On the heels of yesterday’s recount in the Ken Cuccinelli/Janet Oleszek race, the Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia (VVCV) issued a press release regarding what they would like to see happen in this year’s legislative session: count the paper ballots.
It just seems ridiculous to me that where optical scan paper ballots are used, the law does not require them to be reviewed in the event of a recount. Isn’t that the reason for paper ballots, to provide a paper trail? If all they do is have the machines spit out the same data as before, what’s the point of a recount? Comparing the paper ballots to the machine counts just makes sense to me. Can you imagine going to the IRS for an audit, taking your computer along and having it spit out another copy of your return as proof of the numbers? No, the IRS wants the actual input – the paper – to substantiate your return. Voting shouldn’t be any different.
The entire press release is below the fold.
Election advocates urge new security measures
The Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia (VVCV) will seek new legislation this year to provide meaningful recounts in close elections and to ensure that new paper-based election systems are audited for accuracy.
In hallmark legislation last year, the General Assembly banned further purchases of touchscreen voting machines, known as direct record electronic, or DRE, machines. The machines have been shown to be vulnerable to manipulation and error, and do not permit voters to verify that their choices have been correctly recorded. The decision to phase out DREs puts Virginia in line with a number of other states that have recently decided to abandon DREs in the face of security concerns.
Local Virginia jurisdictions that use DREs are expected to replace them over the next few years with optical scanners that read paper ballots. The scanners tally the votes, and the paper ballots are retained as a “paper trail.” But there are currently no requirements for anyone to examine the paper trail—and that, say VVCV members, is a critical next step.
“Optical scanning is a more secure, less expensive, and voter-verifiable technology,” says Jeremy Epstein, a nationally-recognized expert in election machine security and a co-founder of Virginia Verified Voting, one of the coalition members. “But the point of having a paper trail is to look at the paper. Any machine can make errors, and some can potentially be tampered with. So until you actually have a system in place to audit a small, randomly-selected set of machines by comparing the machine tallies with the paper ballots, voters still can’t have confidence in the integrity of the vote count.”
The paper ballots should also be examined in the case of a recount. Carol Doran Klein, a lawyer with the New Electoral Reform Alliance for Virginia (New Era), another coalition member, points out that current law does not permit election officials to examine the paper ballots even when they exist. “Right now in Virginia, a recount basically consists of going back to the machine and asking it to give you the same number it gave you the first time,” she says. “It’s not a real recount, and that’s unfair to both the candidates and the voters.”
Virginia has seen a number of very close races in recent years, adds Sharon Henderson, another New Era lawyer, but it’s rare for the outcome to change as the result of a recount conducted under current law. Citing this year’s Senate race between Ken Cuccinelli and Janet Oleszek, Henderson says Oleszek is fighting an uphill battle. “The law simply doesn’t let officials look at the actual ballots that were cast, even to the extent they’ve got them.”
Olga Hernandez, President of the League of Women Voters of Virginia, says her group joined the VVCV last year because they were worried about not having an actual ballot to recount. Last year the state took the first step by disallowing future DRE purchases. “We need legislation that provides for meaningful recounts and regular, random audits. We need to have verifiable election machines, so we need to take the obvious next step, and put the ‘verify’ in ‘verifiable’.”
Technorati Tags: Verifiable Voting
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
As an election officer in Fairfax County for 16 years I am certainly very interested in the debate over the voting machines and process we use in Virginia. I agree that it is critical that the voters have confidence in the election process and final results. Part of the problem we face is that even though Virginia has election laws, the tools vary by county and there is no one perfect solution that will fit every county.
I have to admit as an officer, I love the new touch screen machines we have used in Fairfax County the last several cycles. They are easy to set up, voters like them and the results are fast to produce on election night. However, I understand the concern about possible fraud. My fear though is that the political “cure” could be worse than the assumed disease.
The law that Del Hugo and Sen Devolites-Davis pushed through this year that did not allow us to use the electronic location summary feature on our machines in Fairfax caused much unneeded confusion and manual work for the officers election night and actually increased the level of risk for errors. Tired workers had to manually tabulate the totals for each race in a precinct using multiple machine tapes instead of a single location total. Which is why the post election canvass and the 37th District recount spent time looking at the tapes and the statement of results paperwork. And more mistakes than usual were found around the county doing it this way. Thanks Tim and JeanneMarie!!
Optical scan machines will give you a paper trail. We use them in Fairfax to process the mail-in absentee ballots which can number up to 10-15K in a local election and thanks to Del. Vivian Watt’s legislation this year, are now processed but not tabulated prior to the election as they are received at HQ. That saves us a lot of time. In 2006 we had to process all of them on election day and it took us past midnight to complete that and the paper work. Remember waiting to find out if Webb had won?? That’s why it took so long. We use the touch machines for in-person absentees which are then counted on election night like any other precinct.
I point this out because while the scanners do use a paper ballot, they will generate a ton of paper that has to be handled several times by the officers and the voters which is a risk in itself. The scanning machines also reject a lot of those ballots for overvoting. This is usually caused when a voter erases their original selection and chooses another. No matter how clear they erase, the machine will still pick it up. It also picks up any stray marks you might make on the ballot with the pencil/pen and kicks that out. Also, any ballots with write in votes are kicked out for manual tabulation. This all amounts to a small percentage of the ballots, but in a big election could get into the hundreds or thousands of ballots. All of which have to be manually reviewed by an election officer from each major party on election day. And now you are into the Florida-like interpretation of voter intent with some of these ballots. With a touch machine, the choices are clear and there are no rejects, not even for write-ins. As more and more people take advantage of the absentee voting process, we can only expect to see that volume of manual counting go up. And as a result, mistakes.
