Last month, when Congress authorized three hundred and eighty million dollars to help states protect their voting systems from hacking, it was a public acknowledgement that, seven months out from the midterm elections, those systems remain vulnerable to attack.
Texas counties have doled out millions of dollars in recent months to replace thousands of old touch-screen voting machines that lack a paper record – a weakness security experts warn could allow Russians or other hackers to rig U.S. elections without detection.
The problem is, many of the new machines have the same vulnerability. So do similar machines in more than a dozen states across the country.
A pair of senators from each party is introducing legislation meant to deter foreign governments from interfering in future American elections.
The bill represents the latest push on Capitol Hill to address Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and counter potential threats ahead of the 2018 midterms.
A bipartisan group of six senators has introduced legislation that would take a huge step toward securing elections in the United States. Called the Secure Elections Act, the bill aims to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines from American elections while promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments.
The U.S. Senate should enthusiastically pass the Graham-Klobuchar amendment to H.R. 2810, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2018.
The amendment would enormously strengthen defenses against cyber attacks that could compromise the integrity of elections in the United States and undermine legitimacy of government. Public confidence in the reliability of elections is a cornerstone of national security—the willingness of the people to fight and die for their country.
Published at Pew Charitable Trust
The way in which local election officials verify signatures on mail ballots in Oregon, where elections are conducted entirely by mail, and the guidance the state provides to the counties were the subjects of a recent legal challenge.
by Sen. Doug Whitsett
Oregon and its people have long prided themselves on their Pioneer Spirit, a willingness to embrace new ideas long before other states decide to do so. And while I applaud that in part, it has also prompted a series of potentially problematic policies that continue to harm the state. Examples include our unique land-use system, which has stunted economic growth throughout rural Oregon for decades. Another example is our unique vote-by-mail system.
Vote-by-mail began with the overwhelming passage of Measure 60 in the 1998 general election. The measure passed with around 69 percent of the vote, and made Oregon the first state in the nation to do its elections exclusively by mail. Prior to that, the concept had been introduced incrementally.
Our history of vote-by-mail began as far back as 1981, when the Legislature approved it under certain conditions for local elections. The practice became widespread among the counties over the following six years.
In 1992, a task force on local government services determined that the state could save money by doing all of its elections in such a manner. Three years later, Oregon was the first state in the union to do a federal primary exclusively by mail.
Early supporters of the concept included groups like the League of Women Voters, the League of Conservation Voters and the Oregon Education Association.
The 2000 election saw Oregon become the first state to do a presidential election by mail. But despite this, it took over a decade for any other state to follow suit.
Washington’s Legislature passed a law in 2011 requiring all of its counties to do vote-by-mail. Local governments had the option of conducting their elections by mail since 1987, and the practice had been allowed for statewide elections since 1993. Colorado became the third state to adopt vote-by-mail in 2013.
All of this begs the question of why this practice hasn’t caught on in more states.
This document produced by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) asks that question, and identifies several issues surrounding vote-by-mail, as well as approaches other states have taken on this matter.
It states that legislators throughout the country introduced 42 bills in 2013-14 related to vote-by-mail. In that period of time, lawmakers in Alaska rejected a proposal to establish vote-by-mail for general elections, and their counterparts in Georgia failed to pass a resolution to study all-mail elections. The document also cites research that determined that “vote by mail in Oregon only affected turnout during special elections.”
Issues identified in the NCSL document include that of “leakage,” which is defined as the circumstances under which ballots are requested and not received, transmitted but not returned for counting or returned for counting but rejected. A lack of chain of custody procedures remains a specific security concern for researchers from the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
One of the best sources for information on problems related to vote-by-mail comes from our own Secretary of State’s office. It maintains this log of prosecuted election law complaint cases related to voting.
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Tuesday, November 18, 2014
By Greg Palast
Statistics guru Nate Silver simply can’t understand why every single legitimate poll indicated that Democrats should have gotten 4% more votes in the midterm elections than appeared in the final count.
