[Novalug] OT: Re: Remember to vote!

Charles M Howe cmhowe@patriot.net
Thu Nov 6 17:18:12 EST 2008


Bonnie,

Two comments.

(1) I keep saying this: Somebody, or more than one, should acquire one
or more Diebold (or Sequoia or ES&S) machines and hack it. The offer
Maryland (and everybody else) a reliable machine for whatever he/she can
afford to charge.

(2) Schools (Bishop Ireton in Alexandria, for example, require a certain
number of community service. Poll watching would certainly qualify -- I
used two for six hours each, doing canvassing.

Charlie

On Wed, 2008-11-05 at 16:19 -0500, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> My day as a MD pollworker and other comments.
> 
> This is  along post so delete it if you are not interested.
> 
> I was busy from 5:30AM Nov 4 until 11:30PM being a "computer tech" judge 
> pollworker in Maryland.
> 
> Maryland has the Diebold Touch Screen Machines without any individual vote 
> paper trail.
> 
> However at the end of the day a summary of the votes cast that day on each 
> machine is printed out and posted at the polling place for the 
> public to view and record if they wish. Our summary is still hanging on 
> the inside of the glass doors to the polling place so people can see 
> it through the glass.
> 
> A second summary tape is sent to the board of elections along with the 
> memory cards from the machines.
> 
> In our polling place the biggest equipment problem I encountered related 
> to the electrical circuit breaker that controlled all the plugs in the 
> walls (but not the lights) flipping - (probably when someone plugged the 
> coffee pot in). 
> 
> Fortunately this occured before the polls opened.
> 
> all the voting machines and the elecronic poll books 
> were alos plugged into this circuit. However the voting machines and 
> pollbooks also have battery back ups and so the breaker flip was 
> not immediately apparent until after the UPS for the poll books woke up to 
> complain.
> 
> In some sort of paranoid, anticipation of disaster moment, before the 
> election I had procured one of those little "nightlight" plugs that you 
> stick into an outlet where it glows if there is power at the outlet.
> 
> After a minute or so of fooling around with the UPS -thinking it might be 
> plugged into a single bad outlet - I got my nightlight and plugged it 
> sequentially into a number of different outlets - all dead.
> 
> Then I applied the low tech solution of calling the building manager 
> for the firehouse where the precinct was and having him reset the breaker. 
> The breaker was fine for the rest of the day.
> 
> Immediately all the little voting devices were happy again sucking 
> down electrons from the grid.
> 
> Had everone's battery been fully charged we could have gone for 4 or 5 
> hours but the pollbooks cannot be opened until election AM so they 
> cannot be charged overnight. The voting machines are not unsealed until 
> election AM but they can be set up on their legs and plugged into the 
> wall the night before so they do have a full charge election AM.
> 
> Despite what the voting public sees, much of what the election judges 
> do relates to security.
> 
> The voting machines have the vote program and the results on memory cards. 
> Those are not stored in the polling place. The pollbooks - which have 
> the voter databases are also not stored in the polling place.
> 
> In the case of the pollbooks - our 4 came to my house for 2 days before 
> election. They are sealed with numbered seals. The voting machines are 
> also sealed with numbered seals. The master list of these numbers stays 
> with the board of elections.
> 
> Before the polling place is opened the chief judge's and their 
> assistants spend a lot of time during the set up recording the serial 
> number of each seal and of each electronic voting device before opening 
> the device and putting it into service. The memory cards are also 
> delivered sealed and each has a serial  number. There is a terrific amount 
> of paperwork!.
> 
> All the seals that are removed at the begiing of the day - which are 
> damaged by being removed and not reuseable - have to be kept and 
> returned to the Board of Elections.
> 
> This is all pretty low tech security - but it does mean that a person 
> with malicious intent would have a difficult time opening any of the 
> machines and doing something undetectable to them. We have instructions to 
> not use anything whose seal numbers do not match.
> 
> When a voter votes in maryland they go to the check in judge with the poll 
> book who checks them in and gives them a paper ticket with their name and 
> other id an a pledge they have to sign. What the pledge says is that they 
> are the person they claim to be. It is a felony to sign this if you are 
> not the person in question. They are also given a plastic flash card that 
> will activate the voting machine to bring up a ballot for them. This card 
> is inactivated by the machine as soon as it opens the ballot so a person 
> cannot use it to vote twice. It is returned to the check in poll worker 
> and reactivated for the next voter. The slow down in our precinct was that 
> we only had 70 of these and so we had people waiting to get a card, 
> rather than the lines being slowed down by other aspects of check 
> in.
> 
> In MD the poll books have information about the voter status - for 
> example if you have not voted before the poll book tells the check in 
> judge to ask for an acceptable form of ID. The check in judge will always 
> ask for date of birth, etc.
> 
> Most voters know the date of birth and are not flagged for show ID but if 
> you were issued an absentee ballot - you would not be able to check in to 
> vote at the machine. There are other things that can trigger having to 
> vote a provisional ballot (which is paper). 
> 
> I have been reading a book by Alvarez and Hall called Electronic 
> Elections which has a pretty good summary history of voting in the US. 
> Some suprising things such as "secret ballots" not being something we had 
> from the beginning.
> 
> In any case one of the nightmares of the administration of voting is 
> called "residual votes". These are the number of votes that cannot be 
> counted because someting is wrong with the ballot cast. It is calculated 
> by subtracting the number of countable ballots from the total number of 
> ballots cast.
> 
> With paper based ballots (including paper ballots sent to an optical 
> scan system) residual votes will include both undervotes (category not 
> voted) and overvotes (two many votes in a category). In electronic systems 
> in which the voter makes a choice on a touch screen the only residual 
> vote problem is the under vote. The system is easily programed to 
> not allow overvotes.
> 
> In 2000 the great upset of the voting public was with the high residual 
> vote rate in PAPER VOTES in a number of states.
> 
> In 2004 the voter dissatisfaction was focused on the potential for false 
> reporting of cast votes because the voting machines had a "black box" 
> aspect.
> 
> All the security things that we do as election judges before and after the 
> polls open are designed to prevent the introduction of deliberate 
> outside party malware into the system. The problem of some sort of 
> mastermind in the board of elections or in the manufacturer of the 
> system doing something is a whole different level of security - 
> which is endlessly debated.
> 
> 
> Dr Willis who teaches the election judge classes in Baltimore COunty 
> is of the opinion that only very close elections are open to 
> undetected manipulation. He feels that this is equally true of paper 
> ballots or electronic voting.
> 
> Here is a small example.
> 
> We know how many people are registered at our precinct and only voters 
> registered at our precinct can vote there. We also know the party 
> affiliation of each voter.
> 
> People are somewhat predictable in their votes so if we had 2 times as 
> many votes for one candidate as we had voters of that party, we would be 
> suspicious, as would the board of elections.
> 
> I strongly reccommend that people who can become involved in elections 
> as poll workers. Young people are not doing it and they should.
> 
> We did have a high school senior as a new pollworker and we hope she 
> recruits some of her friends next cycle. We all signed the poster sized 
> full color precinct map after the polls closed and awarded it to her.
> 
> 
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
> mail:5100 Hydes Rd PO Box 60, Hydes,MD,USA 21082-0060|EMAIL:bdalzell@qis.net
> 
> freelance anatomist, vertebrate paleontologist, writer, illustrator, dog
> breeder, computer nerd & iconoclast... Borzoi info at www.borzois.com.
> Editor Net.Pet Online Animal Magazine  - http://www.netpetmagazine.com
> HOME http://www.qis.net/~borzoi/          BUSINESS http://www.batw.com
> 
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