Breaking: WEC might not comply with laws that don’t apply to it!

Summary: A lawsuit over voter registrations is getting a lot of publicity lately. In the frenzy to portray the issue as a huge menace to Wisconsin elections or voters, the news media is overlooking an important detail: The law that WEC, a state agency, is accused of not following applies only to municipal officials.

When I worked for the Legislative Audit Bureau, about 80% of the projects I supervised asked the question “Is this agency complying with the law?” It was my job to read the law; figure out what compliance would look like; find out whether the agency was doing that; and write a report telling the Legislature what I found and what, if anything, they might want to do about it.

Here’s an example. Municipal clerks (city, village, or town) are responsible for updating voter registrations. These records need to have current addresses. Sometime in the past, someone wrote a state law that seems to have been intended to help municipal clerks keep addresses up to date without causing either them or the voters much extra work.

“Municipalities” are cities, villages, and towns.

That law is still on the books as §6.50(3), Wis. Stats.   It requires all municipal officials—assessor, librarian, police chief, whoever—to tell the municipal clerk when they learn a local resident has moved. For example, the local water utility might know that some home’s account was switched to a new name, indicating that somebody moved. The law requires the water-utility manager to tell the municipal clerk about that.

Then, the law requires the municipal clerk to do one of two things. If the voter left town, the clerk must mail a first-class letter to the voter’s registration address. If the voter fails to respond to the letter within 30 days, the municipal clerk must deactivate that voter’s registration.

If the voter didn’t leave town, but only moved to another address within the municipality, the law requires the local clerk to update the address on the voter’s registration records and send a letter telling the voter of the correction.

Perhaps because the law requires the municipal officials to do this only when they receive reliable information, the law says nothing about what the clerk is supposed to do if the voter didn’t actually move. A sensible reading would be that the legislature intended just that: Nothing.

If a legislator had directed me, as one of their oversight staff, “Find out if they are complying with that law,” I would have trotted out to a few different cities, large and small, and started asking questions.

My first question would be: “How on god’s green earth are you supposed to know whether the person stayed in town or left?” If a water account is switched to a new homeowner, how is the municipal clerk supposed to know whether the first homeowner left town or moved to a utilities-paid apartment down the block? In short, it seems to me like a poorly written law. Such laws exist. More than a few of my real-life reports concluded with, “The agency is not complying, but that’s because you wrote a silly law. A better law might be…”

If I learned, however, the law is more workable than it seems, I’d have reviewed local records to look for evidence of compliance.

There are at least two things I Definitely. Would. Not. Have. Done.

First, I wouldn’t have expected any municipal official to go looking for people who only maybe moved. The law speaks only about reliable information that comes to the local officials through their normal work. Nothing in the law requires, for example, the librarian and the municipal clerk, on their own initiative, to compare the addresses on library cards and voter registrations; to consider any differences to be ‘reliable evidence’ of a move; or to threaten those voters with deactivation if they do not defend their current address.

Second—and I feel silly even saying this, because it is just so absurd—I would not have paid a visit to the Wisconsin Elections Commission to ask what that state agency was doing to comply with requirements that legislators had placed on municipal officials.

If I had given the Legislature a report concluding: “No state agencies are complying with the local governments’ statutory requirements,” I’d have been fired for wasting time on such obviously frivolous fieldwork.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is a STATE agency, not a municipality.

But that, fellow voters and taxpayers, is what I have to write about in this blog post. Because a misguided law firm has sued a state agency, the WEC, for not complying with requirements that apply only to municipal officials.  

Yes, in real life: A law firm is accusing WEC of failing to comply with the law I just described–the one that requires municipal clerks (not WEC) to deactivate voter registrations within 30 days after the municipal clerks (not WEC) sent a notice to voters based on reliable information that the municipal clerks (not WEC) had received indicating that the voters had moved (information that WEC does not possess.)

The laws that actually do apply to WEC require it to follow the procedures of a multistate compact known as ERIC. Once every two years, ERIC compares Wisconsin’s voter-registration files to files maintained by other state agencies such as the Department of Transportation. ERIC then gives WEC a list of people who have reported different addresses to different agencies.  For example, a person who had registered to vote in Milwaukee but who had avoided Milwaukee’s wheel taxes by registering their cars using the address of their Northwoods cabin would have earned a spot on ERIC’s imprecisely named “Movers List.”

WEC knows, from their long experience with this sort of administrative task, that rough information such as the ERIC list is far from reliable evidence of moving. They know how to clear it up, although it takes some patience. For example, they flag those people on the poll book to make sure the voters are asked to clear up the address question the next time they show up to vote. And if the voter never again shows up to vote at that address, their registration will be deactivated through a different process.

