voting machines – Page 2 – Wisconsin Election Integrity

April 14, 2016 at 1:29pm — I observed Dane County’s post-election canvass of the April 5 election results from start to finish this year–all 19 hours over 4 days.

No surprises: As usual, both the municipal and county canvasses checked and double-checked to make sure the right number of BALLOTS had been counted. However, the Board of Canvass (County Clerk Scott McDonell, Democratic Party representative Gretchen Lowe, and Republican Party representative Joyce Waldrop) certified Dane County’s election results at around 3:30 PM on Wednesday, before any one had done anything to verify that the correct number of VOTES had been counted.

The votes of 234,681 Dane County voters (99.6% of the total) were certified based only on unaudited computer output. Vote totals are now no longer subject to change or correction.

The other 859 ballots were late-arriving absentee ballots and approved provisional ballots, which had been publicly hand-counted by the municipalities. The last two days of the county canvass were devoted to making sure the votes from those 849 ballots were added to the correct candidates’ totals.

Got that? Half the canvass effort to ensure the accurate counting of only 0.4% of the votes.

Over four days, County Clerk McDonell maintained the minimum transparency required by law. Any observers who were already familiar with the statutes and GAB guidance for county canvasses (that would be me) could follow along reasonably well, but anyone else would have been out of luck in terms of understanding what the canvassers were doing or why. McDonell provided no written procedures or standards–not even to the members of the board. Neither did he explain what they were doing as they went along; allow questions from observers; or provide observers with copies of anything the canvassers were looking at, or make it visible to them in any way such as by projecting it on a screen.

“Just guess” was the unspoken message to the public. Finally, he restricted any public comment to five minutes at the end of the four-day-long meeting.

It got this bizarre: At the end of the four days, I asked if I could ask a question and was told I could make a five-minute statement and that was it. (McDonell claimed that to answer a question for the public would be a violation of open meetings law.)

So the official public comment at the county canvass started with this awkwardness coming out of my mouth: “I noticed an agenda-less canvass meeting on the county calendar for 10 AM on April 20. I assume that is the digital-image audit you’ve been promising. I hope you will let me know if I am right or wrong in that assumption.”

I’m not making this up: McDonell didn’t even nod yes or no. And when Waldrop wanted to respond to my comment, he wouldn’t allow that, either.

This created something of a Mad-Hatter-Tea-Party feeling to the event, since it was basically just four of us sitting around a table in a conference room in the City-County building, sharing Girl Scout cookies from McDonell’s daughters. The canvassers and I would chat whenever McDonell left the room, but when he was present they had to pretend I wasn’t there, as McDonell himself did.

I left them with a letter, which I’ve uploaded here. It’s kind of wonky–I wanted to address them as professionals who know and care what words like ‘risk,’ ‘prioritize’ and ‘verification’ mean. I could see that at least Lowe was reading it carefully, and she asked me a few sensible questions after the meeting adjourned. The main points of the letter are:

they spend most of their time addressing risks that are much more remote than the risk of electronic miscounts, or that address no risk at all–such as reviewing vote totals in uncontested races for which it would be impossible for them to certify the wrong winner; and
they also spend time on tasks that don’t need to be completed before they certify the election results, such as discussing individual municipalities’ Election-Day practices for keeping track of the number of voters.

And yet they tell us they have no time to check the accuracy of the computer-generated vote totals–which cover 99.6% of the votes.

My request to them wasn’t anything dramatic: I simply urged them to consider risk and timeliness when they decide what to do during the canvass, and told them if they thought about it that way, it would be obvious that verification of the computer output is more important than most of what they are doing now.

As I sat listening to them recite numbers for four days, I visualized the following graphic, which shows:

The steps by which our votes are turning into final election results;
The parts of this process that are verified by the current county canvass procedures; and
The parts of the process that are verified by the type of audit we’ve been demonstrating in our citizens’ audits.

October 15, 2015 at 1:24pm — If some genie were to happen by and offer me three wishes, I fear that before world peace, I’d ask to understand our election officials’ lack of interest in verification, when I’m sure they all have the sense to know why banks audit to make sure their computers credited deposits to the correct accounts. It puzzles me deeply.

