Paper ballots can be manually counted in different ways–sort by candidate and then count the ballots; stack the ballots into groups of 20 and 100 and then have counters mark tally sheets as they go through the stack one-by-one; and more.
Affordable technology–a simple digital camera hooked up to a projector–can beat all these methods on each of the four attributes of a good manual-counting method.
1. Ballot security.
Ballots must not be altered by the manual count. Sorting and stacking methods require the ballots to be handled several times, by several people, and moved around tables. When ballots are projected, only one person needs to handle the ballots, only once, and can keep them on one table, in full view.
2. Accuracy.
In a manual count, accuracy is established with redundant counts—two or more people must agree on each vote, reconciling any disagreement. When counters make errors in sort-and-stack or tally-sheet methods, finding and reviewing the problem ballot can take a lot of time and ballot-handling. With projected ballots, everyone sees the same vote at the same time, so ambiguous votes can be reconciled when they are first encountered.
3. Speed.
Faster methods of manual counting help to restrain costs, because labor is the biggest cost. Quicker counting also makes the task more pleasant for both counters and observers. Projected-ballot manual counts have accurately counted votes in one race at a rate of 100 ballots every four minutes, including time to stop to compare paired counters’ totals and resolve any differences. Depending on ballot design, two races could go just as fast.
4. Transparency.
The value of a manual count depends upon how much trust it produces in candidates and voters. In traditional manual-count methods, observers cannot see ballots well enough to verify for themselves that the votes are being counted accurately and honestly. When the ballots are projected, observers see exactly what the official counters see. In addition, because projected-ballot counts require no ballot-handling by the counters, observers can be drafted on the spot as official counters–powerfully counteracting any distrust.
A tally sheet completed in full view of all counters and observers serves as a record of the manual count.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission met today, and I stayed for most of the agenda.
One agenda item had to do with fixing the snafus that caused a voter-registration list maintenance effort in 2017 to incorrectly ‘deactivate’ thousands of validly registered voters. (You may have heard such efforts described as ‘purges,’ a relatively pejorative term that is fitting whenever voter-list maintenance is used as a voter-suppression tactic.)
Among other things, so many voters were incorrectly removed from the registration lists that poll workers for the past several elections have had to work with two sets of poll books–the regular one for unaffected voters, and a supplemental list of voters who had been struck from the rolls but who would be allowed to vote if they showed up on Election Day and attested that they had not, in fact, moved.
There are dozens of reasons, it turns out, why State of Wisconsin computers got confused about whether these voters had moved. They have to do with things like registering a vehicle with your personal name but your business address, or buying a car for your college student in La Crosse and registering it there instead of where you vote. I won’t go into all the details. If you’re curious, you can read the staff report starting on page 72 of this document.
I spend a lot of time reading about election-integrity problems in other states. That means I read about a lot of skuzzy partisan machinations.
I also spend some time talking with local election officials. That, unfortunately, exposes me to much whining, excuse-making, buck-passing and “no law says I have to” attitude.
Here’s why the WEC discussion impressed me so much that I had to come home and write this blog post.
The discussion was pure, unadulterated problem-solving, start to finish. No one was looking for a partisan angle or opportunity. Not one single commissioner or staff member was whining. No energy was wasted on self-protective defensiveness, or on denying or minimizing the problems. I heard no attempts at buck-passing, no excuses.
Unlike what I hear when I talk to many local election officials about vote tabulation, no one at WEC was pointing out that statutes require them to do the work but don’t require them to do it right. It didn’t seem to cross any Commissioner’s mind to avoid their managerial obligation to detect, analyze, and correct problems until someone passes a law forcing them to do that, and paying them extra for it.
WEC commissioners and staff were straight-up committed to discovering the extent of the problems and what caused them, and to making sure they never happen again. Commissioners asked staff for hard data on error rates, and made sure that staff are not sending any more deactivation notices until the problems are fixed. Staff, for their part, were as committed to getting past problems corrected and future problems averted as the Commissioners were.
This is what responsible election administrators look like.
I wish all voters could have seen what I saw today. And I wish some reporter would write about it when good work gets done.
