Oregon, like many other states, considering authorizing email return of ballots — the bill is HB 3074 and this post is directed toward that proposed law, but could effectively be applied to a host of other states which are considering similar legislation (or perhaps need to review already adopted laws in light of these arguments).

• HB 3074 as drafted would permit both the email distribution of blank ballots AND the email return of voted ballots. While the email distribution of blank ballots has some limited manageable security risks, the email return of voted ballots poses serious risks to the integrity and security of Oregon’s elections that are not easily addressed.

• Email voting is worse than touchscreen voting – according the cyber security expert David Jefferson, PhD, computer scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Oregon has been savvy enough to avoid touchscreen machines and insist on paper ballots and should continue to do so. Email voting does not provide a voter-verified paper ballot.

• The League of Women Voters of the US says that election systems should meet the SARA standards – Secure, Accessible, Recountable and Auditable.Email voting does not meet three of these four standards because it is NOT Secure, NOT Recountable and NOT Auditable. (Source: http://verifiedvotingfoundation.org/downloads/LWVUS-VVPR-2006.pdf)

• Email voting puts Oregon’s election system at grave risk of attack by hostile nations and terrorist groups. Last fall, the District of Columbia’s online voting pilot came under attack from hackers in Iran and China. (Source: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8118) An attack on email voting would require less technical expertise than an attack on online voting and would be easier to carry out undetected.

• A recent Threat Assessment of UOCAVA voting systems by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) concluded  the following:

Use of Email for Return of Voted Ballots  

The use of e-mail to return ballots presents several significant security challenges. Several different computer systems are involved in sending an e-mail from a voter to an election official. Many of these systems, such as the voters’ computers and e-mail servers, are outside the control of election officials. Attacks on these systems could violate the privacy of voters, modify ballots, or disrupt communication with election officials. Because other individuals or organizations operate these systems, there is little election officials can do to prevent attacks on these systems. The security challenges associated with e-mail return of voted ballots are difficult to overcome using technology widely deployed today.
(Source:    http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/upload/uocava-threatanalysis-final.pdf)

• Using the internet for voting is not equivalent to using the internet for banking in the consensus opinion of computer security experts. The “white hat” hacker whose University of Michigan team penetrated the District of Columbia’s online voting pilot, Dr. J. Alex Halderman, explained that

…unlike banking on the Internet or via ATM … a process which is open to oversight before, during, and after by all involved parties, the secret ballot system used in U.S. elections — where it’s impossible to verify the accuracy of the “transaction” after it’s been made and the identity of the voter must be kept forever a secret — cannot be done safely at this time on the Internet.

(Source:  http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8118)

• Oregon is already compliant with the Federal MOVE Act which is aimed at overseas military voters There is no need to allow email return of voted ballots for compliance purposes. Only ten states allow return of voted ballots via email with no restrictions. More than 27 states, do not accept email ballots at all. A minority of states do accept email return of ballots, often with greater restrictions and protections than contemplated in HB 3074.   For instance, the State of Washington requires the return of the physical paper ballot before certification of the election for the email ballot to be counted.

  (Source:   https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/technology_map_2010)

• The Overseas Vote Foundation is on record opposing the email return of voted ballots while supporting the email distribution of blank ballots.

Private email over the Internet is not a secure method of transfer for documents containing your confidential identity information. This is why Overseas Vote Foundation recommends that voters return their ballots by regular mail and fax.  (Source: https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/Email-Ballot-Security)

• How does email voting compare with Oregon’s Vote By Mail (VBM) System? Dr. David Jefferson, cyber security expert from Lawrence Livermore Labs, compares the threats to both VBM and email voting:

1) Ease of automation of email attacks: There is no corresponding hazard for VBM.

2) Lack of ability to detect email attacks: Physical attacks on snail mail ballots, unless done slowly and carefully with good tools, would be detectable.  The only simple undetectable attack on snail mail is to throw ballots away based on where they came from without opening them to determine whether they are favorable or not to the attacker – not a very sharp attack at all.

3) Speed and simplicity of email attacks: Once installed, an email attack package would work silently and efficiently and could handle all of the ballots that happened to be routed through that particular server.  The only way to achieve a similar attack effect for snail mail would be to have a big boiler room operation with many people in league at a postal service location.

4) The potential for foreign cyber attacks: Email attacks do not have to be perpetrated by insiders or employees of ISPs that run email relays.  Any foreign agency might attack an email server remotely and control it, or a botnet criminal syndicate, or an enterprising lone hacker.  There is no corresponding attack mode for snail mail.

(Source:  https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/Email-Ballot-Security)

Recommendations:

1. Remove the return of voted ballots from HB 3074 due to security concerns.

2. Authorize the use of the Federal Writein Absentee Ballot FWAB) for state and local elections in Oregon as other states do.

3. Integrate more proactively with the Federal Voter Assistance Program (FVAP). Currently no link to this program can be found either on the Secretary of State’s Elections Division website or on the Oregon Military Department’s website.