Yesterday. The chairman of Wisconsin’s elections authority, the Government Accountability Board, was testifying before a legislative hearing to defend the agency’s continued existence. One of his Republican executioners confronted him with the fact that the GAB had, for many years, neglected to perform statutorily required post-election audits. How could the Board, the questioner badgered, assure Wisconsin residents that their voting machines had counted correctly if they never did post-election audits?*

GAB Board Chairman Judge Gerald Nichol responded–right out in public, on the record, and apparently without embarrassment, “It is true we did not do the audits, but I don’t find that too worrisome because our staff thoroughly tested the systems before they were approved for use in Wisconsin.”

And–I’m not making this up–that answer appeared to satisfy his questioner.

Imagine what Judge Nichol or the legislator would have said if a banker testified, “We never audit, but I don’t find that too worrisome because when we bought those computers, we tested one to make sure it was capable of counting correctly.”

The over-the-top ridiculousness of that statement would be immediately evident to either of them in relation to a bank’s computers, but neither seemed to think it in any way remarkable when the output in question was our election results.

Today. I went to a large-group training where about two dozen municipal clerks were in attendance. I had several opportunities for one-on-one chats, and I used them to feel a few officials out about their level of awareness of voting machine accuracy. I’ve learned to start such conversations with praise for their efforts in double-checking that the machines counted the right number of ballots–which they do quite well.

“I’m conducting sort of an informal survey about clerks’ thoughts on voting machine accuracy,” I would start. “I know you know for a fact that the machines always count the correct number of ballots–you’ve got that nailed down. But what’s your level of trust that the machines counted the right number of votes?”

Most conversations go one of three ways from there. The worst conversations don’t even get started (two tonight, but I’ve gotten this reaction on other occasions). The question explodes some landmine: “Our voting machines are accurate! We test and double test and maintain the very best security. Our election results are always accurate, I’d bet my life on it.” Any follow-up question (e.g., Can you tell me what gives you that confidence?) will be met with only more anger, and the clerk or poll worker will walk away. The Topic Must Not Be Raised.

The second typical response is less emotional, but no more productive: Some election officials will be unable to understand the question no matter how you phrase and rephrase it. It’s as if you are asking “What do you do when the sun comes up in the west?” They mentally rephrase the question into something that makes sense to them and start talking about that. The elections official will describe the process for checking that the machines counted the right number of ballots, and I’ll politely wait until she is done, and then ask the question again more specifically: “Yes, but how often do you think the number of votes–that is, the number of votes for Jones, and the number for Smith–are correct or incorrect?” The elections official will repeat the explanation about verifying the number of ballots, or tell you how the machines reject over-votes, or how they check their addition during the municipal canvass, or some other thing. I’m usually the one that ends these conversation, because I start to feel I’m being mean.

The third most typical response is that they ‘correct’ the question rather than answering it. In a you-should-know-this tone, they will say something like: “The machines cannot miscount,” or “Accuracy is the county canvass job.” I had two of these conversations tonight. They don’t go anywhere, either. Once this type of election official has decided you are just naive, they switch to an all-talk-no-listen mode.

Of seven or eight conversations I started tonight, only one unfolded into a genuine exchange of information. The clerk responded to my question with, “I would say I’m pretty close to 100% confident, but it does bother me we don’t know for sure. I’ve never discovered any miscount in the pre-election test–that’s what gives me confidence–but I know that doesn’t guarantee they’ll count right on Election Day.” Wow. Town of York voters, you’re in sensible hands.

For the life of me, I cannot understand this mental block. It would be easy to say “People are naive about computers,” but this level of blindness affects their thinking about only voting machines–no other computers.

Some sort of reflexive emotional-defense denial is a possibility–the thought of incorrect election results is just so horrifying that they cannot permit its presence. Maybe, but most of an elections official’s work is dedicated to preventing various mistakes and frauds. It’s simply not believable to me that they could not already have accepted the idea that something could go wrong.

Different officials probably have different reasons. For example, it seems that those who react immediately with anger, taking offense that you would even ask about electronic miscounts, are at some level aware that they might be certifying inaccurate totals–otherwise, why would they be so defensive?

But the others–I genuinely cannot guess.

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* Just for the record, with the audit procedures the Board uses, final Wisconsin election results are unprotected against electronic miscounts whether the Board does the audits or not. Even if they had done them, their procedures are not designed to detect and correct incorrect election outcomes. Among other problems, they use a too-small sample size and have no provision for expansion of the audit beyond a single precinct if a miscount was discovered. The audits are performed after election results are certified as final, so unaudited voting-machine output determines the ‘winners’ regardless.

Tag: voting machines

Report on the Dane County Canvass: 99.6% unverified

Reality Bites: Election Officials’ Remarks on Voting Machine Reliability