Privacy Digest

Diebold Admits ATMs Are More Robust Than Voting Machines - Via Slashdot:

An anonymous reader points out a story in the Huffington Post about the status of funding for election voting systems. It contains an interesting section in which Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier (formerly Diebold) acknowledged that less money is spent making an electronic voting machine than on a typical ATM. The ironically named Riggall also notes that security could indeed be improved, but at a higher price than most election administrators would care to pay. Also quoted in the article is Ed Felten, who has recently found some inconsistencies in New Jersey voting machines. From the Post:  read more »

Court Ruling on Voter ID Law May Encourage Tighter State Regulation - Via NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Podcast | PBS:

The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 Monday to uphold an Indiana law requiring voters to show photo identification at polling stations. The National Law Journal's Marcia Coyle examines the impact of the Supreme Court decisions on voters and state regulations.

(Read Original Article - Via NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Podcast | PBS.)

voting ID requirements and the Supreme Court - Via Freedom to Tinker:

Last week, I posted here about voter ID requirements.  There was a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on the same topic.  It seems Indiana was trying to require voters to present ID in order to vote.  Lawsuit.  In the end, the court found that the requirement wasn’t particularly onerous (the New York Times’s article is as good as any for a basic summary, or go straight to the ruling).

Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of hang-wringing on this (see, for example, this New York Times unsigned editorial).  We can expect similar legislation elsewhere now that the Court has made it pretty difficult to challenge these sorts of laws (see, for example, the ongoing battle to pass this sort of legislation in Texas).

As I wrote last time, I’m not particularly opposed to voters being required to present ID.  However, ID needs to be easy to get for anybody who is elgible to vote.   read more »

After Records Reveal E-Voting Glitches, Election Official Jokes She'll Stop Keeping Records - Via Threat Level:

Kathy Dent, the election director in Sarasota County, Florida, was the target of controversy after the 2006 election when more than 18,000 ballots cast on ES&S touch-screen voting machines in her county showed no vote cast in the 13th congressional district race. The so-called undervote rate in that race was five times what is considered normal and resulted in two lawsuits filed by voters and the defeated candidate, Christine Jennings, who lost the congressional seat by fewer than 400 votes.  read more »

How can we require ID for voters? - Via Freedom to Tinker:

Recently, HR 5036 was shot down in Congress.  That bill was to provide “emergency” money to help election administrators who wished to replace paperless voting systems with optically scanned paper ballots (or to add paper-printing attachments to existing electronic voting systems).  While the bill initially received strong bipartisan support, it was opposed at the last minute by the White House.  To the extent that I understand the political subtext of this, the Republicans wanted to attach a Voter ID requirement to the bill, and that gummed up the works.  (HR 5036 isn’t strictly dead, since it still has strong support, but it was originally fast tracked as a “non-controversial” bill, and it is now unlikely to gain the necessary 2/3 majority.)

I’ve been thinking for a while about this whole voter ID problem, and I have to say that I don’t really see a big problem with requiring that voters present ID so they can vote.  This kind of requirement is used in other countries like Mexico and it seems to work just fine.  The real issue is making sure that all people who might want to vote actually have IDs, which is a real problem for the apparently non-trivial number of current voters who lack normal ID cards (and, who we are led to believe, tend to vote in favor of Democrats).  read more »

Georgia Erroneously Purges Eligible Voters - Via ACLU Blog:

In late March, Georgia's Columbus-Muscogee County Elections & Registration Office mailed out upwards of 700 letters informing voters they had become ineligible to vote because they had been convicted of felonies. The problem? A potentially large number of them hadn't been.

As in 47 other states across the nation, Georgia disqualifies otherwise-eligible voters who are convicted of felonies, a practice known as felony disfranchisement. Officially, this practice — which traces its ancestry to post-Civil War attempts by southern states to limit the political participation of newly-enfranchised African-Americans — has led to the disfranchisement of over 5.3 million Americans. In practice, however, its implications are much broader, extending to voters like those in Muscogee County who are erroneously disqualified by elections officials struggling to implement complex disfranchisement policies.  read more »

pesky details with getting a voting system correct - Via Freedom to Tinker:

Today was the last day of early voting in Texas’s primary election. Historically, I have never voted in a primary election. I’ve never felt I identified enough with a particular political party to want to have a say in selecting their candidates. Once I started working on voting security, I discovered that this also allowed me to make a legitimate claim to being “non-partisan.” (While some election officials, political scientists, and others who you might perhaps prefer to be non-partisan do have explicit partisan views, many more make a point of similarly obscuring their partisan preferences like I do.)  read more »

The Cost of E-Voting - Via Threat Level:

One reason election officials around the country have given for purchasing touch-screen voting machines is that they say the systems save money -- both in the cost of printing paper ballots and in storing them after an election. Officials have made this claim, despite the fact that the machines carry a steep price tag (about $3,000 per machine).

So SaveOurVotes (.pdf), a voting integrity group in Maryland, decided to see if the 19,000 touch-screen machines their state purchased really did save money. The results aren't really a surprise -- the machines are wildly more expensive than anyone anticipated. But just how expensive they are makes their analysis mandatory reading for any legislators and state or county budget committees that approve voting equipment purchases.  read more »

NJ Election Discrepancies Worse Than Previously Thought, Contradict Sequoia’s Explanation - Via Freedom to Tinker:

I wrote previously about discrepancies in the vote totals reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey’s presidential primary election, and the incomplete explanation offered by Sequoia, the voting machine vendor. I published copies of the “summary tapes” printed by nine voting machines in Union County that showed discrepancies; all of them were consistent with Sequoia’s explanation of what went wrong.

This week we obtained six new summary tapes, from machines in Bergen and Gloucester counties. Two of these new tapes contradict Sequoia’s explanation and show more serious discrepancies that we saw before.

Before we dig into the details, let’s review some background.  read more »

Ed Felten on the New Jersey Voting Machine Controversy - Via Threat Level: