It's not news that Ohio has election problems. Cuyahoga Conty in particular has been plagued with election irregularities and inefficiencies. Whether or not these problems have affected prior election results (I doubt it), they are a festering sore that undermines the legitimacy of the state's voting returns.
Today's NYT reports on a new report commissioned by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner identifying a host of problems in the voting systems used throughout the state and calling for another round of reforms.
At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.My local polling station in Hudson, Ohio, already uses optical scan machines, and they seem to work quite well, but I'm hardly an expert.Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.
She called for legislation and financing to be in place by April so the new machines can be used in the presidential election next November. She said she could not estimate the cost of the changes.
UPDATE: Here's local coverage from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
FURTHER UPDATE: Ohio State's Dan Tokaji discusses the report on the Equal Vote blog.
I thought moving from the punch-cards to touch-screens was really stupid. I prefer being able to touch the record and see that my choices are the ones that are actually marked on the paper. Also, having worked an election with the screens, and helped my mom when she worked two others, I can testify that they're a gigantic waste of time and effort. And, sadly, that they confuse voters and staff: there are very few technical difficulties to train for with pens and paper. For example, there's almost no chance that an incredibly computer-illiterate judge could accidentally create a (blank, thank goodness) over-vote without everyone else seeing what was going on and stopping him. And as long as you have flashlights handy, even a power outage (which hit on our last election night) won't have much impact.
I didn't vote for Ms. Brunner, but I hope her proposal is accepted. If for no other reason than that I won't have to lug those machines in and out of the van so many times on and around election day, ever again.
I would not vote on such a machine (vote absentee!) unless it met the following critera:
(1) Open source code - this is essential because it guarantees the most complete analysis.
(2) Open penetration testing - this is also essential because it allows incontrovertible evidence of vulnerability under controlled conditions (e.g. you need X level of physical access to manipulate results).
And we all know people won't vote by mail. Or they'll be encouraged to fill out their ballots at school while waiting for their kids to be released or something. If turnout is lower on issue elections (which isn't consistent) you can always condense your locations, but automatically condensing all of them down to one per county is crazy, and I'm not even going to think about Franklin, Cuyahoga, and the other big-city counties. Though, come to think of it, they probably never have issue-only ballots, thanks to city-wide elections. My town, however, does.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."
~ attributed to Josef Stalin
Me, I want to go back to the optical scanner--and I also want complete transperancy.
We're talking about someone picking a lock, pulling part of the machine apart, slapping part of it into a Nokia n800, and fiddling with it for a decent amount of time. What's to stop someone in the same circumstances from sneaking in tons of faked scantron sheets and stuffing them into the ballot box?
That's not to say that the current systems are remarkably secure -- given what computer security experts should be able to do, they're pathetic, and should at least have chassis intrusion alarms, rely on write-once memory, and -- but this sort of Luddism insisting that paper records are somehow more immutable or difficult to produce is laughable given the current record.
Has ReaderY been proofreading your posts?
Nonetheless, many, especially on the left, are terribly worried about the touch screen machines. And the same people often want to make it even easier to vote by mail.
I have no explanation for this. Perhaps many people just don't know those two simple facts
For the record, I think that the touch screen machines have almost the same advantages -- and disadvantages -- of mechanical voting machines. And those who know even a little about our election history know that those mechanical voting machines helped reduce fraud in many areas.
Also for the record, I prefer optical ballots. (And have written about a hybrid system that I think would be more secure than any currently used.
The obvious first step is to obtain a list of people who apparently voted by mail, and contact them to ask if they really did. But, every case where I've heard of somebody starting to do that, they got attacked for "voter harassment", and shut down.
In California, anyone can register by mail to vote. No proof of citizenship is necessary; just a signature. Nothing more. Once registered, the Registrar of Voters mails a absentee ballot request card before every election. You can check a box stating that you want to vote by absentee ballot in all future elections.
I defy anyone to claim that there is not rampant voter fraud taking place in a system like that.
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Oren is absolutely right. Every time I mail in my Oregon ballot, a state I have never visited, from here in Phoenix, no one ever questions it.
(JUST KIDDING!)
Smokey is correct to say that registering by mail adds problems, but even if you eliminated that, you would still have fraud problems from mailed ballots.
Incidentally, when the British started experimenting with mailed ballots (or, as they call them, postal ballots), they had an immediate explosion of vote fraud. And intimidation. At least one Labour MP reported that Muslim women in her constituency told her that they had been forced to sign their blank ballots and give them to their husbands or fathers.
And their reaction? The British are adding a few controls and will continue using mailed ballots.