4. Do a cost/benefit analysis of sending UOCAVA ballots via trackable express services such as USPS Express Mail, FedEx or UPS with paid return of ballots using the same service.

Thank you for responding to my previous communication. I hope you will reconsider your position and withdraw your support of what has been called the “Blue State Suicide Pact”, aka National Popular Vote proposal.

I am no fan of the Electoral College as it currently operates but I oppose the current NPV proposal. In fact, the name is a classic oxymoron.

1. The NPV is not NATIONAL: It does not require participation of even a majority of states, just enough to meet an artificial threshold. If it were a truly national solution and applied to all states equally then It would be a viable solution to the dysfunctionality of the Electoral College. An end-run around the Constitution as exemplified by the NPV is not the path we should be pursuing to improve our election systems. An interstate compact such as this one on NPV would need Congressional approval since it involves a federall issue — my research indicates that such approval is highly unlikely to occur since there precedent is lacking.

2. The NPV is not POPULAR: there does not appear a national groundswell for this particular proposal. Show me some polling that there is broad grassroots support for NPV — I haven’t seen any such polling on this issue and I follow election reform closely. It is a phony fix for the current dysfunctionality of the Electoral College and would create new incentives for machine hacking and voter suppression in vulnerable states. In fact, the paperless voting systems in certain states (Texas, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Pennysylvania, etal) could be tampered with and no one would know that ballots had been electronically stuffed. There are well-documented efforts at voter suppression underway in a number of states aimed at keeping Democratic-leaning voters from casting a ballot — NH taking aim at college students, and numerous other states imposing a new poll tax by requiring photo ID.

3. The NPV is not about VOTING: Oregon’s electoral votes would be held hostage to the breathless reporting of the national media about who was projected to “win”. Even usually reliable sources can get caught up in this media frenzy and make egregious mistakes: I have in my possession an Almanac that lists Gordon Smith as the winning Senatorial candidate against Jeff Merkley; another later edition lists Chris Dudley as the new Governor of Oregon. A similar rush to judgment would impact the Presidential race under NPV and assign Oregon’s electoral votes to the projected “winner” before all the votes are counted, much less certified. The NPV proposal does not even provide a clear definition of “national popular vote” in the sense that it does not specify that it must be the final certified vote totals of the various states. It does not specify that all the votes be actually counted before the votes are assigned to a candidate. NPV makes no allowance for recounts or disputed elections (see Al Franken v Norm Coleman 2008, Lisa Murkowski v Joe Miller 2010, and Bush v Gore Florida 2000). This fuzziness in unacceptable for electing the President of the United States.

I was glad to speak with you at your recent town hall and hope you will take my arguments against NPV into account if the bill reaches the floor of the Senate.

Political commentators and executives from the private company that conducted the tally using proprietary software are all breathlessly predicting that this is the future of voting and pointing to scattered examples where online voting has been used elsewhere, not always with complete success (that’s the subject of another post, which I’ve partially addressed in a discussion about Hawaii’s low-turnout experiment in 2008).

What actually transpired was more like an online convention, but without the glad-handing by politicians and after-hours socializing — in other words, it was not a lot of fun for most people, which may help explain the extremely low participation rate of 4 per cent by the 57,000 or so voters registered as members of the Independent Party. Those who chose to participate in the online nominating process were required to complete the ballot in one session, all the while wrestling with an unfamiliar website – a tough challenge for all but the most computer-savvy and committed voters.

It is important to note that the online voting procedure used by the Independent Party to select it’s nominees is not in conformance with Oregon elections law regarding primary elections.

First of all, Oregon law is specific about the date of primary elections (third Tuesday in May in even-numbered years) – and the filing deadline for candidates (in mid-March two months before Primary). Furthermore, the voter registration deadline is 20 days before the primary. Except in the case of military and overseas voters, ballots are sent out 18-19 days before election day. Voters and candidates plan for this schedule and know when the deadlines are and what to expect.

The Independent Party created their own very different schedule, leaving many voters confused and candidates scrambling. This fact alone may help account for the less-than-stellar participation rate of four per cent.

The equipment and software used for counting votes in Oregon elections is required to be certified by the Secretary of State – it is publicly tested before each election to see that it performs correctly. On the other hand, the software used in the online process of the Independent Party is neither certified nor publicly tested. Everyone involved – Independent Party voters, the general public and candidates – is forced to rely only on the assurances of Every One Counts, the private company that was contracted to conduct the online election, about the accuracy of the vote count. There is no way to recount the electronic votes and no way an outside observer can tell whether the reported vote tally actually reflects the will of the voters.

Speaking of recounts, Oregon law is pretty specific about those, also. If the top two candidates are separated by 1/5 of one per cent or less (and this frequently happens in contested primaries in Oregon), then an automatic hand recount is required. In the case of this online “primary”, there’s no paper so there’s nothing to recount, naturally. How can you say that this online voting process is so wonderful if you cannot recount it?

I say enough!

Enough already with relying on the assurances of private companies that everything’s just hunky-dory! We’ve seen it again and again that private companies cannot be trusted to act in behalf of the public good – just remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Massey coal mine disaster, BP spill in the Gulf, toxic toys imported from China, shoddy electrical work by Halliburton killing troops in Iraq – the list is long and growing longer every day.

Why should we trust the most sacred transaction of our democracy, the vote, to private companies who are only motivated by profits and whose only loyalty is to their shareholders, not the public good?

We should approach the assurances of private corporations that they are doing a great job with the same attitude that characterized our relations with the Soviet Union during disarmament negotiations: Trust, but verify.

If we cannot verify and recount the election results, then we cannot trust them. Online voting does not meet this basic standard for elections in a democracy.

And don’t treat it like a real primary election, at least in Oregon.

For further details about the Independent Party results please see:

http://www.blueoregon.com/2010/07/independent-party-primary-election-results/

http://blog.oregonlive.com/mapesonpolitics/2010/07/independent_party_primary_offe.html

Hence even fancy iPhones will not work in the wide open spaces – no cell phone coverage in a dead zone. Also no internet service.

It’s hard for those who live in dense urban areas where internet cafes abound to realize that there are places in the U.S. of A. without access to cell phone or internet service. But it is true that there are wide swaths of territory where this is the reality.

So when some folks advocate for voting via the internet and suggest that iPhones could allow voters to cast their vote anywhere these pushers of internet voting are simply being unrealistic about the reach of technology. The access is simply not there for American voters in rural areas. In addition, many voters in urban areas lack access to computers and the internet. This access also correlates with race, education-level and income, with certain groups having limited access.

In a statement that simply focuses on voter registration via the internet rather than the more complex area of internet voting, Project Vote points out that their studies show certain groups being disadvantaged vis-a-vis internet access. http://www.projectvote.org/blog/?p=689

Internet access at home is often related to income or education-attainment.

Compared to 73.9 percent of U.S. panel homes that have Internet access, only 39 percent of those with no high school degree report having Internet at home, and just 41 percent of citizens earning $25,000 per year or less have online access, according to a 2009 Project Vote research memo by consultant, Jody Herman. African-American and Latino citizens are also less likely to have Internet access at home (63%). Latinos, in particular, demonstrate low voter registration rates at 12 percentage points behind the voting eligible population in addition to their greater likelihood to lack of Internet access.

If voters do not have access to the internet for registration, they won’t have it for voting either. So these statistics are relevant for predicting internet access for voting.

It is important to point out that these groups already face the greatest number of barriers to voting and participate at a lesser rate that the rest of the voting-eligible population. So internet voting really does not remove barriers from these groups. It does not make voting more convenient for lower-income voters – nor for Latino or African-American voters in general. Collin Lynch who has dual credentials as a PhD student in Intelligent Systems (yes, a computer geek!) and President of VoteAllegheny.org (yes, an activist, too) sums it up this way in a recent email:

It bears mentioning that we have to ask, convenient for whom? In theory the ability to “vote from anywhere” seems like an easy sell except that the very populations that have a hard time voting now, the poor, or
underserved minorities, are also the least likely to have easy access to a
PC or the free time to use it. Yes, there are internet cafes and public
libraries in some places but I suspect that looks a lot more convenient to
some than it does to others.

The reason that I doubt the “it will increase turnout” argument is that
the one population who is most likely to take advantage of it, wealthier
groups or the iPhone owners already can vote they may choose not to but they face no fundamental barriers that poorer populations do. So the issue really is that this seems more convenient to the people selling it and the decision makers but is not likely to be more convenient for the
full segment of society.

Another argument that is often advanced in favor of internet voting is that it would make it easier for Americans living/working abroad, including deployed military. The same technical challenges encountered by cowpokes (and others) in the American West, would also face those deployed in the mountains of Afghanistan and other remote locations.

Given the inherently insecure nature of the internet, which I addressed in an earlier blog post (See “The Perils of Internet Voting”) there is no reason to put the ballots of deployed soldiers at greater risk from hacking, viruses, spyware, spam, and ID theft so rampant on the internet today than other voters. If anything, the votes of deployed military should be given greater security than the general population, given the level of sacrifice these soldiers are making in our country’s behalf.

Some might well ask: if internet voting is not the preferred solution for overseas voters, what should be done to make sure deployed military and citizens living/working abroad (UOCAVA) can participate in the electoral process on an equal footing with the rest of the electorate?

Good question.

The answer, in my opinion, is to rely on tried-and-true paper ballots. The modern twist would be to distribute and return ballots via express package delivery (UPS, FedEx, USPS). It is much cheaper and more trackable than internet voting, if one considers the costs of programming and maintaining a secure computerized ballot system with internet access.

This approach would not solve the problem of cowboys and cowgirls riding the range: Do UPS or FedEx even deliver to cowpokes on horseback or Jeep? These cowpokes could vote when they get back into town, just like everyone else.

They still might get the blues when their iPhones don’t work but at least they’ll be able to cast a ballot.

If you think about it, there is an implicit assumption in most discussions about Greene that money brings success in politics and most commentators seem bemused by election results where the candidate with the most campaign cash actually lost.

This is not a case of black vs white, as in complexion, but a matter of green, as in cash. It is disheartening to realize that the green of campaign dollars has so clouded our electoral system that we automatically assume that a candidate without access to gobs of cash will surely lose.

If the best predictor about which candidate will prevail at the ballot box is which one has the biggest stash of cash, then American democracy has strayed far from its egalitarian ideal. It is rare, indeed, in today’s America, when a true political “outsider” wins an election unless, of course, they have access to a personal fortune or generous “big donor” base. The time is long past, if it ever existed, when a genuine “man of the people” can get elected to Congress or (gasp!) to the Presidency.

Money influences most decision making in modern campaigns – e.g., which candidates get to run; how to find the buckets of cash necessary for a campaign; which contributors will gain “access” by their largess to a particular candidate; how to best use a campaign war chest to help other candidates and still spend enough to win one’s own race.

Pundits would not be giving airtime or ink to the South Carolina Primary results except for the disparity between the candidates in the money they were able to raise and spend on the campaign. And because the winning candidate has virtually no money, they are busily searching for an alternate explanation as to why Greene appears to have won. “Ballot position,” “dirty tricks” by the Republican party; the “hacking,” malfunctioning or mis-programming of the ES&S paperless voting machines are some of the possibilities that have been laid on the table. Indeed, it is possible that some combination of all of the above is the best explanation – it is not necessarily true that only one of these suggestions is correct. I tend to think all of the above may have played some role in Greene’s out-of-nowhere victory.

That being said, it is important to seize this opportunity to highlight the problematic nature of the paperless voting machines used in this election. While the spotlight is turned on the unrecountable and unauditable nature of these machines, we need to insist on moving toward a better election technology. The long-term solution to at least a part of this puzzle is to ditch the paperless machines and require voter verified paper ballots for all elections in this country. The South Carolina election provides an excellent opportunity to bring public scrutiny to this problem and point toward the obvious solution.

That was actually Chris Hays’ final thought in his conversation with Keith Olbermann – of course, we should be looking at the voting machines, he said.

We also need to find a way to get the overwhelming influence of money out of our elections – the primary color of our elections should not be green, as in greenbacks.

Public financing of elections is an effective way to make this happen. It has been tried statewide in Maine and Arizona, at the local level in jurisdictions around the country. The time has come to move toward public campaign financing at the Federal level, also, so as to prevent future amazement that a candidate like Alvin Greene had a chance to win because there was a more level playing field.  Pass the Fair Elections Now Act and bring true reform to American elections.  Pass the damn bill now.

Just how bad could the voting machines in SC be?

Answer: really, really, really bad. Flaky. Unreliable. Not ready for prime time. In fact, it’s laughable that a country with our technological knowhow would be relying on these machines to count our votes.

And this is not really news. As far back as 2007 veteran newsman Dan Rather did an expose on HD.net entitled “The Trouble With Touchscreens” The show lays bare the shoddy manufacturing practices of ES&S that produced out the iVotronic voting machines that South Carolina voters use to cast their ballots. Production was off-shored to the Philippines to a factory with deplorable working conditions. Quality control was non-existent. But ES&S made a huge profit on each machine in those glory days after the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) bestowed $3 billion on the states to “modernize” their voting equipment.

The video of the Rather 2007 broadcast is not posted online, as far as I can tell, but can be downloaded from iTunes or ordered from Amazon.com. Otherwise I would post it here for reference. Instead, I will rely on transcripts of Rather’s show to demonstrate just how badly these machines were manufactured and how this can impact their (mal)functioning at the polling place as voters attempt to cast their ballots. These transcripts can found in toto at http://election-reform.org/dan.rather.html/, if anyone wants to peruse them.

First let’s take a look at the rush to crank out as many of these machines as possible to meet the demand fueled by the logjam of orders from the states in the aftermath of HAVA. The production of these machines was offshored to the Philippines to a rundown factory in the shantytowns of Manila. Working conditions were terrible, so overwhelmingly hot and humid that workers found it difficult to focus on their jobs. Eddie Vibar was an electrical engineer who worked at the plant in the immediate post-HAVA period.

Rather: But almost nothing may have affected the workers or the machines, like the crushing heat and humidity of Manila, in a factory with only a few air conditioners, often broken or turned off. Vibar recalls days when the temperature inside rose to over ninety degrees.

14:00 Eddie Vibar: We really could not work when the heat in the factory got to be too much…

we would lose our concentration while trying to do repairs.

So we would take off our polo shirts…

because it would make it a little cooler.

It’s hard to do repairs while you’re also holding a fan or a piece of cardboard…

Hmmm …..sounds like a literal sweatshop, doesn’t it? The owners of the plant were the Ching family, who made millions in profits on the contract to make voting machines for ES&S. But the pay was abysmal for the workers on the factory floor.

15:30 Dan Rather: Vibar says that while the Chings made millions, their employees got sweatshop pay.

Eddie Vibar: And I also heard that when we going to make the voting machines…

our salaries for working on the voting machines would be four dollars per hour. (Emphasis added)

But the actual salary given to the voting machine workers…

was the minimum wage in the Philippines which was $2.15 or $2.50 per day. (Emphasis added)

With that backdrop of working conditions in the Teletech factory in Manila, let’s turn our attention to the quality control issues that were endemic to that factory. Just remember that over 97,000 of these machines were sold in the U.S. – and some of these were deployed in the recent controversial South Carolina election. Rather’s TV crew found it difficult to find factory workers who would speak on camera about their experiences. So here is one speaking from the shadows:

Hidden worker (translation on screen):

Of course, we have our jobs.

Of course, he can sue us, or fire us, or whatever. Or do something really bad.

But we also need to let people know what’s happening inside the plant.

11:50 Dan Rather: What was happening inside the plant? According to this employee and many others exhausted Filipino workers: rushed production, poor quality.

Hidden worker:

Well, when you need to ship them out, you really need to ship out.

When we say it’s a reject, no, they will say it’s still okay.

It seems they’re only concerned with the quantity of machines shipped from the plant.

For example, even with the rejects, they do something to make it work.

Just to make it good enough.

They don’t really think about what will happen when someone tries to use it.

That’s why we think it’s quantity not quality.

Everybody in the factory knows that.

Amazing, isn’t it? – factory managers weren’t concerned about someone actually trying to use the machines to cast a vote, but simply focused on getting more and more and more of these junk machines out the door to meet insane production goals. Plus, do you want to hear about the laughable quality test that was used to test these machines?! We hear from Eddie Vibar again.

Dan Rather: Vibar says he worked on thousands of voting machines shipped to the United States with what he says was virtually no testing done on them. Originally, a fraction of the machines underwent a so-called vibration test. And what was this quality control test for machines on which Americans would cast hundreds of thousands of votes?

Eddie Vibar: They shake the machine.

If there is something inside the machine like components or screws…

all of that gets shaken around inside the machine as well.

Dan Rather: This manual shake-test, would have been a joke at any quality electronics factory. But Vibar says that even this crude test was only done on a fraction of the machines. Why? Because, Vibar says, management didn’t want to slow down production.

If this were a situation comedy on TV, there would have to be a laugh track by this point. There is much more disturbing detail in the transcript, too much to include here – go read it if you’re interested. But the situation is too serious for giggles and guffaws – it involves the machines that are used for voting in may jurisdictions across the country – and these machines don’t have a voter-verified paper paper record that can be recounted and audited.

So when the Senate Democratic primary in the Palmetto state yielded bizarre results with the improbable victory of Alvin Greene over Vic Rawls, there was little to be done to overturn the results. Yes, indeed, computer geeks could do a forensic investigation of the memory cards and cartridges that contain the electronic records of the recent election. But this is not likely to happen. Nor would it solve the basic problem of non-recountable non-auditable voting machines.

The Executive Committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party voted to accept the election results, because there is no tangible reason to overturn an election based on rumors,  surmises and hypotheticals.

But if this situation makes you seethe with rage, then work to get rid of these machines. Root them out and toss them in the junkheap where they rightly belong. Channel your rage into productive political action.

Rage … rage … rage against the voting machines!

First, take two obscure candidates in a statewide race. Yes, one the of the candidates (Rawls) had previously run for office but he was not widely known across the Palmetto state – he at least ran something of a campaign – website, rallies, e-mails, mailings. But the other candidate, come-from-nowhere victor (Greene), mounted no discernible campaign and still cruised to victory with 60 per cent of the vote. How likely is a scenario where an unemployed vet who lives with his Dad and faces felony obscenity charges emerge as the election winner. No wonder lots of folks are scratching their heads and looking for answers.

Next ingredient in this election controversy: paperless touchscreen voting machines.  South Carolina uses the ES&S iVotronic DREs without a paper trail.

Touchscreen machines were originally promoted as the solution for accessibility by disabled voters. Problem is, this particular model is NOT able to be lowered for use by wheelchair-bound voters and is very challenging for voters with manual dexterity problems, such as patients with Parkinsons disease, or those impaired by stroke. So the claims about enabling disabled access fall apart pretty readily when examined in the context of certain kinds of disabilities that are frequently suffered by older voters.

But states across the country raced to buy up these paperless technological wonders after Congress authorized a gush of Federal money ostensibly to provide greater accessibility for disabled voters. This was a major impact of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) – a spending spree on paperless voting machines that garnered huge profits for the voting machine companies but did not really address the needs of many disabled voters. Many states are still using these technological blunders, with South Carolina being one of them.

One of the problems with touchscreen voting machines is that the screens can easily lose calibration, particularly during transport. This means that a voter’s finger may not be able to find the “sweet spot” on the screen that will reflect their selection – instead it may end up with another candidate’s name being selected because the screen is out of kilter. This frequently shows up as “vote flipping” or “jumping”. There are reports of this phenomenon in the recent South Carolina Primary and may partly explain the anomalous results.