The answer, Nate, is “Crosscheck.”
No question, Republicans trounced Democrats in the Midterm elections. But, if not for the boost of this voter-roll purge system used in 23 Republican-controlled states, the GOP could not have taken the US Senate.
It took the Palast investigations team six months to get our hands on the raw files, fighting against every official trick to keep them hidden.
Here’s what we found.
Interstate Crosscheck is computer system that officials claim can identify anyone who commits the crime of voting twice in the same election in two different states. While the current list of seven million “suspects” did not yield a single conviction for double voting, Crosscheck did provide the grounds for removing the registrations of tens of thousands of voters in battleground states.
The purge proved decisive in North Carolina, Colorado, Kansas and elsewhere. Without Crosscheck, the GOP could not have taken control of the US Senate. [Read my original investigative report.]
Nate Silver might want to punch these numbers into his laptop:
The Crosscheck purge list also swamped GOP Senate margins in Alaska and Georgia and likely provided the victory margins for GOP gubernatorial victories in Kansas and Massachusetts.
No, states do not purge every name on the lists. Typical is Virginia which proudly purged 64,581 “duplicates” from its voter rolls in 2013, equal to about 19% of its Crosscheck list. Other states refuse to provide numbers, but their scrub methods are the same, or even more aggressive, than Virginia’s.
We can conservatively calculate that the purge of 19% of the Crosscheck lists accounted for at least three GOP Senate victories – and thereby, control of the Senate.
by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America
Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America.
At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.
Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states — Georgia, Virginia and Washington — have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.
The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud.
The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.
By the New York Times Editorial Board
Election Day is three weeks off, and Republican officials and legislators around the country are battling down to the wire to preserve strict and discriminatory new voting laws that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court — no friend to expansive voting rights — stepped in and blocked one of the worst laws, a Wisconsin statute requiring voters to show a photo ID to cast a ballot. A federal judge had struck it down in April, saying it would disproportionately prevent voting by poorer and minority citizens. Last month, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit allowed it to go into effect, even though thousands of absentee ballots had been sent out under the old rules.
There was sure to be chaos if the justices had not stayed that appeals court ruling, and their decision appears to be based on the risk of changing voting rules so close to an election. But they could still vote to uphold the law should they decide to review its constitutionality.
Similar laws have been aggressively pushed in many states by Republican lawmakers who say they are preventing voter fraud, promoting electoral “integrity” and increasing voter turnout. None of that is true. There is virtually no in-person voter fraud; the purpose of these laws is to suppress voting.
In Texas, where last week a federal judge struck down what she called the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, there were two convictions for in-person voter impersonation in one 10-year period. During that time, 20 million votes were cast. Nor is there any evidence that these laws encourage more voters to come to the polls. Instead, in at least two states — Kansas and Tennessee — they appear to have reduced turnout by 2 percent to 3 percent, according to a report released last week by the Government Accountability Office.
Voter ID laws, as their supporters know, do only one thing very well: They keep otherwise eligible voters away from the polls. In most cases, this means voters who are poor, often minorities, and who don’t have the necessary documents or the money or time to get photo IDs.
Continue reading the main story
By Philip Bump
Almost no one shows up at the polls pretending to be someone else in an effort to throw an election. Almost no one acts as a poll worker on Election Day to try to cast illegal votes for a candidate. And almost no general election race in recent history has been close enough to have been thrown by the largest example of in-person voter fraud on record.
That said, there have been examples of fraud, including fraud perpetrated through the use of absentee ballots severe enough to force new elections at the state level. But the slew of new laws passed over the past few years meant to address voter fraud have overwhelmingly focused on the virtually non-existent/unproven type of voter fraud, and not the still-not-common-but-not-non-existent abuse of absentee voting.
In August, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola University Law School, detailed for Wonkblog 31 instances of documented, in-person voter fraud that would have been prevented by stricter rules around identification at the polling place. The most severe instance Levitt outlined involved as many as 24 voters in Brooklyn who tried to vote under assumed names.
