Comments (32)

Dave from the Lake Effect Zone wrote on January 8, 2007 11:56 AM:

At last! Congress is about to do something constructive! Oh, happy day!

Still angrey about '00 wrote on January 8, 2007 12:12 PM:

This letter is perfect - its time to play hardball with the repugs ...

'08 can't come soon enough!

Crust wrote on January 8, 2007 12:14 PM:

You forgot the compulsory "Katherine Harris' old district" reference. I can't believe you guys with pass up a chance to mention Pink Sugar. ;)

Ron Thompson wrote on January 8, 2007 12:26 PM:

Anyone else have any problem with a Congressional committee chairman writing to an Appeals Court asking them to take action in a pending case?
Why doesn't she simply subpoena the codes, in her capacity as chairwoman of the House Administration committee?

Mike wrote on January 8, 2007 12:49 PM:

Separation of powers doctrine. She is trying to prod them along since the case is already in the courts jurisdiction, without taking more drastic measures.

DallasNE wrote on January 8, 2007 1:10 PM:

Sometimes older technology is better suited than newer technology. Electronic voting is one such example. Using a light pen rather than touch screen would remedy the problem with dirty screens. It would do nothing to address the issue of bad ballot design. That can only be cured by putting qualified people in charge of elections. Even here the remedy is simple. Issue guideline on proper ballot design then invite "strangers" to test the system. Putting a test system in a mall and inviting shoppers to perform testing would uncover problems long before election day.

Better yet, go back to paper ballots that can be scanned electronically. Anything but the current touch screen systems. They are the classic wrong tool.

markg8 wrote on January 8, 2007 1:36 PM:

Sometimes older technology is better suited than newer technology.

Not if you're trying to flip an election! Do you know how long it takes to spoil ballots one at time? And making a 18,000 vote undercount like this would be almost impossible.

Seriously though paper ballots with an electronic scanner like the Optiscan are no failsafe either.
Touchscreens are the worst but neither are fraud proof.

eric wrote on January 8, 2007 1:55 PM:

That lower court ruling was pretty bad. Denying access to the voting machines because of trade secrets? I am sure an adequate protective order would have protected trade secrets. Furthermore, we are talking about a fundamental constitutional right vs. a corporation's trade secrets? Guess which one should problably trump the other?

Besides, we are talking about the functional equivalent of ballot boxes here. Would the Court deny the People the right to look into a ballot box to make sure that it wasn't stuffed?

Give me a break.

BramP wrote on January 8, 2007 1:57 PM:

Optiscan is pretty good. It leaves an auditable/recountable paper trail by definition.

You can set up the scanners to do a reasonable amount of validation to detect things like overvotes.

Jak King wrote on January 8, 2007 2:03 PM:

We don't have any of these problems in Canada -- nor in the UK when I lived there. We still use paper ballots that are counted by hand. Oddly enough, we usually get perfectly accurate results just a couple of hours after the polls close. The use of voting machines has always been about -- and nothing but -- profits for corporations making the unnecessary devices.

Blake wrote on January 8, 2007 2:06 PM:

I believe it absurd to deny access to the machine source code, but from a technical perspective it is extremely unlikely that anything will be found amiss there. Much, much more likely is some sort of glitch in the touch screen, or a miscommunication between the touch screen and the software as to where the mark was made on the screen, etc.

Either of these more likely scenarios can/should be evaluated by settting up the hardware/software in question and running simulated votes through to see what the outcome is. Still, it's likely that only some of the machines exhibited the problem. Even if the percentage of machines that had problems is high, the Jennings people could easily be given a machine that didn't exhibit the behavior in question. If they're not asking for ALL of the hardware from at least one precinct where things went wrong, they're asking to get snookered.

Eric wrote on January 8, 2007 2:06 PM:

examining the source code at this stage in the game is probably pointless if this was intentional. If it was just bad coding it could still be caught, but if this was intentional hackery I'm sure the evidence is long since gone.

ewastud wrote on January 8, 2007 2:32 PM:

I bet there could be some very revealing information in the source code and that is why the e-voting companies are very nervous about the code being examined by any outside party. There could be non-operative remark or comment lines in the code which state specifically what kind of chicaneries are being done as well as who is responsible for coding this electoral fraud into the software. The people who do this kind of thing are very arrogant and think they won't get caught and are liable to have been very sloppy in hiding their criminal wrongdoing.

Zandru wrote on January 8, 2007 2:34 PM:

We don't have any of these problems in Canada -- nor in the UK when I lived there. said Jak King.

But seriously ... what does your typical paper ballot look like?

At the New Mexico mid-term election (much smaller than the 2004/2008 General Election), the paper ballots had such fine print that each voting "booth" had a magnifier, provided by the County Clerk's office, so people could read them. And they were two-sided. Each ballot involved about 35 candidate decisions, 12 bond issues, and 4 constitutional amendments.

The 2008 election will be much worse.

With 50 or so items to tabulate PER BALLOT, hand counting would be time-consuming, to say the least. How does this compare with the typical Canadian or British ballot?