It’s great to demand an accurate election process. But before we go running down the path of paper ballots and throw away those expensive machines, let’s take a deep breath and consider how we can make the new technology eliminate the tampering concerns. Unless you want to get to elections that take days to tabulate and have even a higher risk of human error and deceit.
Remember, the few errors that are found in the recounts we have done are due to human error in reporting the results, not the machine results themselves. No one has proved any tampering with our machines or any unusual results from those machines. Paper trail for the machines would verify that fact and be a much better alternative to paper ballots and scanners. Let’s be careful!
vivian,
The democratic party continues to amaze me…I used to believe it was a people’s party…and the Republican’s were the corporation’s party….now I think the Corporate influence now controls both parties…
Why in the world hasn’t the Democratic party made it an issue to make sure we continue to be a democratic nation and INSISTED on a paper trial and a sound system for recounting votes in case a recount is necessary?
Seems like neither party wants the people to have a voice anymore….
No wonder Americans are sick of the politicians….
Buzz…Buzz….
Terry – I hope you saw the results of a recent Ohio study on the DRE machines that I wrote about here. The findings are disturbing to me. Voters must have confidence that their votes are being recorded accurately. And it makes no sense to me that we have no paper trail. What’s even more ludicrous is that where we do have paper ballots, they are not reviewed when a recount is done.
I’d much rather have it take longer for the ballots to be counted than to have an inaccurate count quickly.
Vivian, as one who worked on the “recount” for Creigh Deeds in Newport News, I was amazed they call it a “recount”. It is a retabulation of the final count. Only if a judge sees an area where there is a “problem” is there an actual count of the actual votes.
This is something I would like the general assembly to take up.
You can get a receipt at Wachovia for a deposit or withdrawel of your money – on a Dieblod machine, at that. But you can’t get a paper trail from a Dieblod voting machine.
Sounds fishy to me.
I entirely agree, Vivian. There MUST be a paper trail. I really liked the punchcards Virginia Beach used to have. You could inspect your card to be sure it was correct, and get another if you have messed it up. The are easy for machines and people to tabulate.
Vivian, thank you for taking this on. It is better to wait and be sure you got the correct results than speed with something other than the voter’s choice. Having served as an election officer I appreciate that everyone is tired, but democracy is more in the counting than in the casting of the votes.
There is more bad news. I hope those that care about this issue will agree to serve as election officers.
Vivian, good posting.
As one of the folks who worked last year with Sen Devolites Davis and Del Hugo on the bill banning use of wireless on election day, I feel compelled to respond to Terry Mansberger’s comments.
I agree that the touch screen machines are fun to use, and the location summary feature is neat. However, I’m unwilling to give up my democracy for the sake of a bit of convenience. The fact is that the AVS WinVote machines used in Fairfax County (and several other jurisdictions in Virginia, but almost nowhere else in the US) have never had a serious independent examination, so we don’t know how many security problems are lurking in those machines, nor how accurate the vote totaling software is. We know for a fact that they use a very weak form of protection on their wireless communications – practically inviting fraud by someone intent on hurting our elections.
Second, there is a simple alternative for the wireless network: if AVS would make a minor change to their machines, they could use a traditional wired Ethernet network to do the end-of-day counting. The hardware is already present; AVS would have to adjust their software and resubmit it for certification. The problem is that AVS’s products have only been tested against the decade-old NASED standards, not the 2002 or 2005 standards recommended by the US National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
Said another way, we’re using equipment that’s three generations old from a certification perspective. Shouldn’t we expect that our voting systems will keep up to date? Would you buy a car that only met the 1960s safety standards, with no seat belts, air bags, or anti-lock brakes? That’s what we have with the AVS machines.
Third, it’s worth remembering that until the WinVote machines were introduced in 2002, the Shouptronic 1242 machines (and before that the lever machines) used in Fairfax County had no end-of-day totaling feature, so pollworkers had to do the same additions as is now required with the AVS machines. So at worst it’s a step back to 2002.
Moving on to the issue of the optical scan machines, the majority of jurisdictions around the country use optical scan, and that proportion is increasing. So while you’re right about the amount of paper, it’s something that every jurisdiction is dealing with. And it’s not nearly as bad as some would have you believe – a standard photocopier box holds 5000 sheets. There were about 200,000 votes cast in Fairfax County in the 2007 election, or about 40 boxes of paper. That’s not a very big stack.
The final point I need to disagree with is your last comment: “the few errors that are found in the recounts we have done are due to human error in reporting the results, not the machine results themselves”. That’s exactly the problem with our current law: Virginia law prohibits looking at the actual ballots recorded (or not recorded!) in the electronic voting machine, and limits us to looking at the printouts. That’s like the bank giving you an opening balance and a closing balance, and expecting you to reconcile your checking account without a list of what checks and deposits were cleared – just saying “trust us”. We need the paper so we can see whether the vote totals are in fact correct.
And finally, something we can agree on: you wrote “before we … throw away these expensive machines, let’s take a deep breath …”. The machines were expensive to buy, and are expensive to maintain (the batteries they use will wear out before long – ever tried to buy a replacement battery for a 10 year old laptop computer?), so it’s important that the replacements be something we can count on. With the technology we have today, and what we can see in the next 5-10 years, the best bet is optical scan. Not perfect, but the best we can do for now.
So I’m proud to be one of the people pushing for better audit and recount language in the state code, so we can have verifiable elections. That, to me, is more important than convenience.