Posted by Karen McKim · November 25, 2018 10:31 PM
No city treasurer would refuse to check the accuracy of property-tax bills. No county executive would release a report on annual expenditures without double-checking its accuracy.
Most local officials don’t need anyone to pass a law telling them to check their work. They accept that as a basic managerial responsibility.
But the Wisconsin County Clerks Association is officially on record: They don’t want to.
And their work product is our election results.
The WCCA statement came in response to the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s September announcement that they were considering two election-security measures.
The Commission’s first proposal involved the only accuracy-checks the Commission has authority to order: audits of individual voting machines by municipal (not county) clerks. These audits are better than nothing, but they are limited to November elections in even-numbered years and check only a few random voting machines without confirming the winners in any race.
The Commission was considering ordering more machines audited than in previous years and requiring the audits to be completed before election results are declared final.
The Commission’s second proposal would move Wisconsin slightly in the direction of national election-security standards. The Commission was considering encouraging county clerks to perform audits of the type that if done widely, might confirm that Election-Night results had identified the right winner and enable clerks to correct the results if they had not.
WCCA’s response was swift, naïve, and irresponsible. The county clerks didn’t want the Commission to require, or even encourage, the county clerks to perform genuine election audits.
Perhaps sensing they are defending the losing side in a national trend (they are), the county clerks also described how they want to restrict this election safeguard:
They don’t wanna check accuracy until after they have certified final election results.
They don’t wanna check accuracy for any but the top race on the ballot.
And they want the State to pay extra if it even suggests they check accuracy.
I’m not making that up. The organization’s memo to the Wisconsin Elections Commission is reproduced, verbatim, below.
About delaying audits until after certification: The WCCA wrote that our paper ballots “should be treated like evidence and remain undisturbed” until after the clerks have certified the results. Join me in a prayer that the Trial Judges Association doesn’t have the same idea about the proper use of evidence. Imagine our courts refusing to look at evidence until after they’ve reached their verdict.
About auditing only the top race on the ballot: The WCCA wants to audit only the top race on the ballot, ever. This could be restated: “If you force us to protect the US Senate election, we will refuse to protect the Governor’s race.” Hackers are delighted to know ahead of time which races will be protected, and which will be on an honor system.
About making the state pay extra for accuracy: The WCCA clearly rejected the idea that accuracy is a normal managerial responsibility by demanding they be paid extra for it. Imagine a parks manager telling the county budget manager: “Here’s a statement of the user fees we collected. If you want me to make sure it’s right, you’ll need to pay extra.”
Straight-out lie: In a final Trumpian flourish, the memo’s author blatantly misrepresented the findings of a study by MIT, Harvard, and the UW Madison researchers (Learning from Recounts, 2017). The WCCA memo claimed the researchers had declared that “hand counts of election results are inherently inaccurate.” Compare that to the researchers’ actual words:
“…careful hand counting in a recount is the gold standard for assessing the true vote totals — in large part because of the greater focus on a single contest, more deliberate processing of ballots, and careful observation by campaign officials and other interested parties….”
* * *
Wisconsin statutes give the buck-stops-here responsibility for election results’ accuracy to the county clerks, and to no one else. Municipal clerks cannot verify results in federal, state, and county races; they have access to the ballots from only their own city, village, or town. The state elections agency is the legal custodian of no ballots at all; has only a few days after county certification before they must certify; and has no statutory authority to question results a county has certified.
We must insist the county clerks fulfill their responsibility. They have the paper ballots. They have the time. Modern election-audit practices would allow them to verify a few races on the ballot in just two or three days, while statutes allow them at least two weeks before they must certify the election. The only cost would be the hand-counters’ time at $10 or $12 an hour—a tiny fraction of the county’s elections-administration budget. They could randomly select just a few races for verification—just enough to deter election thieves in the races most liable to attract their interest.
And yet, collectively, they refuse.
Update: The Commission wisely ignored the WCCA’s whining and voted unanimously to encourage county clerks to start auditing during their canvass. And as the WCCA memo states, a few county clerks have begun voluntarily to incorporate hand-counted audits into their routine canvass procedures.
