virginia to do any sort of audit of optical scan machines to see if they're actually working. [The "effectively" is because the law allows an audit if the locality wants *AND* the results have all been finalized *AND* the margin of victory is greater than 10% for all races on the ballot.] Most states have mandatory random audits; in Virginia it's not even optional. Would you believe an auditor who didn't actually look at a sample of data behind a company's books? There's an name for people like that - Arthur Anderson (see Enron, for those with short memories).

There's lots more that could be said. Take a look at the Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia's web page for more info.