There are almost no elections in which 24 votes makes a significant difference, particularly at the federal level. The graph below compares the vote total and the margin of victory for every race with less than a million votes in general elections since 2006.
Internet voting, a technology often cited as a solution to the United States' problematic voting machines, received failing security and accessibility grades in the latest in-depth audit conducted by the City of Toronto. Two of the three vendors audited by the city currently have contracts with over a dozen U.S. jurisdictions for similar technologies.
The accessibility report, prepared by researchers at the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University, and the security report, prepared by researchers at Concordia and Western universities, were obtained by Al Jazeera America through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Proponents of Internet voting, largely disabilities groups and advocates for military voters overseas, point to the apparent ease-of-use of other Internet-based activities, such as banking, and claim the technology would lead to higher turnout rates.
The reports highlight the difficulty in creating a voting system that isn't more susceptible to corruption than existing voting technology and that is easy enough to use for voters with a variety of personal computer setups, including those with disabilities who often use alternatives to traditional mice, keyboards and screens.
Thirty-one states in the U.S. allow overseas and military voters to print and deliver ballots electronically. A Pentagon unit, the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) has largely spearheaded the effort by funding state programs providing assistance to overseas troops and others. A nonprofit watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sued FVAP last month to force them to disclose their own audits of Internet voting conducted three years ago. In 2012 the program told Congress it would release the records to the public by the middle of 2013.
Other countries including Germany and the Netherlands have banned all forms of electronic voting, including Internet voting. Norway experimented with Internet voting in 2011 and 2013 for a select subset of voters. A recent government-commissioned report on the trial found that it did not increase voter turnout nor did it mobilize smaller demographic groups. Officials noted that increasing turnout was not an intended or expected outcome and it confirmed previous findings that voting was easier for some, but those with disabilities had issues with error messages, text contrast and other elements.
Written by Susannah Goodman, Pamela Smith
Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia allow military and overseas voters (not domestic voters) to return voted ballots by email, facsimile and/or other Internet transmission; six allowInternet return for military members in “hostile fire” zones, and one – Alaska -- allows it for all absentee voters. But Internet voting is very insecure; ballots returned this way are at risk for manipulation, loss or deletion.
According to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the agency charged with reviewing the security of Internet voting systems, even the most sophisticated cyber security protections cannot secure voted ballots sent over the Internet and secure Internet voting is not feasible at this time. The integrity and reliable delivery of ballots returned electronically over online balloting systems – even those that employ security tools such as encryption or virtual private networks -- can’t be guaranteed.
Just as important, ballots sent by electronic transmission cannot be kept private. Most States which accept electronically transmitted ballots require voters to sign a waiver forfeiting the right to a secret ballot. In some cases, this waiver conflicts with state law or constitutional provisions which guarantee the right to a secret ballot.
In light of these facts, cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security have advised against sending marked ballots back via email or Internet portal. Moreover, the Department of Defense’s Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) has advised that postal return of voted ballots is the most responsible method of ballot return.
More and more often these days, Neal Kelley and his staff find themselves rooting through shelves at used computer stores in Orange County, Calif., looking for something they can’t find anywhere else: laptops that run on Windows 2000. Kelley is the registrar of voters in Orange County, and one component of his election equipment still runs on the Microsoft operating system from 14 years ago.
As in most places around the country, Orange County’s voting technology is based on federal standards set after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. The razor-thin presidential election in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush revealed that outdated technology had left thousands of votes uncounted. With HAVA, Congress encouraged local governments to install electronic voting equipment, resulting in a wave of upgrades across the country. Between 2002 and 2004, Congress allocated more than $3 billion for some 8,000 local jurisdictions to replace the punch card devices and lever machines they had been using for more than 30 years. But today, a decade later, that upgraded election infrastructure is quickly becoming obsolete.
