Hand Counted Paper Ballots
This area of the site contains news articles, reports, studies, essays relating to hand-counted paper ballot voting.
Sign Up for the I Count Corps to Hand-count Paper Ballots
Volunteer for the I Count Corps to Restore Electoral Democracy
Calling citizen volunteers to hand count paper ballots in the precincts on election night, and, at your option, to receive training for election recounts, audits, and citizen exit polls as well.
To sign on, please go to the I Count Registry: http://electiondefensealliance.org/count/signup.php
The Case for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots
THE CASE FOR HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS
by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
February 21, 2007
I remain an advocate of paper ballots, counted by hand, at the precinct level, in full public view, on Election Night, no matter how long it takes. Here is an outline of my reasons:
1. Without PAPER BALLOTS, no election results can be verified by auditors.
“Voter-verified paper trails” do not suffice, because:
(a) not all voters will take the extra time to “verify” each and every vote for a multitude of offices and initiatives;
(b) there is no way to ensure that the vote count reported by the machine actually matches the “paper trail” without looking at the paper record;
(c) contentious court cases will be required in order to look at the paper record during the brief time period when an election can be challenged; therefore
(d) the unverified machine count will likely become official; and
(e) auditing the poll books and voter signature books can only verify the accuracy of the total number of ballots cast, and cannot detect alteration of the vote count for individual candidates.
2. The ballots must be COUNTED BY HAND.
We have examined tens of thousands of ballots from the 2004 general election in Ohio, and have found large discrepancies, errors, and outright fraud that were not detected by the machine counts, including:
(a) hundreds of consecutive ballots cast for the same presidential candidate;
(b) inexplicable voting patterns, such as half of the gay marriage supporters voting for Bush;
(c) outright alteration, such as marks for certain candidates covered with white stickers;
(d) “duplicate” ballots without original “voided” ballots to match them;
(e) unused ballots missing or destroyed;
(f) ballots cast in the wrong precinct, with a different ballot rotation;
(g) far more, or far fewer, voted ballots than the official number of ballots cast;
(h) thousands of “absentee” ballots identified in the same handwriting, with the same writing implement;
(i) absolutely blank ballots substituted for ballots cast by voters;
(j) thousands of ballots punched in advance for third-party candidates, causing voters to spoil their own ballots by casting overvotes, found almost exclusively in heavily Democratic inner-city precincts.
3. The ballots must be counted AT THE PRECINCT LEVEL, because:
(a) hand counting of paper ballots is not manageable at the county level;
(b) the counting takes place before “chain of custody” issues have arisen;
(c) all ballots will be counted in the correct precincts.
4. The ballots must be counted IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW, because:
(a) nothing else will restore public confidence in the veracity of the vote count;
(b) public monitoring of the actual counting of ballots is an exciting opportunity for citizens to engage in participatory democracy; and
(c) if observers are limited to persons residing in the precinct being counted, contentious challenges from partisan lawyers can be averted.
5. The ballots must be counted ON ELECTION NIGHT, NO MATTER HOW LONG IT TAKES, because:
(a) again, the counting takes place before “chain of custody” issues have arisen;
(b) the voters have already endured a lengthy campaign, and can wait a while for the unofficial results;
(c) the right of voters to have their votes counted correctly, the first time, trumps the desire of election workers to go home early; and
(d) if election workers are tired after a long day, a new team can be brought in to count the ballots.
"We're Counting the Votes" HCPB Method Kit (PDF download)
Note from the author:
When I was writing this Kit, I asked several experts to review it for me.
Experts in election law, election administration, and election activism. I
also asked regular citizens to review it. Some came back to me and suggested
that the inclusion of so many election laws in the Kit made it somewhat unwieldy.
It was suggested that I simply cite the laws so readers could look them up
at their leisure. I was compelled, however, to include each and every word
of New Hampshire election laws that were relevant to the topics at hand.
These laws represent the character, the nature, and the essence of the New
Hampshire election system. These laws were crafted by New Hampshire legislators,
some at the suggestion of citizens, some not. Some of these laws are exemplary,
and some should be changed.
The point is, that it is through these election laws that the voice of the
people must be heard, and must be listened to. And by understanding and listening
to these laws, the citizens of New Hampshire can pick their way through the
brambles of thorny and difficult issues and find the way forward. Finding the
answers to the challenges we face in our election systems today begins with
knowing which questions to ask. More often than not, the questions are found
in our laws. Why do we have to stand four feet from the counting on election
night? Is it legal for the Ballot Law Commission to go ahead and approve voting
machine software when they know that it is defective? In a recount, is it the
manual or the machine count that is the count of record? Why was the ballot
redesigned this way?
The United States of America is, at its most fundamental level, a nation of
the rule of law. And at the heart of all of our efforts, it is our State laws
that provide the most direct link between the people and their governing representatives.
It is our State laws that must be strengthened and crafted to ensure that we have the election systems
that we need to preserve our American democracy.
For this reason, I felt it was important to make the laws directly available
to anyone using the Counting the Votes Kit, regardless of how unwieldy and
sometimes arcane it may appear.
This Kit is also available in editable Word format for those who wish to localize
it to their regions. It is my hope that others will find in the Kit an opportunity
to learn and to teach others about their own State laws. And in doing so, they
will find, in both the roses and the thorns, their own way forward.
A word on national election reform efforts:
We live in a dangerous time. We need our states to be strong in order to re-establish
the system of checks and balances and decentralized power on which our American democracy thrives.
In these dangerous times, we have witnessed an unprecedented and systematic assault
on the democratic and constitutional processes that are the basis for the freedoms and liberties
cherished by all patriots of the American Republic.
Amazingly, this assault is coming from our own Federal government, from all
three branches with full complicity of the fourth estate, the media. It has
been six years since the Judicial Branch of government decided to put a stop
to an electoral recount, thereby deciding through judicial action the President
of the United States of America. In this time, the Legislative and Executive
Branches have colluded in astoundingly undemocratic actions such as sending
our men and women to kill and be killed in a war based on lies, passing the
Patriot and the Real ID Acts, running torture camps and holding prisoners with
no legal representation. On top of all this, all three branches of the Federal
government have poured out a steady stream of unethical and even criminal electoral
acts, including the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) ,
which insinuated insecure and defective voting equipment into our elections
at an unconscionable cost to taxpayers and American democracy.
What is even more amazing, is that, in the face of this brazen
and unrelenting assault against democracy, many election activists and
reform organizations continue to push for legislation that will hand over
sweeping electoral powers to that same Federal government described above.
After nearly four decades of disastrous national election reforms, each of
which has steadily increased centralized Federal power, the important lessons
that should have been learned are pushed aside in a frenzied push for more
of the same.
Today, a tremendous amount of effort is being made to pass national legislation,
such as HR 550 , which itself promises to be nothing more than HAVA II.
Election reformers pushing hard for this legislation now find themselves aligned with the original architects of HAVA,
as evidenced by Representative Steny Hoyer's recent show of support for HR 550.
But Representative Hoyer knows what many of us have already surmised: HR 550
will open up the floodgates for an expanded election industry, once again bankrolled
by the American taxpayer at the expense of American democracy. He knows, too,
that the Election Assistance Commission , the keystone feature of HAVA I which he helped to design,
will be strengthened through HR 550 in such a way that we the people will completely lose any semblance of control over our own elections.
What is called for in dangerous times such as these, when corruption and dysfunction
characterize all three branches of our government AND the media, is not more concentration of power.
What is needed is for the citizens of the American Republic to take back our country town by town, city by city, and state by state.
What is needed is a strengthening of the base of power that belongs to we the people.
I hope that the We're Counting the Votes Kit is one small step in this direction.
--Nancy Tobi, September 2006
Handcount Labor, Time, and Cost Calculator
The spreadsheet program that generates reports like the one pictured below, was developed by Dave Berman and the Voter Confidence Committee of Humboldt County, CA, in collaboration with Nancy Tobi and Democracy for New Hampshire . This calculator provides a practical way to size up the labor, time, and cost likely required to hand count an election, given knowledge of basic parameters such as number of expected voters and number of contests/Issues on the ballot.
Want to see what the calculator says for your county? Click here to download the Calculator (runs on Excel).
To keep current with the latest version of the application click here.
Click here to download handcount time and cost projections for each of 16 New York state counties, estimated for the coming 2008 presidential election when New York ballots will have two federal contests on the ballot (office of president, and member, U.S. House of Representatives).
Click here to read about the Justice Department HAVA compliance lawsuit against New York State and the amicus brief filed by EDA proposing hand-counting of ballots, rather than DRE machines, to fulfill the HAVA accessibility requirements.
Hand-Counted Paper Ballot Election Administration Handbook
Hands-On Elections
An Informational Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People
Authored by Nancy Tobi
Do you believe in secret vote counting? No? If instead, you believe votes ought to be cast in private but counted in public, this Handbook is for you.
Hackable e-voting machines began to be used in America's elections in the mid-1960s, then exploded in use after the 2000 election, and they now count the lion's share of America's ballots. With computerization came privatization of our elections as well. Your vote-the right by which all your other rights are secured-is now the private property and trade secret of corporate e-voting industrialists. These for profit corporations seize our ballots, count them in secret, tell us what the results are, and then lock away the records, so nobody can ever verify our election results.
This is no way to run a democracy! We need to reclaim our public elections. Fortunately for us, it turns out this is something we all can do!