WEC’s boring compliance with this routine administrative procedure was ignored by the press as WEC worked on it over the past summer and fall. But as soon as a lawsuit was filed, the press has been all over it, spinning a partisan angle as hard as they can and parroting an inflated click-bait 234,000-voter figure. Thousands of those voters have already re-registered or updated their addresses, so the number of voters at risk of deactivation is nowhere near that many.  

Because I attend WEC meetings regularly, I realized the small effect this list-maintenance exercise would have for actual elections, no matter how it turns out.

First, understand my perspective: I spend most of my time working to get election officials to pay attention to something that theatens all 3 million voters: Wisconsin does not yet employ methods that would enable election officials to detect and correct the effects of voting-machine hacks. So even 234,000 seems to me like a junior-varsity number.

Still, there are other reasons I cannot see these voters as a huge threat to Wisconsin elections: Many other safeguards reduce the risk of voter fraud to an inconsequential level. And if these particular voters are attempting fraud, they are being flamboyantly inept. They were not going to be able to vote in two places by using their vehicle registration as if it was a voter registration.  

On the other side, we have to appreciate the ease with which people can register at the polls—especially (excuse me) people such as those who have cars to register and two addresses from which to register them. Among any voters who might be incorrectly deactivated, few will have their ability to vote impaired by anything worse than a few minutes’ delay. (To be clear: Any judge would be outside the law to order deactivation of any registrations in the absence of reliable information that the voter has moved. What I’m saying is that, if one does, the effect on actual voters will not be anywhere close to the levels that devout partisans fear or hope for.)

So it wasn’t until today that I sat down and read through the complaint and looked up the statute it references—actually even quotes. Anyone can read that law and see that it applies to municipal officials, not to a state agency. Check it out for yourself—the complaint accurately quotes the law. It’s the paragraph numbered ‘10’ on page three of the complaint. In that law, you will see nine references to municipal officials and not one to WEC.  

As irritated as I am with the media for their breathlessly misleading coverage, I am furious about the lawsuit. It is wasting your tax dollars and mine by asking the courts to address this bogus issue and making the WEC defend itself. I’d sputter about the lawyers’ and judge’s apparent inability to use their legal education, but reading that statute requires only elementary-school reading skills and a man-on-the-street understanding that WEC commissioners are not municipal clerks.

Postscript: Pollyanna that I am, I have to note the silver lining. This whole episode has provided a great opportunity to publicize one of Wisconsin’s treasures, our eminently usable and convenient voter-registration and election-information website, MyVote. Click on that link to see solid, up-to-date information about elections in general and your own voter registration in particular. And yes, if you were on the ERIC list, you’ll see that, and you can fix it.

Projected Ballot Counting

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.

A pdf document containing step-by-step instructions is here.

What might a recount discover?

Quick summary: A recount in this week’s Supreme Court race would be a good idea for everyone involved. Verifying accuracy is a necessity if we want to protect our right to self-government from errors, glitches, and fraud. Even the seeming winner, Brian Hagedorn, would be better off if a recount removes the shadow of doubt from his legitimacy as winner. But because our legislature, egged on by our county clerks, tightened the recount law so extremely, it’s unlikely we’ll get one.

* * *

April 5, 2019 – A statewide election decided by only 6,000 votes is frustrating for everyone. Accurate or not, it indicates no clear will of the people. Chances are last week’s Supreme Court race was determined by random events. Who got tied up at work and didn’t get to the polls? Who neglected to get a valid witness signature on their early ballot?

And of course, such a close result raises fears of manipulation. 

I’ve been asked about what I think happened.

First, I can say with certainty that the vote totals are incorrect. Statewide results always are, not just on Election Night but even after the county clerks have certified them. Every recount always finds miscounts.

Few people know that the 2016 recount found at least 17,681 mis-tabulated votes, or 0.58% of the total, because news media highlighted only the change in the victory margin. That’s 1 miscounted vote for every 170 cast. In 2016, the errors were random—affecting all candidates—so correcting them did not change the outcome.

Why so many miscounted votes? Lots of reasons, caused by both man and machine. Our elections are administered by a temporary workforce, without serious IT expertise. Even the county clerks don’t work full time on elections. Most workers are only lightly trained and supervised; get no more than four days’ on-the-job experience every year; and work under enormous time pressure. Only in recounts do they examine their work to find out how well they did.  They would have to be superhuman not to make lots of mistakes. 

But back to this specific race. Were the miscounts bad enough to have identified the wrong winner? And were they random?

I see no obvious sign of hacked voting machines. When someone manipulates Wisconsin’s election computers to alter the outcome in a statewide race, they are most likely to mis-program the software for one or two of the big counties, and they will surely put the statewide result outside the recount margin.