Not only do these machines fail to meet the needs of many disabled voters and also rely on flaky touchscreens, they also provide no assurance that the votes are counted as the voters’ intended. The vote tally is done in secret using proprietary software: the process is inscrutable to the average voter. Plus, without voter verified paper records there is no way to recount or audit these election results. As demonstrated by Minnesota’s arduous Franken-Coleman recount, there is great value in having paper ballots that can be counted, audited and recounted to give the voting public the assurance that the election results can be relied on to be correct. South Carolina will not be able to offer this kind of assurance – the message is “trust us, the machines are correct” when the better message would be to be able to say “trust, but verify” (as Ronald Reagan famously said).

Furthermore, the paper ballots in Minnesota are still available for further study if the state so chooses: they are archived and would be available for future academic research projects. Minnesota uses optical scanning equipment made by the same company that produces the iVotronics used in South Carolina. The difference is that Minnesota voters have paper ballots that can be counted, recounted, audited and archived for future reference.

South Carolina, on the other hand, has only the reports generated by the touchscreen machines. There are no voter-verified paper records to recount or audit. While it would be possible for computer scientists to do a forensic study of the memory cards and vote logs, that has two intrinsic problems: on the one hand, this process would not be transparent to the average voter because it would rely on a handful of experts. On the other hand, the forensic evidence may not able to be preserved and may already be disappearing. Because there is a runoff election coming up shortly in South Carolina, the memory cards are probably already being erased and all the data from the recent election permanently lost with no chance of recovery. According to greenvilleonline, a request that the voting machines be impounded has been turned down. http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20100615/NEWS/306150015/Senator-wants-voting-machines-impounded

“Sen. Phil Leventis of Sumter asked the State Election Commission to impound voting machines until after an investigation is conducted. Chris Whitmire, a spokesman for the State Election Commission said no machines will be impounded.”

“The commission has issued a statement on its website to try and reassure voters that the system is sound in anticipation of next week’s runoff.”

If there were a stack of paper ballots that could be preserved and recounted, then South Carolina would be in much better shape. There would be a way to check the results of the voting machine tally and find out whether the correct winner was produced.

Going forward, there is a legislative solution that should be pursued in the U.S. Congress that would require paper ballots in all Federal elections. If House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) is as perturbed by these South Carolina election results as he says he is when speaking in front of a TV camera, then he should get behind Rep. Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) Voter Accountability and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 2894), which does mandate paper ballots and audits for all Federal elections. Swift passage of HR 2894 would keep the kind of paperless mess that we are seeing in South Carolina from happening in the future. The bill has 97 co-sponsors but is languishing in the House Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation.

If nothing else, the South Carolina Primary mess should provide motivation for Congress to pass this vital election reform. Starting with Rep. James Clyburn.

Paper ballots, please! Paper ballots, now! Pass HR 2894.

This has led to an enormous increase in voter registration across the United Kingdom. Pre-election polling shows the three parties locked in a tight race with no party favored to gain a governing majority. A large pool of new voters can only increase the unpredictability as UK voters go to the polls to choose a new Prime Minister. After 13 years of Labor Party rule it seems likely that change is in the air. It is uncertain what form this change will take.

According to The Independent (UK) the numbers are amazing. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/remarkable-rise–in-number-of-people-registering-to-vote-1958670.html

Amid signs that the country is heading for the closest result in a generation, a survey by The Independent has discovered the vast majority of councils experienced significant rises in voter registration in the run-up to last week’s deadline.

From the south coast of England to central Scotland, local authorities are reporting increases of up to 17 per cent in registration.

The trend is consistent across major cities, suburban constituencies and rural seats; and is pronounced in areas with crucial marginal seats. Returning officers attributed the “remarkable” increase to the interest generated by the three televised leaders’ debate and the three-horse nature of the contest.

The survey results of local councils across the UK show a consistent pattern of heightened voter interest.

The London Borough of Islington said 135,769 people had registered to vote on 6 May, compared with 116,176 at the time of the last election in 2005, a rise of 17 per cent. In neighbouring Hackney, registrations have gone up 15 per cent.

The number of voters on the electoral roll has increased by 8 per cent in Leeds, equivalent to an extra 18,000 voters. It also went up by 6 per cent in Newcastle and by 4 per cent in both Sheffield and Manchester.

A call centre set up by the Manchester City Council Council received more than 1,000 calls a day after the first leaders’ debate on 15 April. The authority reported an “unprecedented” 7,000 people registering to vote during this month.

Officials in Leicester reported a late rush with 1,800 voters signing up in the week before the 20 April deadline. The council’s electoral services manager, Alison Scott, said the “phones hardly stopped ringing”.

She said: “We anticipated a surge in enquiries, so made sure we had enough staff to answer the helpline number. But we weren’t expecting to be handling 400 calls a day – we certainly didn’t see a late surge like this in 2005.”