In a worst-case scenario, current equipment will start to fail in the next couple years, forcing fewer voting booths to process more ballots, a recipe for longer lines and voter frustration. “What you don’t want is disenfranchised voters who are deciding not to cast a ballot because of these issues,” says Kelley. “We can’t let ourselves get to that point. We need to be ahead of this curve.”
It’s an impending crisis for states and localities. “Jurisdictions do not have the money to purchase new machines,” the Presidential Commission on Election Administration reported in January, “and legal and market constraints prevent the development of machines they would want even if they had the funds.” In other words, the newer technology simply isn’t there. And even if it were, localities couldn’t afford it.
“Election rules should seek to minimize the number of provisional ballots cast."
— Thad E. Hall and Tova Andrea Wang
"The more provisional ballots that are cast by voters, the longer it will take to authenticate the provisional ballots, integrate these ballots with the ballots tabulated on election day, and achieve an accurate vote count," write Hall and Wang in "International Principles of Election Integrity."
Fundamental security problems aren’t solved, computing experts warn.
By David Talbot
A decade and a half into the Web revolution, we do much of our banking and shopping online. So why can’t we vote over the Internet? The answer is that voting presents specific kinds of very hard problems.
Even though some countries do it and there have been trial runs in some precincts in the United States, computer security experts at a Princeton symposium last week made clear that online voting cannot be verifiably secure, and invites disaster in a close, contentious race.
“Vendors may come and they may say they’ve solved the Internet voting problem for you, but I think that, by and large, they are misleading you, and misleading themselves as well,” Ron Rivest, the MIT computer scientist and cryptography pioneer, said at the symposium. “If they’ve really solved the Internet security and cybersecurity problem, what are they doing implementing voting systems? They should be working with the Department of Defense or financial industry. These are not solved problems there.”
The unsolved problems include the ability of malicious actors to intercept Internet communications, log in as someone else, and hack into servers to rewrite or corrupt code. While these are also big problems in e-commerce, if a hacker steals money, the theft can soon be discovered. A bank or store can decide whether any losses are an acceptable cost of doing business.
Voting is a different and harder problem. Lost votes aren’t acceptable. And a voting system is supposed to protect the anonymity of a person’s vote—quite unlike a banking or e-commerce transaction—while at the same time validating that it was cast accurately, in a manner that maintains records that a losing candidate will accept as valid and verified.
Given the well-understood vulnerabilities of networked computer systems, the problem is far from solved, says David Dill, a Stanford computer scientist. “Basically, it relies on the user’s computer being trustworthy. If a virus can intercept a vote at keyboard or screen, there is basically no defense,” Dill says. “There are really fundamental problems. Perhaps a system could be tightened so some particular hack won’t work. But overall, systems tend to be vulnerable.”
This year, the U.S. Department of Defense canceled plans to allow Internet voting by military personnel overseas after a security team audited a $22 million system developed by Accenture and found it vulnerable to cyberattacks.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — On the morning of the primary here in August, the local elections board met to decide which absentee ballots to count. It was not an easy job.
The board tossed out some ballots because they arrived without the signature required on the outside of the return envelope. It rejected one that said “see inside” where the signature should have been. And it debated what to do with ballots in which the signature on the envelope did not quite match the one in the county’s files.
“This ‘r’ is not like that ‘r,’ ” Judge Augustus D. Aikens Jr. said, suggesting that a ballot should be rejected.
Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor here, disagreed. “This ‘k’ is like that ‘k,’ ” he replied, and he persuaded his colleagues to count the vote.
Scenes like this will play out in many elections next month, because Florida and other states are swiftly moving from voting at a polling place toward voting by mail. In the last general election in Florida, in 2010, 23 percent of voters cast absentee ballots, up from 15 percent in the midterm election four years before. Nationwide, the use of absentee ballots and other forms of voting by mail has more than tripled since 1980 and now accounts for almost 20 percent of all votes.
Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.
“The more people you force to vote by mail,” Mr. Sancho said, “the more invalid ballots you will generate.”
Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.
In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.
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