The precinct where I served had something like 300 voters turning out - disturbingly low. Yet it took us over an hour just to do the close-out paperwork of verifying that the number of ballots voted, provisionally voted, absentee voted, spoiled, voted in lieu of, write-in voted, etc were correct, and everything packed up, locked up, and sent off to the right place, by way of the correct party affiliation election worker. Plus, there was closing out the tabulating machine and packing up all the election equipment. Needless to say, we made sure to at least double-check everything.

Suppose we had had to also hand-tabulate all 50 plus items from every ballot? My guess, from similar experience, is that it would take much more than a double check to get the numbers right and consistent.

eric wrote on January 8, 2007 3:09 PM:

"Much, much more likely is some sort of glitch in the touch screen, or a miscommunication between the touch screen and the software as to where the mark was made on the screen, etc."

I think so, too. The lack of paper is the biggest problem, though. It is just so elementary to me that paper is needed. You can't verify without paper. You can't recount without paper. On close votes, people don't even trust hand or voice counts. You need to do a ballot.

Anonymous wrote on January 8, 2007 6:14 PM:

For Australian elections, paper ballots are also used.

For a senate ballot, 40 or so candidates can be running - and the voter has the choice of putting a single '1' in a box (allowing the party of choice to distribute preferences) or labelling all candidates in order of preference.

The ballot is about A3 size, and thus is easy to read. The main results of the counting are known that night - similar timeline to the US elections. And in Australia, as voting is compulsory, the turnout rate is around 95% or more with a few percent spoiled ballots.

So even with large sets of numbers to decipher, and high levels of participation, hand counting is viable.

DallasNE wrote on January 8, 2007 6:39 PM:

"Much, much more likely is some sort of glitch in the touch screen, or a miscommunication between the touch screen and the software as to where the mark was made on the screen, etc."

But the "miscommunication" would be part of the source code. And it would be rather glaring. Mapping functions are absolutely part of the source code. That is why they want to look at the source code -- to locate the program bug causing the miscommunication.

Kenny Easwaran wrote on January 8, 2007 9:35 PM:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/05/opinion/main2333639.shtml

It looks like the problem was actually that this race was listed in an out of the way corner on the same page as the governor's race, so that people in that county often forgot to vote on it. So there wasn't any mechanical problem, but rather a design problem. Just like the West Palm Beach butterfly ballot.

Although low-tech voting is often better than high-tech, sometimes things fail for totally low-tech reasons.

Rick B wrote on January 8, 2007 10:53 PM:

The lack of paper is the biggest problem, though. It is just so elementary to me that paper is needed.As a Precinct Judge in Texas for the last five years I will agree with you.

However - a paper trail is of no value if the voter himself does not verify the accuracy of the recorded paper vote before leaving the poll. Without that verification by the voter, then a paper trail still only records what the computer the voter uses has recorded internally. The problem is that that internally recorded vote is the one that counts.

Rick B wrote on January 8, 2007 10:55 PM:

I had intended the first paragraph above to be in quotes and italicized. Eric wrote that.

kATHY BUSHMAN wrote on January 9, 2007 2:37 AM:

I am so glad that Democrats are prepared to o patriotically preserve the very basis of our democracy - protecting each citizen's right to know that his/her vote counts. The last 6 years should have made it obvious to all but the ill-informed that REpublican politicians are all about graft, corruption, lies and fraud of all kinds, including election fraud and voter suppression. It is time to assert the will of the true BLUE majority so it is also time to reestablish the primacy of the constitution through impeachment.

Dave Bell wrote on January 9, 2007 4:55 AM:

The huge number of simultaneous ballots in a US election is a problem. It encourages alternatives to simple, hand-countable, paper ballots.

But how many simultaneous Federal races are there in any particular place? Three? Four at most? This is a level comparable to British elections.

It's not that people shouldn't care about the honesty of all the counts, but the President and the Congress are important enough to get special treatment.

And this particular situation seems to me to raise the possibility that Congress could refuse to accept the result of an election, where there was strong reason to doubt its honesty. The weaknesses of computer-based voting are widely documented.

The danger is that, just as the precedents set by the Republicans over the last few years can come back to bite them, a Republican Congress could take the results of this case as allowing them to reject new members who are opposed to them.

dan wrote on January 9, 2007 10:24 AM:

The fact that Jeb Bush has been so adamantly opposed to paper trails and has insisted that the touch screen machines are sufficient leads me to suspect that there has been chicanery in this past election. I wonder how much deceit there was in the other Florida races that hasn't reached the level of obviousness that this one did. A while back I read an article by a group that is monitoring the vote vs. the exit polls which found a consistent 5% difference between the recorded vote and what people said they voted (in favor of you know who) which would have been enough to switch the vote to the same who know who's if there had not been a late surge against them during the month after the machines had been sent out.

DallasNE wrote on January 9, 2007 10:34 AM:

It looks like the problem was actually that this race was listed in an out of the way corner on the same page as the governor's race, so that people in that county often forgot to vote on it. So there wasn't any mechanical problem, but rather a design problem. Just like the West Palm Beach butterfly ballot.