Martin John, electoral services manager at Oxford City Council, where registrations rose by 14 per cent, said: “We have seen a late surge in people registering, applying for postal and proxy votes and re-registering. The surge started about two weeks before the deadline and continued right up to 20 April.”

Chris Facey, electoral services officer for Sedgemoor District Council in Somerset, said: “There’s been a definite increase since the debates started. We’ve registered 1,700 voters in the last two weeks – it’s been phenomenal.”

Numbers registering have increased by 6 per cent in Wells, Somerset, where the Tories are defending a 3,040 majority over the Liberal Democrats, and by 5 per cent in Somerton and Frome, where the Liberal Democrats’ notional majority over the Tories is 595.

This rise in voter registration makes prognosticators wonder whether these new voters will actually show up at the polls. Recent trends have shown a decline in voter turnout in the UK. According to The Independent:

Election turnout has been steadily dropping since 1950 when 83.9 per cent of the adult population voted. It fell to just 59.4 per cent in 2001, slightly recovering to 61.4 per cent four years later. Political leaders will be hoping that two out of three electors will turn out this time.

Commentators such as Dame Margaret Eaton, chair of the Local Government Association sound an optimistic note about turnout: “Any sign of increases in the number of people registering to vote can only be good news for democracy. It is crucial people not only register to vote, but make sure they turn out on polling day so their voice is heard.”

If these new voters turn out in large numbers they will provide a new argument for shortening voter registration deadlines not only in the UK but here in the US.   A major impediment to voter participation has consistently been found to be registration deadlines which are set too far in advance of election day.  By moving the deadline by just eleven days the UK has taken a step in the right direction.

Well, I’ll tell you: a reprise of his Letterman appearance featuring bongos, a tall stool and black turtleneck sweater – but with a brand new script. Not that old Palin resignation stuff (that’s so last summer!). But a little rhyme by Gregg Levine over at FireDogLake.com about the health care reform spectacle in Congress. Levine does a masterful job of tying the corrupting power of money to the legislative process in the Capitol.

Since Shatner is not available right here and now, we’ll have to make do with making a mental YouTube (aka using our collective imagination) to make this happen. So visualize a black-turtlenecked Shatner propped against a tall stool on a darkened stage. The bongos start. Then Shatner begins reciting the following rhyme.

How the Joe Stole Health Care

By Gregg Levine

Every Who down in Whoville liked health care a lot…
But the Joe, who lived in northeast Whoville, did NOT!
The Joe hated health care! Reform smells like treason!
Want to know why? Someone must know the reason.
It could be his “head” always broke to the right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all,
Was that Joe thought his purse was two sizes too small.
Whatever the reason, His purse or his shoes,
He kept blocking health reform, hating the Whos,
Appearing on news shows with a sour, jowly frown,
Joe’s admonitions were a thing of renown.
For he knew every Who down in Whoville beneath,
Whether suffering from gout or infected teeth,
Was “just waiting for free care” Joe’d snarl with a sneer,
“And thanks to that Kenyan, it’s practically here!”
Then he whined, with his fat fingers nervously drumming,
“I MUST find some way to stop health care from coming!”
For Tomorrow, he knew, if he let cloture pass,
Joe’d get less attention. He’d be out on his ass!
And then! No more noise! No more Noise!
Noise! Noise! Noise!
When senators debated! The NOISE!
NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!
Then the Whos, young and old, would see doctors and nurses.
Instead of waiting in ERs, or paying for hearses!
They would learn that Joe’s friends from AHIP were beasts.
Which was something that Joe couldn’t stand in the least!
And THEN they’d do something he liked least of all!
Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small,
Would stand all together, every Who that was living.
They’d stand hand-in-hand. And the Whos would stop giving!
They’d stop giving up paychecks to health care inflation,
Which meant Aetna would stop giving Joe a donation!
And the more that Joe thought of this whole lack of bling,
The more that Joe thought, “I must stop this whole thing!”
“Why, near twenty-one years, this has been my cash cow!”
“I MUST stop this health care from coming! But HOW?”
Then he got an idea! An awful idea!
OH JOE GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!
“I know just what to do!” Then Joe laughed in his throat.
And he called his friend Harry to talk of his vote.
And he chuckled, and clucked, “Ol’ Hank, here’s the trick!
“I will vote for reform, and won’t look like a prick.
“All I need is a favor…” (Joe thought himself witty)
“Make health rules go through my senate committee!
“Because I’m the chairman of Whoville affairs,
“All the money from any who possibly cares,
“Be it AHIP, or Hospitals, Unions, or PhRMA,
“If they want Joe to help, they must increase Joe’s ‘karma.’”
“I get where you’re going,” said Harry with glee,
“If they want your approval, there will be a fee.”
“Then we speak the same language,” Joe cawed like a crow
“We do,” said the boxer from Flashlight, “you know,
“When the lobbies help you, you will likely help me,
“With six-figure check to the DSCC!”
And what happened then? Well… in Whoville they say,
That Joe’s bank account grew ten sizes that day!
And the minute his purse didn’t feel quite so tight,
He whizzed through DC in the bright morning light,
And he offered his vote as if clearing a storm!
And each Who down in Whoville got fake health reform.

