Kim Zetter,10.31.06 | 2:00 AM
But two recent and lengthy reports examining this year's May primary in
Cuyahoga County, Ohio -- a pivotal state where the electoral votes gave
President Bush his second win in 2004 -- make it clear that Florida-like fiascos
are far from behind us.
The reports, totaling more than 500 pages, paint a disturbing picture of how
million-dollar equipment and security safeguards can quickly be undone by poor
product design, improper election procedures and inadequate training. From
destroyed ballots and vote totals that didn't add up to lost equipment and
breaches in security protocols, Cuyahoga's primary is a perfect study in how
not to run an election.
The findings have ominous national implications. Cuyahoga County could play
an important role in deciding two races in next week's election that will help
decide which party controls the Senate and House. But one of the reports
concluded that problems in the county were so extensive that meaningful
improvements likely could not be achieved before that election, or even before
the 2008 presidential election.
Moreover, few voting activists and election experts believe the problems are
unique to Cuyahoga.
"I suspect that Cuyahoga County may be below average (in terms of how
well it ran its election), but if you lift up the rock and look at election
administration across the country, you'll see the same thing elsewhere,"
says David Dill, Stanford computer scientist and founder of VerifiedVoting.org,
a proponent of paper-verified elections.
The problems in Cuyahoga County, a heavily Democratic county that
encompasses Cleveland, began with a glitch in the design of the optical-scan
ballots -- black lines separating sections of the ballot were too thick, and
the fill-in bubbles were in the wrong place, preventing scanners from reading
them.
The gaffe caused a six-day delay in election results, but wasn't
insurmountable. The county hired an army of office temp workers to recast the
votes from the 18,000 optical-scan ballots onto touch-screen machines -- both
types of voting machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, were used in the
county for the first time in the primary.
On the surface, that seemed to solve the problem. But a post-election audit
of votes and election procedures revealed deeper issues in the way the state's
most populous county ran its primary -- problems that, if not fixed, could open
the state to serious legal challenges from candidates and voters in a close
election.
Among the findings in one report
(.pdf) prepared by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel:
There were also problems with tracking the voting machines themselves, according
to a
second report (.pdf) produced by the California-based Election Science
Institute. ESI was hired before the election by Cuyahoga's Board of
Commissioners to audit the election and measure the accuracy, reliability and
usability of the county's new voting machines.
Out of 467 touch-screen machines assigned to 145 precincts that ESI audited,
officials couldn't locate 29 machines after the election, despite days of
searching. And 24 machines that were found had no data on them. "All their
paperwork says (the machines) were deployed to polling locations but we can't
figure out why there's no election data on them," says ESI founder Steve
Hertzberg.
It's possible the machines were sent to polls but never used -- perhaps they
malfunctioned or voter turnout was so low the machines weren't needed. But so
far no explanation has been forthcoming. Cuyahoga County election director
Michael Vu responded to initial questions from Wired News, but did not respond
to follow-up questions about the missing machines and data
Experts say the chaos in Cuyahoga is a bellwether of broader
election-administration problems nationwide.
"It should be a general wake-up call for all states and localities to
make sure they have addressed these problems in their statutes and procedures
to make sure that they don't run into the same problems," says Thad Hall,
a political science professor at the University of Utah who assisted with the
ESI report. "People should be taking all of this very seriously."
Beyond sloppy procedures, the ESI report found technological problems with
the printers installed on the county's 5,000 new Diebold touch-screen machines.
The printers produce the voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, mandated
by a new Ohio law.
The printer problems turned up when the ESI team set out to examine the
accuracy of the touch-screen machines. The team compared four sets of vote data
from a sampling of 145 precincts. The data included electronic votes recorded
on removable memory cards (used to tally the official count); electronic votes
on flash memory inside the touch-screen machines; individual ballots on the
paper-audit trail rolls; and a summary total of those ballots printed at the
end of the paper roll.
Although the majority of the paper rolls were easy to read, 40 rolls
contained ballots that were physically compromised in some way: Rolls were
crumpled accordion-style due to paper jams; ballots were printed atop one
another, making them illegible; rolls were torn and taped. Eighty-seven rolls
were missing entirely.
The compromised ballots and missing paper rolls demonstrate that the paper
trails voting activists spent three years pressuring states to mandate could be
useless in a recount. Per Ohio's recount law, and laws in 14 other states that
mandate paper trails, the paper roll is the official ballot in a recount.
But the law doesn't address what to do when paper records are illegible. An
administrative rule from the secretary of state says the official ballot would
revert to the electronic record if the paper trail were illegible or destroyed,
which, in theory, would get every vote counted.
