Voting and Security

Schneier is posting on Voting and Security. If you have interest in the topic his posts are very informative. He links to various articles on the topics and has related commentary.
First there is Voting Technology and Security.

Last week in Florida's 13th Congressional district, the victory margin was only 386 votes out of 153,000. There'll be a mandatory lawyered-up recount, but it won't include the almost 18,000 votes that seem to have disappeared. The electronic voting machines didn't include them in their final tallies, and there's no backup to use for the recount. The district will pick a winner to send to Washington, but it won't be because they are sure the majority voted for him. Maybe the majority did, and maybe it didn't. There's no way to know.

Electronic voting machines represent a grave threat to fair and accurate elections, a threat that every American -- Republican, Democrat or independent -- should be concerned about. Because they're computer-based, the deliberate or accidental actions of a few can swing an entire election. The solution: Paper ballots, which can be verified by voters and recounted if necessary.

I disagree with the "if necessary" point. There should be legislative requirements for a certain percentage of hand counts from randomly selected polling places for audit purposes. Randomness ensures those who are trying to cheat don't know if they will be audited and increases their risk of being caught. But, he is talking about the technology and not the procedures.

Much of our election security is based on "security by competing interests." Every step, with the exception of voters completing their single anonymous ballots, is witnessed by someone from each major party; this ensures that any partisan shenanigans -- or even honest mistakes -- will be caught by the other observers. This system isn't perfect, but it's worked pretty well for a couple hundred years.

Electronic voting is like an iceberg; the real threats are below the waterline where you can't see them. Paperless electronic voting machines bypass that security process, allowing a small group of people -- or even a single hacker -- to affect an election. The problem is software -- programs that are hidden from view and cannot be verified by a team of Republican and Democrat election judges, programs that can drastically change the final tallies. And because all that's left at the end of the day are those electronic tallies, there's no way to verify the results or to perform a recount. Recounts are important.

I love that "security by competing interests" statement. Excellent perspective. Unfortunately, the elections officials are in some cases elected officials or are appointed. I think that's a big flaw in the whole scheme, but not one that can't be procedurally neutralized.

Go read the rest.

Then there is More on Electronic Voting Machines.

This year I wrote an essay for Forbes.com. It's really nothing that I, and others, haven't already said previously.

Florida 13 is turning out to be a bigger problem than I described:

The Democrat, Christine Jennings, lost to her Republican opponent, Vern Buchanan, by just 373 votes out of a total 237,861 cast -­ one of the closest House races in the nation. More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, or 13 percent of those who went to the polls Tuesday, did not seem to vote in the Congressional race when they cast ballots, a discrepancy that Kathy Dent, the county elections supervisor, said she could not explain.

In comparison, only 2 percent of voters in one neighboring county within the same House district and 5 percent in another skipped the Congressional race, according to The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota. And many of those who did not seem to cast a vote in the House race did vote in more obscure races, like for the hospital board.

And the absentee ballots collected for the same race show only a 2.5% difference in the number of voters that voted for candidates in other races but not for Congress.

There'll be a recount, and with that close a margin it's pretty random who will eventually win. But because so many votes were not recorded -- and I don't see how anyone who has any understanding of statistics can look at this data and not conclude that votes were not recorded -- we'll never know who should really win this district.

This article outlines the problem spots in Florida and Pennsylvania. He links articles and blogs referring to the issues.

Next is The Inherent Inaccuracy of Voting. This one points out some things that I think the public in general doesn't understand and has highly unrealistic views of.

In a New York Times op-ed, New York University sociology professor Dalton Conley points out that vote counting is inherently inaccurate:

The rub in these cases is that we could count and recount, we could examine every ballot four times over and we'd get -- you guessed it -- four different results. That's the nature of large numbers -- there is inherent measurement error. We'd like to think that there is a "true" answer out there, even if that answer is decided by a single vote. We so desire the certainty of thinking that there is an objective truth in elections and that a fair process will reveal it.

But even in an absolutely clean recount, there is not always a sure answer. Ever count out a large jar of pennies? And then do it again? And then have a friend do it? Do you always converge on a single number? Or do you usually just average the various results you come to? If you are like me, you probably settle on an average. The underlying notion is that each election, like those recounts of the penny jar, is more like a poll of some underlying voting population.

He's right, but it's more complicated than that.

There are two basic types of voting errors: random errors and systemic errors. Random errors are just that, random. Votes intended for A that mistakenly go to B are just as likely as votes intended for B that mistakenly go to A. This is why, traditionally, recounts in close elections are unlikely to change things. The recount will find the few percent of the errors in each direction, and they'll cancel each other out. But in a very close election, a careful recount will yield a more accurate -- but almost certainly not perfectly accurate -- result.

Systemic errors are more important, because they will cause votes intended for A to go to B at a different rate than the reverse. Those can make a dramatic difference in an election, because they can easily shift thousands of votes from A to B without any counterbalancing shift from B to A. These errors can either be a particular problem in the system -- a badly designed ballot, for example -- or a random error that only occurs in precincts where A has more supporters than B.

The errors aren't a security issue necessarily. Mostly these errors are procedural and not intentional. The user interface for many of the ballots are the cause in many places. People don't take time to understand the ballot, and many times ballots are just poorly laid out. That's a reason why electronic voting user interfaces need to be designed by someone that knows how and the paper ballot output to ensure that the person can verify they didn't screw up.

Lastly there is The Need for Professional Election Officials.

In the U.S., elections are run by an army of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. These are both Republicans and Democrats, and the idea is that the one group watches the other: security by competing interests. But at the top are state-elected or -appointed officials, and many election shenanigans in the past several years have been perpetrated by them.

In yet another New York Times op-ed, Loyola Law School professor Richard Hansen argues for professional, non-partisan election officials:

The United States should join the rest of the world's advanced democracies and put nonpartisan professionals in charge. We need officials whose ultimate allegiance is to the fairness, integrity and professionalism of the election process, not to helping one party or the other gain political advantage. We don't need disputes like the current one in Florida being resolved by party hacks.

[...]

To improve the chances that states will choose an independent and competent chief elections officer, states should enact laws making that officer a long-term gubernatorial appointee who takes office only upon confirmation by a 75 percent vote of the legislature -- a supermajority requirement that would ensure that a candidate has true bipartisan support. Nonpartisanship in election administration is no dream. It is how Canada and Australia run their national elections.

To me, this is easier said than done. Where are these hundreds of thousands of disinterested election officials going to come from? And how do we ensure that they're disinterested and fair, and not just partisans in disguise? I actually like security by competing interests.

But I do like his idea of a supermajority-confirmed chief elections officer for each state. And at least he's starting the debate about better election procedures in the U.S.

I agree with his doubts as to finding or hiring professional elections officials. I don't see how you could find a disinterested party unless they aren't allowed to vote and they are under huge and continual scrutiny. I suppose you could always do the process by a committee, but that would be dreadfully inefficient. Not to mention managing the process to eliminate collusion.

I skipped the comments section. Much of the time it wanders off into partisan bickering, which gets no where. You do get periodic inciteful discussions, but it's frankly pretty difficult to ferret out.