Every county clerk in Wisconsin received a memo on October 4, 2018 explaining the current nationwide move to election auditing and providing the clerks with instructions on how to get started.
Only voters, though, can make it happen. Voters who care about election security should contact their county clerk to find out whether their votes in future elections will be protected with hand-counted audits during the county canvass.
If not, the next election on February 19 will provide an excellent opportunity for your clerk to begin developing routine election-audit practices, since it will likely be a low-turnout election. Your county clerk has plenty of time before February to learn about the various methods of checking accuracy and work out his or her local procedures.
May 18, 2018 — Forget about whether Russians hacked election computers in 2016. We’ve got a bigger problem, and not much time to fix it. The November elections are less than six months away.
But the vote-counting system is separate. It resides on no computer that either of them can control, monitor, or inspect. It was outside their range of vision in 2016, and it’s outside their vision now. They don’t talk about voting-machine security because they don’t know.
Wisconsin’s vote-counting computers are controlled, protected, and monitored by our local election clerks and by three companies—ES&S, Dominion, and Command Central.
That’s all. No one else.
Local election clerks have exactly the level of IT sophistication you think they do. County clerks send our vote-counting software off to Nebraska or Colorado or Minnesota to be reprogrammed for each new election, with no way to notice if it comes back carrying malicious code. A few counties use an application supplied by those companies to reprogram the software themselves. They put a plastic seal on it when they’re done.
Wisconsin’s local election clerks will happily leave a service technician alone with a voting machine or the county’s election-management computer, with no way to notice if he installs malicious code or a wireless communications card. They put a plastic seal on the voting machines for Election Day.
Go ahead—ask them. They seal the software. They seal the machines. They seal the paper ballots that they could use—but don’t—to check the machines’ Election-Day accuracy.
And what about where the real danger lies—within the voting-machine companies? How well does their security guard against external hackers and corrupt insiders?
The companies themselves might not understand IT security. Professor Aviel Rubin of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute checked with the major American voting-machine companies before the 2016 elections and discovered none employed “even one full-time trained expert in computer security.”
Congress, too, has been frustrated in its attempts to get straight answers about the companies’ security practices. When Congressman Ron Wyden tried to get answers from ES&S, he didn’t get a response from anyone with ‘security’ in their job title. Instead, a Senior Vice President for Governmental Relations replied, saying “At ES&S, security is the responsibility of not just one, but all who elect to work for our company.”
This governmental-relations expert reassured Rep. Wyden that ES&S had asked DHS “if they had knowledge of any such security issues involving ES&S to which they responded that they did not.” Well, whew.
ES&S—this company where every employee handles IT security and yet the vice president has to ask DHS to find out whether they’ve had a security breach—is the largest supplier of voting machines to Wisconsin. Just one of their machines—the DS200—counts more than 60% of Wisconsin’s votes, including votes from Milwaukee, Dane, Waukesha, and La Crosse Counties.
We cannot make the voting machine companies hire IT security staff before we elect a governor and a US senator in November.
And we cannot make our local election officials into IT sophisticates, ever.
But we can put an end to the honor system. That is, we can force our local election officials to use the paper ballots to detect and correct any miscounts before they declare election results final.
Our local election officials are the legal custodians of the paper ballots. They can unseal them anytime to count votes and make sure the voting machines counted right. At any time before the 2018 midterms, our local election officials could learn about results-audit practices already in use in other states and bring them to Wisconsin.
Do these three things today:
Contact WEC. Tell them to exercise leadership in getting county clerks to audit election results during the canvass. Tell them to use some of the federal HAVA funds; they’ll know what that is.
Contactyourlocalnewspapereditor. Tell him or her that you want to see local journalism take a sober look at voting-machine security right here in Wisconsin—and that doesn’t mean writing about plastic seals.
March 31, 2018 — Being a normally flawed human, I cannot resist starting this blog post with “As we have been saying for six years…”, Wisconsin’s “failure to carry out post-election audits that test the accuracy of election outcomes leaves the state open to undetected hacking and other Election Day problems.”
Boom.
The Center for American Progress released what is probably to date the most complete, sensible and (judging by their Wisconsin appendix) accurate report on national election security.