VerifiedVoting.org's Dill cautions that if just 10 percent of an election's
paper rolls are compromised, the purpose of the paper is defeated, and a door
is once again open for someone to rig an election.
"If someone wanted to fix an election they could program the machine to
produce a certain number of faulty paper ballots so that (officials) had to
count the electronic ones instead," Dill says.
The machines should be designed to shut down if the printer jams or poll
workers load the paper improperly, says Dill.
Dan Tokaji, assistant
professor of law at Ohio State University, says the issue of illegible ballots
and conflicting recount laws clearly weren't well thought out in advance by
Ohio lawmakers.
"It's quite possible we could see litigation over this issue in the
event of a close election," he says, noting that the same problem could
arise in other states. "We know about the problems with paper trails in
Cuyahoga, but in other counties both in and out of Ohio we really haven't done
a careful assessment. So I don't think we know how widespread the problems with
the VVPAT system are."
And unfortunately, he says, most people don't worry about the problems or
fix them until after there's a blowup similar to what occurred in Florida.
Vote discrepancies also turn up in the ESI audit, and voting activists seized on this
aspect of the investigation as evidence that there were problems with Diebold's
software. On about 80 paper rolls, the votes totaled from the individual
ballots didn't match the summary of votes at the end of the roll. In most cases
the count was off by one to five votes, but in some it was off by more than 25.
Here, too, paper jams were the culprit, says Gary Smith, director of
elections in Forsyth County, Georgia, who led the paper count for ESI. Printer
problems led to missing and illegible ballots, causing the final numbers to be
higher than the sum of the individual ballots. When his team printed fresh
paper records from the memory cards, the totals from individual ballots matched
the summaries at the end of the rolls.
The ESI audit also uncovered mismatches between paper-vote totals and the
digital totals from the memory cards, and 13 cases in which the removable
memory cards and the flash memory inside the machines didn't match up.
Diebold said there are innocent explanations for why memory card totals
didn't match flash memory totals. Eleven of the discrepancies were a side
effect of election workers' transference of botched optical-scan votes onto touch-screen
machines. Because they failed to also add the optical-scan votes to the
flash-memory data from those machines, the two sets of data didn't match when
ESI compared them.
The other two discrepancies occurred when poll workers placed memory cards in
the wrong machines, then moved the cards to the correct machines after voters
had already cast a few ballots on the machines -- a switch that did not affect
the voting tally, but seriously complicated the audit afterward. When election
staff gave ESI data for those machines, they were unaware that some votes on
these memory cards were backed up on the flash memory of other machines.
Cuyahoga County election director Vu says his staff has verified Diebold's
conclusions but ESI has not had a chance to independently verify the
explanations. However, all these issues point to the most important finding
from Cuyahoga County, says Hertzberg: it was so difficult for ESI to get
accurate and complete data to conduct its recount.
ESI had been assured by Vu's office that the data ESI was auditing did not
include optical-scan votes, says Hertzberg. In fact, ESI had to request data
from Vu's office six times because it kept getting the wrong data, or data that
was tainted with optical-scan votes.
Vu's staff also had a dozen different versions of the same vote data but no
file-management system or naming conventions to keep track of them or explain
why so many versions existed, says Hertzberg. "So these guys were sitting
there trying to search for which data set to give us and they couldn't figure
it out," he says.
Political scientist Michael Alvarez of the Caltech/MIT Voting Project, who
helped with the ESI report, agrees: Although many people focused on the vote
discrepancies, the fact that ESI found it so difficult to conduct an audit is
the biggest problem, and it doesn't bode well for what could happen in November
or in a close presidential race.
"An independent entity, be they ESI or be they anybody else ... should
be able to walk in and very easily replicate that election outcome,"
Alvarez says. "That's the sort of thing that is what induces voter and
candidate and media confidence in the process."
Vu says his office was overwhelmed with the task of adjusting to new
procedures and equipment. His staff also never anticipated that poll workers
would swap memory cards between machines; they're addressing this issue in poll
worker training for November. "For the most part," he says, "the
majority of the county did relatively well."
Hertzberg worries that things could be worse Nov. 7 because turnout is
expected to be larger than in the primary. Cuyahoga has 1 million registered
voters. Hertzberg urged Vu to develop and practice a manual count procedure
before Election Day, but says there's been no movement.
"It's going to take time," Vu says. "You can't go from having
problems in one election to perfection in the next election." Vu says he
has made some changes for November, but mentions only issues with poll worker
training, pay and recruitment.
The county Board of Elections and Board of Commissioners did recently
appoint The Center for Election
Integrity at Cleveland State University to monitor progress in the
implementation of reforms recommended by the two reports, and the group will
monitor the county's actual conduct during elections.
See Also:
Building a
Better Voting Machine