Using this Handbook you can learn about:
*voting rights
*public elections
*election laws
*how our votes are or are not being counted
*the people running our elections
*how to run real elections
*how to overcome challenges in taking back our elections
*the federal government's role in our elections
*the people making the decisions affecting our elections
*citizen election watchdog groups
Citizens Gone Wild: Taking Control of Our Democracy
As we pursue solutions to the problems with our election systems, it often is necessary to build up public support and education. This is a powerpoint I put together for a citizenship symposium at Keene State College in New Hampshire.
Click to download the Powerpoint file
If you open in Notes view (View/Notes) you will see my accompanying talk.
Of course, this is NH specific, but you can customize to your own state needs.
People need to know what their options are, and how their state decision making works. You can fill in your own state legalities - infrastructure, laws, etc. and use this as a tool at public meetings to let people know exactly where to find THEIR POWER TO MAKE CHANGE.
O'Dell Testimony for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, Texas Legislature, 04.04.07
My name is Bruce O’Dell, and I am a self-employed information technology consultant based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have twenty five years experience specializing in the design of very large scale computer systems with extraordinary requirements for security and integrity. For example, as an employee of American Express, I led a project to design a computer security service to authorize access to financial systems across that company and with other financial institutions throughout North America. In 2005 I was the architect in charge of integrating existing systems with a comprehensive new company-wide security environment at one of the 20 largest public companies in America. So I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to share my perspective on electronic voting, as someone accountable for the security and integrity of computer systems which safely handle billions - or trillions - of dollars of other people’s money.
Since the heady days of the 1960s, a new, multi-billion-dollar electronic voting industry with world-wide growth aspirations has emerged. Whether the original drive to automate our voting was driven by genuine desire to improve elections, naive faith in progress, blissful ignorance of the potential threats, bad technical advice or coldly calculated self-interest, that industry is now so entrenched it has now become almost impossible to question the original decision to apply computer technology to voting.
This problem has been decades in the making, but was brought to a head by the “Help America Vote Act” of 2002 (HAVA). Passed in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election in 2000, HAVA was intended to improve the process of voting in America. But as a direct result of its enactment, a new wave of secret and proprietary computerized voting technology has taken almost total control of American elections.
With thousands of reported problems nationwide affecting newly-deployed electronic voting equipment in the subsequent elections of 2002, 2004 and 2006, it is clear that HAVA has had precisely the opposite effect to its stated intention, and Texas has certainly seen its share of so-called glitches. As an information technology professional I am dismayed that all this has been allowed to happen with the blessing and active participation of so many of my colleagues, many of whom make their living promoting e-voting technologies. Billions of dollars have been spent on new voting equipment in the absence of what I would consider adequate disclosure of the true costs and risks to policy makers and the general public. This is a disservice to those who must rely on IT professionals to assess the technologies they do not understand.
The proposed Texas House Bill 1364, “AN ACT relating to the accuracy, security, and reliability of certain electronic voting systems”, acknowledges the very real risks of e-voting and it seeks to mitigate them by mandating a more rigorous testing protocol for Texas’ DRE (Direct Recording Electronic touchscreen) voting equipment, along with enhanced tracking of access to voting equipment and the chain of custody of electronic storage media.
To avoid reprising HAVA’s harmful side effects despite the best of intentions, and to help restore and maintain public trust and confidence in our electoral system, this committee needs to look much more closely at the fundamental issues of software and voting.
Ensuring the integrity of systems is the hardest of all challenges in computing, and in too many cases, my profession has failed to adequately protect our employers and the public.
One of the primary reasons why trustworthy technology is so hard to achieve is that the mind-boggling complexity of real-world systems provides an enormous number of potential points of vulnerability. Voting hardware is deployed at more than 180,000 precincts and in more than three thousand counties in the US - more than 7,000 polling places just in the state of Texas. The physical logistics of moving all that equipment out to the field and getting election results back to the central tabulators for the official canvass is challenging, and as we will see, House Bill 1364’s procedural safeguards, while well-meant, are utterly inadequate to safeguard the integrity of the end-to-end system.
Not only are there thousands and thousands of devices, there are thousands of individual hardware and software components within each voting device. This includes proprietary software developed by voting equipment vendors, mass market consumer products like Microsoft Windows, and a host of highly complex, very specialized software - with no visible behaviors - supplied by a long list of other vendors, many of them offshore.
In addition to all the devices and their individual components, we must also consider the collective actions of the thousands of people who participate, directly or indirectly, in designing, programming, testing, distributing, manufacturing, installing, maintaining, configuring, operating, transporting, monitoring, repairing and storing the millions of hardware and software components that collectively add up to our system of electronic voting.
House Bill 1364 calls for testing and controls to be applied to several aspects of the end-to-end voting process, but no amount of testing alone can conjure trust in the overall system.
It is well known in the information technology profession that computers are ultimately "black boxes" - you cannot actually see what bits are really present and executing; and all methods to attempt to do so require other software that itself has the same problem, in an infinite regress. There is no workaround.
The only way to know what is running in a computer at any given moment is to observe its behavior: give all possible inputs, measure its corresponding outputs, and then check to see if the inputs and outputs you observe match the specification.
It is reasonable to ask if computer software is always tested before use, why bother to produce an “audit trail”? Unfortunately, you really have no guarantee that a given computer program's behavior as measured, say, at 10:00 AM will have any relationship to the same program's execution at noon. Computers have clocks and can tell time, and can easily be programmed to behave differently at different times, on different dates – or under an endless variety of different circumstances.
When it comes to systems processing high-value transactions of interest to potential criminal embezzlers - like money or votes - the inherent limitations of point-in-time behavioral testing make it unacceptably risky. Some kind of computer behavioral monitoring system is required to record a vulnerable system's inputs and corresponding outputs while it is processing critical transactions. This would provide all the information needed to enable a human auditor or another automated auditing system to spot processing errors or manipulation of the transactions.
I know that many people make an analogy between computerized banking and computerized voting. For example, Michael Shamos, a noted expert in the field, advocate of computerized voting, and a long-time paid consultant to states on the certification of their electronic voting systems has stated:
“Why should voting systems be held to a standard of perfection when nothing else in society is? Nonetheless, electronic voting watchdogs insist that election equipment must be perfect or it is totally unusable. The analogy between voting systems and the bank is particularly apt because (1) the chance of a system being tampered with successfully is low; (2) even successful tampering does not necessarily result in the wrong candidate being elected; and (3) only a small portion of the vote is cast on one machine.”
Unfortunately, not only is there good reason to dispute each of his three assertions, computerized voting and computerized banking actually have almost nothing in common.
One reason why electronic financial transactions are as secure as they are (by which I only mean that embezzlement is the exception and not the rule) is that while financial transactions are private, they are hardly anonymous; you need to prove your identity to all the other counterparties involved. Each counterparty gets and keeps their own independent records of the transaction, all counterparties are strongly motivated to spot discrepancies and compare their records with others, while procedures relating to resolution of financial disputes are legally mature.
Why are voting systems so difficult to protect? In contrast with banking, voting is a private and anonymous transaction. Applying the conventional counterparty-based financial auditing mechanisms to voting transactions as they occur would compromise the confidentiality of the vote and voter and would in fact be illegal.
To meet the standards of banking, not only would multiple independent copies of audit records fully describing the voter’s identity and ballot choices need to be generated and shared with multiple parties, 100% of those transaction records would be routinely audited and the results compared across organizations. In voting, on the other hand, only a relative few states routinely audit their paper ballot records (if they have any) and then only a few percent of the precincts are checked. If a bank audited only a few percent of its accounts - or none at all, its customers would flee, regulators would shut it down, and the Board of Directors would face possible jail time.
Although some computer scientists feel they've identified some magical all-electronic means of auditing the accuracy of DRE internal vote totals, ultimately there is no reliable means to do so. At the moment of creating the electronic audit record, the computer could be programmed to electronically assert you input “Smith for Governor" even though you actually input "Jones for Governor". Every all-electronic internal DRE auditing scheme, no matter how elaborate, would from that point on then simply record a lie with every appearance of the truth.
The only way voters can protect themselves from such a consistently-told electronic lie is with some kind of corresponding tangible, visible receipt that could be used as a proof you really voted for Jones. Unlike in banking, we cannot give a voter a receipt or a monthly statement; the best we can do is create an anonymous receipt that says the equivalent of "Someone Voted for Jones", have the voter verify the accuracy of that assertion, and then deposit it with the electoral authorities to retain for future auditing or recounting.
The risks of errors and covert manipulation are inherent to the use of computer software. Human nature being what it is, those risks are ever-present in all systems that process high-value transactions - especially those involving money or voting. So to achieve trustworthiness, auditing of an independent ballot record would always be performed.
Both the accuracy and integrity of any paper ballot record must also be assured.
“Accuracy” means that every voter checks that the paper record accurately records their intent. Yet studies show an abysmally low rate of detection in the field of problems with voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs) created by DREs; election outcomes can never be known to a greater accuracy than the rate at which voters accurately verify their intent. Paper ballots (whether tabulated by hand or optical scan) have much higher accuracy than VVPATs since the audit record is the same thing as the vote-casting record and inherently demands much more scrutiny by the voter.
To ensure integrity, no one must be able to alter, delete, or substitute paper ballot records after they are verified by the voter. Immediately after the election, traditional paper-based audit and control concerns take precedence. In general, the more time passes since creation and the further it travels from point of origin, the more risk there is of manipulation or destruction of paper records.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as perfect security; the best we can do is to mitigate the risks as best we can. In recognition of this inherent problem, the Canadian system of counting paper ballots in-precinct on election night - in concert with their absentee/early voting procedure - is highly secure. The paper flow is always under observation, and ballots are immediately counted in front of multiple adversarial counterparties - namely the political party representatives.
Admittedly, even rigorous paper-handling processes are not perfectly secure - but on the other hand, in the last 600 years of general use of paper records, we have figured out some pretty good procedures. Yet I doubt that many jurisdictions in America handle paper election records with the level of custodial care that we find, say, in handling real estate collateral in the mortgage-backed securities market, much less in Canadian elections.
So as a practical matter, I'd have to conclude that simply having a VVPAT offers ultimately no assurance of practical "auditability" - the records in the field are only as accurate as the rate at which people actually verify them, and with the passage of time are increasingly unlikely to have a clear, secure chain of custody. The same applies to optical scan ballots.
There are additional practical problems with checking the trustworthiness of an electronic vote tally after the fact. Since paper ballot records are typically not recounted unless margins are very close, brazen theft would be rewarded in practice. No candidate losing by a large margin wants to challenge an election and force a recount. Political culture being what it is in America, they quickly get labeled as "sore losers" who "waste the public's money and the government's time" on pointless recounts, and who use "conspiracy theories" to compensate for their inability to admit they lost.
Even when recounts of paper ballot records occur, recent experiences in Ohio and Washington state clearly reveal fundamental flaws in both approach and execution. Recounts are "broken" and existing spot-audit protocols are subject to the same limitations, as well.
Not only are there fundamental limitations to our ability to prove the trustworthiness of any complex real-world computing system, voting itself deserves the strongest degree of protection. Many of my colleagues (perhaps more so, for those gaining financially by their involvement with electronic voting industry) seem to utterly miss the essential point: computerized voting systems should be classified as national defense systems demanding a much higher standard of protection than conventional applications - including mere banking software.
Undetected widespread covert manipulation of computerized voting systems is the functional equivalent of invasion and occupation by a foreign power. In either case the people lose control of their own destinies, perhaps permanently. Undetected covert manipulation of voting systems could even be worse than mere invasion, since the “electoral coup” would appear to occur with the illusion of the manufactured consent of the governed, and there would be no “tanks in the street” to galvanize resistance.
Voting systems used in American federal elections grant regulatory powers over the world’s largest economy, disbursement authority for the federal procurement budget, control of the composition of the Supreme Court and federal judiciary, and command of the world’s only superpower military. Texas would be among the world’s wealthiest nations if it were an independent country, and it is clear that the financial rewards for covert control of state elections are vast as well.
Yet despite the fact that our computerized voting systems represent the most irresistible target for insider manipulation in the history of the world, they are not currently given even the same level of protection as systems I’m familiar with in banking and financial services, nor even to computerized gaming equipment in Las Vegas. This is a national scandal, and a disgraceful failure on the part of my profession. House Bill 1364 continues the unfortunate historical pattern of misunderstanding and underestimating the seriousness of the threat to computerized voting systems while putting in place ineffective countermeasures.
Independent inspection and certification of source code has no real benefit. If a malicious insider at Diebold or ES&S truly wanted to corrupt vote tabulation logic, they would hardly put it in the official release handed over for review. There’s simply no reason to trust that any software delivered for inspection bears any relationship whatsoever to the logic that actually runs on voting devices in an election.
The language in House Bill 1364 regarding “check and verification check” is also suspect. Since real-world computer systems involve complex inventories of hundreds or even thousands of application program modules, firmware, device drivers and operating system components, static inspection alone will never be able to reliably determine what those components will actually do at any given point in time. There’s simply no reason to believe that given executable corresponds to the given source code, and no way to truly know what the executable is doing - except by running it. Static inspection is not a security measure.
Nor can we test security into software. It is a truism in my profession that the purpose of testing is to find “bugs” - not to indicate that a piece of software contains no flaws. It’s a subtle point, but what it really means is that if I’ve found 100 errors, there is simply no magic oracle that will then tell me “well, that’s all, we’re done, no more bugs”. If it was possible to test quality - much less security - into any piece of software Microsoft Windows would be the bug-free, highly secure platform we all know it to be, since Microsoft has the world’s most sophisticated automated testing tools, thousands of paid testers, and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who volunteer to help. Yet even so several critical Microsoft security defects have been reported every month for the last several years. But not to pick on Microsoft; Secunia, a Danish company, has nearly a seven hundred page listing of security issues in popular software; in every case these flaws were discovered after completion of formal testing.
As socially-responsible professionals we must openly acknowledge the inherent limitations of our ability to ensure voting is as trustworthy as a critical national security system should be. We cannot and should not ask the public to simply trust the outcome of any testing and certification process, no matter how many “experts” say so.
In fact, there is a fascinating study from 2001 (interestingly enough, published shortly before HAVA was enacted) which concluded that not only were hand-counted paper ballots the most accurate of all vote counting methods, measuring by residual vote rate, but that every single technological “innovation” of the last century - lever machines, punch cards, optical scan, DRE - actually measurably decreased the accuracy of the voting process. Their conclusion:
These results are a stark warning of how difficult it is to implement new voting technologies. People worked hard to develop these new technologies. Election officials carefully evaluated the systems, with increasing attentiveness over the last decade. The result: our best efforts applying computer technology have decreased the accuracy of elections, to the point where the true outcomes of many races are unknowable.
There is an entire industry which is predicated on the belief that computers are better than people when it comes to counting votes, yet the precise nature of the problem that electronic voting was intended to solve remains unclear. The balance of evidence indicates that while voting by DRE may well be wide open to insider manipulation, and in practice has been plagued by glitches and inaccuracies, at least it’s far more expensive than the alternatives. Even with optical scan balloting, the effort required to hand-check machine tallies undermines the rationale for automation in the first place.
The fundamental question - why should machines tally our votes in secret - remains unanswered. Other than for the obvious financial benefit of the vendors, why should voting be forever defined as a transaction to be tallied in secret by machines, and never as a civic transaction to be performed by people in public view?
In the final analysis, I believe computer automation of voting will be regarded by future historians as one of the greatest blunders in the history of technology. Our choice now is to determine at what price - both in money and public good will - that realization will finally strike home.
Hand Count Slides from NH State Officials
Here are three sets of Adobe pdf slides from the June 2007 DemocracyFest presentations given by NH State officials:
1. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Manning on Disability Accessiblity
2. Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens on Hand Counting Methods and Costs
3. Deputy Attorney General Bud Fitch on Hand Counting Reconciliation
Click links at foot of this page to download and open the PDF slideshows on your computer.
"We're Counting the Votes" Handcounted Paper Ballot Videos
"We're Counting the Votes" Handcounted Paper Ballot Demonstration Videos
Original posts at http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/2648
These videos are made available by Democracy for New Hampshire to promote the use of hand-counted paper ballot election systems nationwide. The videos show the easy, transparent, observable, secure, and fair nature of this method of vote counting when done within the community by members of the community and administered by good and honest election officials.
What you see in these videos is the civic and community component that is present in proper election administration, as well as the
methodology. Our hope is that people will begin to remember the heart that is the grassroots, community-centered American election.
Click These Links to Watch the Videos (requires Windows Media Player) or download the video files from the links further below
Lyndeborough (~18 min.)
A ballot-by-ballot tally method of hand counting, 980 ballots cast and counted in under four hours with 100% volunteers (no budget item for the town)
State Recount (~10 min.)
Demonstrates the ballot pile method of hand counting; 22,024 votes cast and counted
Wilton (~10 min.)
Ballot-by-ballot tally method of hand counting, 2,274 ballots cast and counted
These videos are DFNH copyrighted material of Democracy for New Hampshire. They are being made available for download and distribution for personal and educational purposes, but they may not be downloaded and used or repurposed for any form of financial gain whatsoever by any individual or organization.
All videos are in .wmv format. To download videos from Internet Explorer, right-click and select "Save target as" or from Firefox
select "Save link as." Choose the location on your hard drive where you want to save the videos and click "Save."
Download Video Files Here
Lyndeborough, New Hampshire (43MB)
Wilton, New Hampshire (28 MB)
New Hampshire Statewide Recount (23MB)
Hand-Counted Paper Ballots Now
Hand-Counted Paper Ballots Now
by Sheila Parks
The right to vote, as well as the principle of “one person, one vote,” are cornerstones of our democracy. The anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements as well as the expansion of voting to young people are all part of the history of electoral reform in this country.
Equally fundamental is the assurance that each voter knows that her or his vote counts and is counted as intended. At this time in our history, many have lost confidence in our voting system. The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and at least six contests in the mid-term elections of 2002, raised many questions about fraud and electronic voting machines.[1]
The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002,[2] the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)[3] established by HAVA, and the Carter-Baker National Commission on Federal Election Reform[4] were all created after the 2000 election to improve the electoral process. All of these efforts, however, have been detrimental to the prevention and detection of election fraud and error due to their advocacy of the use of electronic voting machines.
One election reform advocate, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, provides a particularly vivid glimpse into the scope of the problems associated with electronic voting machines. She notes that, at a special Texas meeting of the Carter-Baker Commission, “I asked a member of the Panel why they [the Commission] had not asked a single question about how hacks can be done. He said it is not necessary to understand how the system can be compromised in order to protect it.”[5] The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its nonpartisan September 2005 report on elections states in its conclusions: “Numerous recent studies and reports have highlighted problems with the security and reliability of electronic voting systems…the concerns they raise have the potential to affect election outcomes.”[6]
Currently there is no government agency that regulates the voting machine industry in the United States. Roughly 80% of votes in the 2004 presidential election were cast and counted on machines manufactured by two private companies, Diebold and ES&S (Election Systems & Software, Inc.), both controlled by registered Republicans.[7]
There are two principal types of machines now in use:
(1) touch-screens (DRE – Direct Response Electronic), on which for many no audit or recount is possible because they have no paper trail and
(2) optical scans, which use paper ballots for the vote but are counted by central tabulators or at the precinct level (both particularly susceptible to fraud).
Although several bills currently pending in the U.S. House and Senate, introduced by both Republicans and Democrats, propose changes to electronic voting machines,[8] as do HAVA, the EAC and the Carter-Baker Commission, none consider hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) as a solution. Most of the proposed legislation advocates for what is variously called a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), a voter verified paper trail (VVPT) or a voter verified paper ballot (VVPB). A discussion of the nuances between and among these systems is beyond the scope of this article, but all share a potential weakness – namely, there is no way to prevent hacking of electronic voting machines later in the process, whether or not a voter receives a record of how she or he voted and/or whether there is a paper trail in the machine.
Mandated random audits of the vote raise the question of whether the audit will really be random and bring back flashes of Florida in 2000 and a long drawn out struggle. Will the Supreme Court again put a non-elected person in office as president of the United States? Although much has been published on the Internet, the mainstream media have mostly chosen to ignore or dismiss the questions of fraud and error raised in relation to electronic voting machines.
Notable exceptions are discussions by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s “Countdown” and Mark Crispin Miller’s article “None Dare Call It Stolen” in Harper’s Magazine,[9] in which he strongly suggests that the presidential election of 2004 was rigged, much of it by electronic voting machines.
HCPB are an alternative to the current widespread and increasing use of electronic voting machines. An HCPB system of voting has the following major advantages over electronic voting machines:
(1) Counting of ballots is publicly done, observed and filmed by everyday citizens who are registered voters in the precinct where the counting takes place.
(2) Security safeguards are much more easily built in to protect against tampering.
(3) The cost is far less.
There have been two recent efforts to promote an HCPB system in the United States, and a third will take place at some later time. In 2004, voting rights activists Sharona Merel, Karen Renick, Ellen Theisen, and Kathleen Wynne proposed federal legislation for federal offices.[10] In 2005, four voting rights activists (this writer and three members of CASE Ohio – John Burik, Phil Fry, and Dorri Steinhoff) began work on a protocol for HCPB. Some of this writing has been modified and is included in this paper in the specifics for HCPB. Voting rights activist Joanne Karasak plans to promote a state constitutional amendment for HCPB in Ohio.[11] There are 18 states where such constitutional amendments are possible.[12]
The key elements of an HCPB system are as follows:
(1) Electronic voting machines are not involved in this process in any way whatsoever.
(2) Each voter hand marks a sturdy paper ballot with a black felt pen provided at the precinct.
(3) The counting process happens at each precinct immediately after the polls close.
(4) Each ballot is hand-counted by registered voters from that precinct in full view of other registered voters from that precinct.
(5) The counting process is filmed.
(6) Results are posted at each precinct, immediately after the counting.
(7) A chain of custody of the ballots and ballot boxes is specified.
(8) Ballot boxes are observed and filmed as they are opened and closed and move from place to place.
Three categories of registered voters are included in this process: the official counters, the official observers of the counters, and the public watchers of the counters and observers. The hand-marked, paper ballots are hand-counted in full view of the public in each precinct by a specified number of registered voters in that precinct – e.g., four, six or eight voters. Half of the counters will consist of one person from each party on the ballot, chosen by the party itself; the other half of the counters will consist of registered voters, chosen by lottery.
The hand-counting is observed by the same number of registered voters (e.g., four, six or eight), and chosen in the same way as the counters. Counting is filmed by a video projection unit; a process will be set up to determine how the videotaping unit will be selected. The videotaping will be broadcast over closed-circuit TV and streamed over the Internet while the counting is happening.
All watchers may also videotape and/or take photographs. Each polling place must be arranged so that registered voters from those precincts (in addition to the above mentioned official observers) can easily watch the vote counting. These watchers are not to be confused with the observers of the counters. Watchers will include two registered voters from each party on the ballot, chosen by the party, and eight registered voters chosen by lottery. The polling place must be large enough to accommodate these numbers.