Although low-tech voting is often better than high-tech, sometimes things fail for totally low-tech reasons.

Posted by: Kenny Easwaran

---------------------------

I am sure that this was a contributing factor. But that begs the question. Every County in Florida voted for both Governor and Congressperson. So why was this Democratic county the only one where the screen was designed to jam both races on the same screen. And why are there no State wide guidelines on ballot design. We have had multiple elections now where ballot design has been central to an election outcome. This stuff is not rocket science yet it keeps getting messed up but only in Democratic Counties. Like it or not, this is quite intentional and it must be stopped.

Zandru wrote on January 9, 2007 10:35 AM:

So, in Australia they hand count races with 40 different positions! Perhaps they're smarter than we Americans. I had assumed something simpler for Parliamentary systems - apparently, it's just me who is "simple" ...

I agree that ballot design, whether paper or otherwise, is critical. I supervised the tabulating machine in the fall election, and found that it was necessary to ask everyone if they'd filled out BOTH SIDES of the ballot. A surprising number missed it.

Worse, the tabulator was set to flag only the overvotes. If one page was left completely blank, the voter would have been none the wiser. If any choice had been marked in such a way that the machine failed to scan it, ditto.

In the election worker training, the county staff told us - and demonstrated - that the machines would flag, and enumerate, every undervote. They can - but in the actual election, were not set that way.

Jeremy wrote on January 9, 2007 11:29 AM:

If I'm not mistaken, Orgegon has been using mail-in ballots, has something like an 80% voting rate, and has few of these problems.

What's stopping the nation from going in this direction?

Trinket wrote on January 9, 2007 4:25 PM:

In the 2004 general election in Sarasota County there were 12,200-plus undervotes for the same congressional seat. In 2006 there were [only] about 6,000 more undervotes.

Many, many voters on both sides of the isle were so put-off by [extremely] negative primary campaining; not to mention that Ms. Jennings' primary [2006] opponent did not support her in the general.

Also, we ought not to overlook the average age of county voters. Human-error is omni-present.

chip wrote on January 9, 2007 4:45 PM:

Isn't ballot design the responsibility of the local (county) officials in Florida? I know that it is in Illinois. If that is in fact the case wouldn't it mean that the officials responsible for the poor ballot design in Sarasota County in 2006 and in Palm Beach County in 2000 were Democrats? What reason would they have for designing a ballot that would tend to disenfranchise their voters? Isn't it more likely that the voters in those jurisdictions weren't sharp enough or careful enough to follow the poorly designed ballot?

DallasNE wrote on January 9, 2007 5:28 PM:

Chip, where I live all of the Election Commissioners are appointed by the Governor with the other party appointing the Assistant Election Commissioner. This may vary by State.

But as we also learned in 2000 with the butterfly ballot, the design selected was the recommendation of the Secretary of State.

With the touch screen devices it may well be the software vendor that creates the design.

Bottom line, the top 2 officials would need to sign-off on the final product. Since they are political appointments, who knows what their qualifications are regarding arcane issues such as proper ballot design. Selling them a bill of goods probably isn't all that difficult.

Likewise, if there were 12,000 undervotes in 2004 in this same County why would the County not look into possible reasons for this abnormality. Democrats voting against Kathrine Harris should have been like fish taking to water. And why would other Counties in this same Congressional District not have a similar percentage if it was the nature of the campaign that turned voters off.

While you have a point Chip, I don't think the reasoning passes the smell test.

Michael wrote on January 9, 2007 8:06 PM:

"Anyone else have any problem with a Congressional committee chairman writing to an Appeals Court asking them to take action in a pending case?"

Actually, I have no problem with that -- This is a peculiar circumstance where we need to remember that the Congress ultimately holds the sole power under the Constitution to decide to seat somebody. However, the Congress is well aware that if it simply rode roughshod it would be killed in the court of public opinion. So, the chair is simply laying low while letting the local court know that it's very keen on this being looked at in a fair manner. But, in any event, any person, Congress or not, has a right to write a letter -- It's up to the court to decide if it wants to receive the letter, let alone give it any heed.

Zandru wrote on January 9, 2007 8:29 PM:

Jeremy states: "Orgegon has been using mail-in ballots, has something like an 80% voting rate, and has few of these problems. What's stopping the nation from going in this direction?"

Mail-in ballots have the greatest potential for fraud. (Well, maybe less than Internet voting...) If there were enough ballots submitted in Oregon to number 80% of registered voters, what was the actual percentage of voters participating? What about all those nursing homes, where the helpful Party representatives went in to "assist" the residents to vote?

I appreciate the good intentions in expanding absentee voting. When I first voted absentee in the 1970s, it was necessary to have an ironclad reason why you couldn't make it to the polls - like a note from the doctor, or temporarily residing in a distant state. Now, literally everyone is encouraged to obtain and mail in an absentee ballot - if nothing else, it's recountable paper and not a momentary magnetization within a voting machine.

But you can't really tell if a ballot was voted by the designated voter, or if certain persons managed to vote for several other voters.

On the other side, election officials can easily find criteria that enables to throw away a lot of the absentee ballots. And that's not good, either.

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