New report on election integrity for 2012:
Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Election Preparedness
http://countingvotes.org/
Executive summary:
http://countingvotes.org/sites/default/files/countingvotes2012execsummary.pdf
Excerpt:
On Election Day, Nov. 6, the stakes will be high. A number of critical races will be very close, and some might be decided by very few votes. At the same time, it is highly likely that voting systems will fail in multiple places across the country.i In fact, in every national election in the past decade, computerized voting systems have failed – machines haven’t started, machines have failed in the middle of voting,ii memory cards couldn’t be read be read,iii votes were mistalliediv or lost.v
Our elections are so complex, with so many different jurisdictions and varying technologies, that problems are inevitable. And, as the technology used for elections has become more complicated, the opportunity for error has substantially increased.
This report reviews how prepared each state is to ensure that every eligible voter can vote, and that every vote is counted as cast. Because we cannot predict where machines will fail during the upcoming national election, every state should be as prepared as possible for system failures.
The Verified Voting Foundation, the Rutgers Law School Constitutional Litigation Clinic and Common Cause surveyed states’ voting equipment and ranked the states according to their preparedness. The rankings are based on how states compare to a set of best practices already being used in some places.
The report ranks states from worst to best (inadequate, needs improvement, generally good, good and excellent) in these five areas of evaluation:
1) Does the state require paper ballots or records of every state? When computer failures or human errors cause machines to miscount, election officials can use the original ballots to determine correct totals. Additionally, paper ballots or records can be used to audit machine counts to determine if outcomes are correct.
2) Does the state have adequate contingency plans at each polling place in the event of machine failure? Machine repair should occur quickly and emergency paper ballots should be made available.
3) Does the state protect military and overseas voters by ensuring that marked ballots are not cast online? Voting system experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and cyber security experts at the Department of Homeland Security warn that even state-of-the-art online voting technology lacks adequate security and privacy protections. Ballots cast over the Internet can be subject to alteration and voters may lose the right to a secret ballot.
4) Has the state instituted a post-election audit that can determine whether the electronically reported outcomes are correct?
Listed below are examples of past machine failures and how they impacted various elections:
Following a June 2009 election, officials in Pennington County, South Dakota, discovered a software malfunction that added thousands of non-existent votes to the county totals.vi
In a municipal election in Palm Beach County, Florida, in March 2012, a problem with election management software allotted votes to the wrong candidate and the wrong contest. The official results were only changed after a court-sanctioned public hand count of the votes.vii
In the 2008 Republican presidential primary in Horry County, South Carolina, touch screen voting machines in 80 percent of the precincts temporarily failed, and when precincts ran out of paper ballots, voters could not cast ballots in their home precinct.
In a test-run for an online election in the September 2010 Washington, D.C., primary, a hacker team was able to change all of the votes to “elect” their own candidates. The online voting system was days away from being launched in a real election for use by overseas and military voters. After the incident, the Internet voting system was canceled.viii
Similar vote-counting errors may go undetected during the 2012 elections unless the mistake is so large and obvious – like the software malfunction in South Dakota – that it can’t be ignored, or the state has adopted procedures – like the post-election audit done in Florida – as recommended in this report.