Even with all these safeguards in place, the chance for fraud still exists. Therefore, immediately after the first count, there will be a 100% hand-counted audit of the vote, carried out in the same way as the first hand count, but in the audit, the observers will be the counters and the counters will be the observers. Ballot boxes must be clearly marked and visible in plain view. Ballot boxes will be sealed and locked whenever they contain ballots and are not being actively used. Ballot boxes are secured from the beginning of voting until the end of counting by a chain of custody procedure. Ballot boxes never leave the polling place until after the vote is counted, audited and certified. Each time ballot boxes move from the physical control of or visual contact from one person to another, a duplicate record signed by all counters and observers must be made relinquishing and gaining control.
There will be a documentation process wherein each ballot box will have a record of its handling from the beginning of the day to the end of counting. On the web site of computer science expert Professor Douglas W. Jones, there is a very clear and detailed protocol for “Ballot and Ballot Box Transportation” and “Ballot Storage.”[13] The call to action is HCPB now.[14]
Canada already uses an HCPB system for its federal races. Various states and municipalities already have protocols for HCPB, and one has been presented in this paper. These could easily be adapted from one jurisdiction to another. Elections are governed by state rather than federal statutes (HAVA notwithstanding). According to electionline.org, a website that provides an ongoing analysis of election reform, “Each state strikes a unique balance in allocating responsibility for elections between state and local governments. A survey of all 50 states reveals a wide spectrum of power-sharing arrangements.”[15] There is a “Snapshot of the States” on pp. 11-14 of the Election Reform Briefing.[16] When you begin this work, call your local Secretary of State and get the exact rules for your state.
It is time to make electronic voting machines a NIMBY (not in my back yard and not in anyone else’s back yard either) issue. To begin a movement for HCPB, ordinary citizens, registered voters, must begin organizing door-to-door with their neighbors to petition their local election officers and demand HCPB in their city or town. Although organizing could also proceed on a state level, going municipality by municipality is a good way to start, depending on your state’s laws.
Notes
[1] See my review of What Went Wrong in Ohio and Black Box Voting. Available at http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/reviews/article.2006-01-06.7975946864 .
[2] 42 U.S.C. § 15301 et seq.
[3] 42 U.S.C. §§ 15321-15330.
[4] See http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/ . Copyright © 2006 by Sheila Parks, Ed.D.
[5] “We knew they’d miss this boat.” Available at http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/10345.html?1128366160 .
[6] “Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, But Key Activities Need to be Completed.” Available at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf .
[7] Landes, L. (2005). Voting systems orgs and companies. Available at http://ecotalk.org/VotingMachineCompanies.htm .
[8] See e.g., Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, H.R. 550, 109th Cong. (2005).
[9] Miller, M.C. (2005, August). None dare call it stolen: Ohio, the election, and America’s servile press. Harper’s Magazine. See also his even stronger book, Miller, M.C. (2005) Fooled Again. New York: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
[10] See http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/now-legislation-print.htm .
[11] Personal communication, April, 2005.
[12] See http://www.iandrinstitute.org/Quick%20Fact-Handouts.htm .
[13] The reader is referred specifically to these two sections (the last two on this link): http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/paper.html .
[14] Although it is too late to change to HCPB for the 2006 elections, a beginning must be made now for the 2008 elections. The hacking of the electronic voting machines by Harri Hursti, working with Black Box Voting; the problems that occurred with electronic voting machines in many states in the recent 2006 primaries; the law suits against the electronic voting machine companies; the paper by Ed Felton et al from Princeton University in Sept. 2006; the report of the Brennan Center Task Force of NYU, on June 27, 2006; the outstanding article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Rolling Stone (Issue 1002, June 15, 2006); articles in the New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers; and Lou Dobbs on CNN have hopefully made a more receptive climate for such change if not now on November 7, 2006, certainly by 2008. Two important questions must be addressed. First, should HCPB be initiated all at once for the entire ballot or only for federal races (i.e., for the president/vice president; U.S. Senator; U.S. Representative)? A dilemma is raised by this question. On the one hand, with a long or complicated ballot, HCPB might be difficult to initiate in toto. Moreover, because taking smaller, incremental steps might be more acceptable to doubters, starting with federal races first, and then adding local races, might be a better way to proceed. On the other hand, beginning only with HCPB in federal races implies falsely that local races are not as important and, therefore, electronic voting machines can be used for local contests. A second question that must be asked is as follows: Should HCPB be used for all contests or only for federal races?
[15] “Election Reform Briefing, September 2002, Working Together? State and Local Election Coordination.” Available at http://www.electiononline.org/ .
[16] Ibid. A version of this article first appeared in the April 2006 issue of Tikkun. Available at http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/specials/article.2006-04-10.1693298872 .