(Originally published 12/11/2009 at http://firedoglake.com/2009/12/11/late-night-how-the-joe-stole-health-care/)

OK, so Shatner and the bongos stop … the lights brighten … and you come out of your imaginary YouTube wondering what to do about the tsunami of campaign cash and the flood of lobbying dollars that kept health care reform from matching the hopes and dreams of most Americans. The answer, in the short term, not much, except call your senators and rep and let them know how you feel.

In the long term, however, one fix to the system that shows promise is public financing of Congressional campaigns. In fact, this idea of public campaign financing has been around for a while – and actually works in Maine and Arizona for both local and statewide races. If this were done at the Federal level, U.S. Senators and Representatives would not have to spend most of their time in pursuit of campaign cash but instead could focus on the doing the people’s business without undue regard for the opinions of a few fat-cat contributors.

It just so happens that there are “twin” bills in Congress that would create a public financing system to help tip the scales in favor of the average voter instead of large donors. The Fair Elections Now Act (S. 752 and H.R. 1826) was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and in the House of Representatives by Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.) and Walter Jones, Jr. (R-N.C.). The bill would allow federal candidates to choose to run for office without relying on large contributions, big money bundlers, or donations from lobbyists, and would be freed from the constant fundraising in order to focus on what people in their home communities want.

One intriguing aspect of this proposal is the financing mechanism. Instead of tax dollars from the general revenues being used to publicly fund Congressional campaigns, new fees would be levied and set aside for this purpose. http://www.publicampaign.org/node/38166

The cost of Fair Elections for Senate races would be borne by a small fee on large government contractors and for House races would come from ten percent of revenues generated through the auction of unused broadcast spectrum.

• • The largest recipients of federal government contracts would pay a small percentage of the contract into the Fair Elections Fund.

• • If the system proves popular like similar laws at the state level, the new system could cost between $700 and $850 million per year.

A detailed analysis of the bill(s) can be found on the publicampaign.org website and a downloadable PDF is available at http://www.publicampaign.org/sites/www.publicampaign.org/files/05-20-09_Fair_Elections_Now_Summary.pdf

Take action today and don’t let “The Joe” ‘steal’ any more reform legislation in Congress. Contact your Senators and Congressional Representative and ask them to sponsor and support this legislation, the Fair Elections Now Act. (S. 752 and H.R. 1826).

So the FCC asked for public comment.   And, boy, did they get a virtual earful!  As of today there are 917 filings posted online.

A quick look at the comment filings is informative.  All the big telecoms and mobile  providers (T-Mobile, AT&T, Qwest, Frontier,Verizon etc.) are out in force represented by high-powered attorneys.  Ditto for media companies such as Time Warner Cable,  Comcast, Belo, Univision, Sirius XM Radio, American Cable Association, Dish Network as well as technology firms like Microsoft,  Dell Computers and Google.  Many of these have multiple comments submitted in their name.  Some of these mega-corporations have even submitted comments marked “confidential” to the nominally public comment process (Don’t ask me how a “public” comment can be “confidential” ).

A mere handful of these comments  to the FCC seem to have focused on the civic participation aspect of the broadband, particularly internet voting and these  can be divided into two groups — election integrity activists on one side and private companies hoping to make a profit from internet voting on the other.

This could also be seen as a division between the “No” and “Yes” sides of the online voting controversy.

Election integrity activists who are speaking out with one voice against   internet voting include Pam Smith of Verified Voting, Joyce McCloy of NC Coalition for Verified Voting,  David Jefferson, Candice Hoke, Jim Soper, Luther Weeks, Deborah Whitcomb, Ethan Scarl, and the team of Dave and Kathy Jackson (apologies if anyone has been overlooked — it was not intentional).

In the other corner, to use boxing parlance, are companies which hope to make a killing profit by selling internet voting services to gullible election officials across the country.  So far the two corporations which have come forward to offer such  services are Every1Counts, based in California and Scytl, an Italian firm which recently established a lobbying outpost in the DC area.

The sales pitch of these companies sounds remarkably like that offered by purveyors of  DRE voting machines when they touted the features, advantages and benefits of doing away with all those “messy” paper ballots and going paperless –  it was the wave of the future, they said then.   This is now and election officials across the country are frantically dumping the junk DRE machines they purchased with HAVA funds and looking around for a better solution in the form of optical scanners.

Could election officials be wooed by the siren song of internet voting?   It is hard to say how receptive election officials will be to the pitch from these vendors.  However,  an infusion of Federal money could make a difference.  It worked before with HAVA and led to a stampede to paperless DREs.

Just when election integrity activists thought they were stemming the tide of paperless voting via DREs, they can see a new emerging threat to auditable, recountable paper ballot elections.  It seems like the work is never done (sigh!).

Anyone interested in perusing the actual FCC filings can go to http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/ and click on “Search for Filings”.  Enter the proceeding number 09-47, 09-51 and/or 09-137 and  a date range ending 12/11/2009.