In speaking about Wisconsin, the report concludes: “To protect its elections against potential attack by sophisticated nation-states seeking to interfere in U.S. elections, Wisconsin should adopt robust post-election audits that have binding effect on election results.”
CAP researchers picked up on a feature of Wisconsin elections that in-state commentators have missed:
Problems with Wisconsin’s election security, along with possible solutions, are not visible unless you look beyond the state level and into the counties and municipalities.
Our state-level agency, the Wisconsin Elections Commission does not control the voting machines. They control only the systems that manage voter registration (WisVote) and that compile already-tabulated election results (the Canvass Reporting System, or CRS).
But the technology that counts Wisconsin’s votes is owned and operated by counties and municipalities–not the State.
It is the local clerks, not the WEC, who are responsible for pre-election protective security and for the managerial measures that would detect and correct any Election-Day miscounts.
Not only is pre-election security managed by non-IT professionals, Wisconsin’s entire vote-counting system lacks the ability even to detect miscounts, never mind correct them.
Wisconsin’s local election officials–bless their hearts–are not IT sophisticates. Asked about the threat of hacking, most will say something like what Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dobson recently wrote to me: “The equipment is never connected to the Internet, (so) unless someone has figured out a way to hack through the unit’s power cord, our equipment is basically unhack-able.”
Clerks like Mr. Dobson are not being disingenuous. They genuinely believe that if they cannot see a way to hack the vote-tabulating technology, no one else can, either. Their trust in the voting-machine companies is complete and sincere.
For their education in IT security, Mr. Dobson and his colleagues rely almost entirely on the commercial reassurances of the voting-machine companies. They don’t seek the counsel of independent IT-security authorities who could explain the myriad number of ways an elections system can be compromised without Internet connection, particularly by insiders.
Wisconsin’s county clerks genuinely do not understand that elections software could be compromised by security lapses outside their vision or control–by the vendors, service companies, municipal clerks, and poll workers.
And as for Internet access, news hasn’t yet reached them from their counterparts in Pennsylvania, who found that a voting machine company had installed unauthorized remote access capability on their election computers without their knowledge–something that computer-security professionals had been warning of for years. Like the Wisconsin clerks, the Pennsylvania clerks had been blithely assuring reporters that voting machines were never connected to the Internet–without having checked. When I publicly asked him whether he ever checked Dane County’s machines for such unauthorized alterations, Clerk Scott McDonell said that the vendors had told him that would void the machines’ warranty so no, he doesn’t check. He is not fooling when he says he truly believes the machines to be so very secure that he can doesn’t have to check their accuracy before he declares election results final.
And that, fellow voters, is the level of IT naïvete that stands between motivated international hackers and our voting rights.
But we have to be realistic about what we can expect from local election officials. As Prof. Dan Wallach of the Rice University Computer Science Department explained, “You would not expect your local police department to be able to repel a foreign military power.”
What we canexpect of our local election officials–particularly our county clerks–is that they use the authority and resources already provided by Wisconsin law to manually check accuracy of the computer-tabulated vote totals before they certify election results final.
The only protection can come from using our paper ballots to check the machines’ Election-Day accuracy.
That’s the solution that 26 states already have in place, with varying degrees of rigor.
It’s the solution that we’ve been advocating for the past six years.
It’s the solution that the 2014 Presidential Commission on Elections Administration recommended.
And it’s the solution that the CAP report recommended for Wisconsin.
Wisconsin reporters and editors need to pick up on it now, too. They need to start asking county clerks the same hard questions about their security practices that they have been asking the WEC about theirs: How do you detect whether the technology worked as intended on Election Day? Do your security and recovery procedures meet national standards? What plans do you have in place for recovery if they fail?
Voters can ask, too. Pick up the phone. Call your county clerk. Get the facts right from him or her. Ask: “At the moment when you sign that certificate declaring the election results to be correct and true, what specifically have you done to verify that the voting machines counted correctly on Election Day?”
Among the 72 county election authorities in this state, not a one will answer: “I follow federal recommendations and conduct a valid post-election audit.”