But the unexpected results in this Supreme Court race came from northern Wisconsin, and the statewide result is so close that Lisa Neubauer can—if she can raise huge cash quickly—get a recount. If that was computer hacking, it took impressive effort (accessing several small counties’ systems) while also being incredibly clumsy (creating results that are subject to recount.) 

If a mis-tabulation (either accidental or deliberate) flipped the outcome in this Supreme Court race, my nominee for the most likely culprit is mishandled early, absentee, and mail-in ballots.

The 2016 recount found widespread errors with absentee ballots, mostly officials rejecting envelopes they should have accepted and vice-versa. But there were other mistakes, too. In Dane County alone, the recount found more than 60 uncounted absentee ballots. Neither rejected nor cast, these ballots were simply overlooked on Election Day and later, during both the municipal and county canvasses.

So we know absentee and early ballots are often miscounted by mistake, and we know those mistakes are not noticed except in a recount. We also know that in elections as anywhere else, the best place to hide fraud is where no one looks for it, and where any oddities that are noticed are written off as human error.

So messing with absentee ballots would be a good way to manipulate a relatively small number of votes.

There are many ways to interfere with absentee, mailed-in, and early ballots. As we saw in North Carolina, you can intervene between the voter and the delivery of the ballot to the municipal clerk. (That’s one ‘hack’ that cannot be detected or corrected by a typical recount.)

But once a ballot has been delivered, it can still be rejected on several grounds.

Local officials can—must, in fact—exercise judgment (e.g., Is this handwriting legible?) when deciding whether to cast or reject an absentee ballot.  And while they are exercising that judgment, they can see the name and address of the voter. That means they can make reasonable guesses about which candidate will get the votes if they decide the ballot can be cast. Implicit, unintentional bias almost certainly shapes some decisions; the effect could be much stronger with deliberate effort. Rarely does anyone review their judgments.

To be clear, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that such manipulation was done in this election or any other Wisconsin election, but it’s a fact that it could be done. A recount would clear that up for both those who suspect and those who deny any wrongdoing.  If no recount occurs, we’ll just have to keep guessing.

But we are not likely to get a recount. For the past several years, the Legislature–urged on by the Wisconsin County Clerks Association–has tightened the recount law to make it nearly impossible to get a recount in a statewide race. Had an election held in April 2015 produced a victory margin of less than 0.50%, as this one did, Neubauer could have obtained a recount at no cost.

From the 2016 recount, we now know that a 0.58% error rate is a realistic expectation. So we can see why the old law, which made it easy to get a recount if the margin was 0.50%, was sensible. If unlike our legislators, we care about protecting our right to self-government against election errors, a recount is always wise when we could easily be declaring the wrong winner by mistake. 

So we will all be well-served if Lisa Neubauer can quickly raise the cash—$2 million, based on the cost of the 2016 recount—that she’ll need to get a recount. The losing candidate is the only one who can buy a recount; our laws assume voters have no standing or interest in accuracy.

But neither she nor we should underestimate the effort needed to raise that much cash that quickly. To get the cash into WEC’s bank account by the deadline, she will need to raise it within about 60 hours of when WEC receives the last county’s official results. Jill Stein had a little longer to raise the money (legislators shortened the deadline after Stein showed it was possible), but this election is not drawing the sorts of national interest that helped Stein raise that much money that fast.

Having said all that, if the result in the Supreme Court race was ‘manipulated,’ my bet would not be on an outcome-flipping miscount, but on the success of a last-minute, under-the-radar, highly targeted, dark-money effort to motivate northern and rural voters to get out and vote for Hagedorn.

But as long as we allow that conduct to be legal (and we do), we cannot call it manipulation. If we want to put an end to that, we’re going to have to do more than complain about it. We’re going to have to fix campaign-finance laws. And to do that, we voters are going to have to get a constitutional amendment.  

I wish you had seen this.

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.

Wisconsin County Clerks Association doesn’t wanna.

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.

Insist on it.  

Wisconsin has an election security problem. It’s not the Russians.

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.

When the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) talk about “election security”, they talk only about the voter-registration system. WEC operates that system, and DHS can monitor it. 

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Contact your county clerk. Say you want the county canvass to make sure the voting machines identified the right winners before they certify the election results. If they don’t know how, tell them to contact the Election Verification Network or the Verified Voting Foundation.
  3. Contact your local newspaper editor. 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.

National report looks at Wisconsin election security–and nails it.

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 can expect 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.

It’s the solution that Rep. Mark Pocan wisely wrote into his proposed federal legislation.

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.”

Not one.

Jump on this chance to improve Wisconsin election security!

Friday, March 30, 2018 – In defense of our right to self-government, please contact the Wisconsin Elections Commission in the next few days to tell them: Include routine election auditing in Wisconsin’s application for federal election-security funding.

Chances like this don’t come along very often. Congress sits on its hands for years, ignores problems, messes around, and then–when an issue is hot–throws some money at the states and says “Spend it quick!”

When that happens, states need to be able to grab the money and spend it on something worthwhile.

That is just what has happened with election security. Voters have been warning, shouting, complaining, and worrying for years about the dangers of poorly managed election technology, and then all of a sudden Congress awoke and leapt out of bed. (Thank you, Vladimir!) Last Friday, Congress passed a federal budget bill that includes $380 million for grants to the states for improving election security.*

Just short of $7 million of that is earmarked for Wisconsin–pending the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s submission of a plan for spending it.

Thirteen states should definitely spend their money to replace unauditable voting machines–the kind that don’t use or create a paper record of each ballot. But that’s not Wisconsin’s problem. Paperless vote-counting computers have always been illegal here.

Wisconsin’s big election-security hole–where we lag most other states–is not that our elections are unauditable. Wisconsin elections are simply unaudited.

Wisconsin is in relatively good shape on most other aspects of election security. The WEC has done a good job with those systems they control, which are the voter-registration system and the ‘canvass reporting system,’ the automated system that counties use to report results they have already counted and certified. In addition to having respectable security, both these systems also have effective backup in case of manipulation or failure. With same-day registration at the polls, hackers have to ask themselves how much effort they are going to waste deleting Wisconsin voters’ registrations when we will be able immediately to vote anyway, with only about five minutes’ re-registration inconvenience. And the canvass reporting system kicks in only after our votes have already been counted in the polling places and municipal clerks’ offices. Any hacking of that would be easily detectable and reversible, even without a serious audit effort.

But Wisconsin has no more security for our voting machines than any other state that uses paper ballots, and a paper trail is merely decorative if the ballots are sealed on Election Night and never seen again.

Our elections’ biggest unprotected vulnerability is that our county boards of canvass make a habit of declaring election results final without lifting a finger to check to see whether the vote-counting computers counted our votes correctly. That practice is justifiably illegal in 25 states (26 if you count D.C.) and contrary to every national election authority’s recommendation.

The practical solution: Wisconsin law provides county election officials with paper ballots and allows them to check accuracy before they certify, but they choose not to. The problem isn’t time or money. Wisconsin’s county clerks have as much time for the canvass as their counterparts in states that do audit, and modern election-audit methods are so efficient they could almost be funded from petty cash.

So we can only guess why our county officials continue to force us to trust our franchise to unaudited computer output–something they wouldn’t tolerate for a millisecond from their banks and ATMs. My best guess is that they’ve been allowed to ignore that basic managerial responsibility for so long that they fear they will find a host of problems when they start to look. Look at the panic this county official exhibited as she refused an observer’s request for verification during the 2016 recount. That level of distress looks to me like she knew the machines’ unreliability would be revealed if she allowed verification, so she refused to hand count “even five ballots.” And she was right: the machines were, in fact, miscounting and were later decertified by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

What voters need to do: 
Contact the WEC and tell them that you want them to include funding for routine audits during the county canvass in Wisconsin’s federal grant application. WEC staff are up to date on national election-administration trends, and I believe they understand the need for, and practicality of, routine election audits. In addition, I sense that WEC Commissioners are favorably disposed to effective election audits and will do the right thing if enough citizens express interest and support.  

You can:

  • Tweet to @WI_Elections to say that you want to see county election audits in the application for federal funding;
  • Email Chair Mark Thomsen and Administrator Meagan Wolfe at elections@wi.gov. 
  • Snail-mail them at Wisconsin Elections Commission,  P.O. Box 7984, Madison, Wisconsin 53707-7984, with copies to U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 1335 East West Highway, Suite 4300, Silver Spring, MD 20910, and to Jill Lau, Chair, Wisconsin County Clerks Association, 421 Nebraska St, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin  54235.

If you want to do more, you can use these web-contact forms to tell Senator BaldwinSenator Johnson, and the US Election Assistance Commission that they, too, should encourage the WEC to seek funds for election auditing in Wisconsin.

Also, please, tell other voters about this so that they, too, can weigh in for election audits. The WEC hardly ever gets any citizen input on election security issues, and they will definitely sit up and take notice if they get a lot now. So go for it!

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* It would be unfair to accuse every member of Congress of inaction. Wisconsin’s very own Mark Pocan introduced an excellent elections-security bill, the Secure America’s Future Elections (SAFE) Act a year ago. As other representatives wake up to the issue, it’s still collecting new co-sponsors. If you live outside Wisconsin’s Second Congressional District, contact your congressperson today and ask them to sign on. If  you live in Rep. Pocan’s district, tell him “Thank you!”