Problems With E-Slate and Straight-Party Vote

[TexasLawyer]

Hi y'all--

I have just started researching the problems associated with straight-party voting in Harris County. I would be interested if anyone could share additional information with me on this topic.

My neighbor, a very solid and trustworthy person, told me that she tried to vote a straight Democratic ticket but each time she was prepared to cast her "ballot", her presidential selection was left unmarked. She had to go back several times and hit the Kerry button in order for the ballot to indicate that she had chosen someone in the presidential race. She doesn't know if her vote ultimately was counted, since she may have over-voted or under-voted depending on the way in which the machines were programmed a simultaneous selection of Kerry and a straight-party vote. Good question!

I did a google search for Harris County election problems and came up with this letter sent recently from EFF, an election monitoring organization, to Beverly Kaufman, the Harris County Clerk responsible for overseeing elections here in Harris County. The letter describes just some of the reports that were phoned in to the Election Protection Incident Reporting System :


https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapCounty&state=Texas&county=Harris&cat=ALL&tab=ALL&pagetop=200

As you might guess, these complaints are just a very small subset of the universe of problems that people encountered in the Nov. election.

There have also been reports of straight-party voting problems with e-slates in other Texas counties: Check out http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/travis.asp

As per the letter below, the EFF organization just wants Harris County to check its machines and fix them if they are broken. But I think that the causes of this problem should be investigated, especially since I have found no reports of voters alleging that they were trying to vote a straight Repub ticket and that they encountered a similar problem.

Thanks for taking a look.

Katie aka TexasLawyer






http://www.eff.org/e-vote/investigate/HarrisTX.pdf

Electronic Frontier Foundation
November 17, 2004
Via Federal Express Overnight Delivery

Beverly Kaufman
Harris County Clerk
Attn: Elections Division
1001 Preston, 4th floor
Houston, TX 77002
Dear Ms. Kaufman

The Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF") and the Verified Voting Foundation are two of the leading nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest organizations dedicated to ensuring the integrity of election systems. We have specific expertise in direct recording
electronic ("DRE") electronic voting systems such as the system used in Harris County. We write because of the large number of machine-related problems reported to us through the Election Protection Coalition and elsewhere.

The problems that are of specific interest to us are those where voters reportedly attempted to vote for one candidate and the machine misrecorded or attempted to misrecord their vote for another
candidate. We received a large number of reports of this occurring in multiple precincts in Harris County, more than nearly any other jurisdiction in the nation. Reports are still being entered into our system. The reports included the following specific precinct examples, as well as a number of reports that did not include precinct-specific
information:

Rolling Isaac Elementary: Voters reported that #2 and # 4 machines did
not properly reflect a party-line ballot and inconsistently recorded votes for president.

Harris County Court House, Houston: Three of six machines reportedly
displayed selections for George Bush in the presidential race even though voters attempted to vote Democratic.
.
Scenic Woods Church of Christ: Machines did not record votes for
president when party-line votes were cast.
.
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 USA
[phone] (v) [phone] (f) www.eff.org

Beverly Kaufman
November 17, 2004
Page 2

Doeme lntermediate School, Spring: Presidential vote did not appear to
register when voters voted a straight party line.
.
Cthaise on Pech Road, Katy: Voter attempted to choose John Kerry for
president, but when she checked her ballot, George Bush was instead
selected. This happened more than once, but the voter was finally able to get the machine to register a vote for Kerry.
.
0566-1, Houston: Voters attempted to vote a straight Democratic, but
machines did not register a vote for president.

Given this troubling record, we urge you to seek an immediate, independent review of your electronic voting machines in their current post-election state. As you may know, the federal Election Assistance Commission 1, the Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights/Brennan Center2, as well as numerous other governmental and nongovernmental organizations have recommended independent testing of election systems with public discussion of the results.

To that end, EFF and Verified Voting Foundation otTer you assistance in both locating and securing appropriate independent technical assistance and in navigating any legal or
other issues that may arise. EFF and Verified Voting Foundation have significant and longstanding relationships with the leading security experts who have been investigating electronic voting machine issues
nationwide and we have been in contact with them to see if they would be interested in assisting your county with an independent review of its voting system.

Verified Voting Foundation was founded by Stanford Professor David Dill. Other advisors include nationally recognized electronic voting experts Professor A viel Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, Professor Dan Wallach of Rice University, Professor Doug Jones of the University of Iowa, Professor Edward Felten of Princeton University, and prominent computer security researcher Bruce Schneier. Many of these individuals may be willing to assist you in your efforts and we can help facilitate contact with them.


1 h!ill://www.eac.2ov/bo/dres.aso ("Rely as little on the vendor as possible; look for outside IT expertise if it is not available in house. Have either election staff or independent consultants design and run tests. . . Conduct post-election logic and accuracy testing of machines. Conduct a post-election audit to reconcile all records,
especially the number of voters and the number of votes cast. Conduct a public postelection "debriefing" to address any concerns related to the voting system.")

2 htt ://www.brennancenter.or ro ams/dem vr hava votin s stems.html ("Elections officials should hire a well-qualified, independent security team to examine the potential for operational failures of and malicious attacks against the jurisdiction's DRE voting
system").

Beverly Kaufman
November 17, 2004
Page 3

EFF has also been active in assisting independent security researchers who are currently bidding to assist the State of California with its planned source code review and security
testing of its voting systems. We understand the often complex contractual and other issues that can arise with such efforts and have spent a significant amount of time reviewing vendor contracts and considering how best to balance the public's interest in
the outcome of any such investigations with the claims of proprietary and trade secret rights that have been made by some vendors. To that end, we have secured assistance from some of the nations leading law firms and are confident that those attorneys would be willing to assist you.

We strongly urge you to engage in independent testing and review of the electronic voting system in your county. We believe that this is one of the most important things that local election officials can do to ensure that these technologies, upon which they have spent significant amount of taxpayer money, are actually working as advertised. Independent testing will give you the information and facts you need to demand improvements and repairs to your systems, as the State of Maryland did after the two independent reports it commissioned, or to take the path followed by Solano County,
California, and end your use of the machines altogether.
But almost as importantly, we believe that independent testing with full publication of results is the first step to building public confidence in our electoral systems.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance to you in this endeavor.

Yours sincerely,
c:::::~~:~~=::?==
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Will Doherty
Verified Voting Foundation

[Pirate Smile]

1. Did you post this under 2004 Election results? If not, please do.

[TexasLawyer]

2. Will do n/t

[PDittie]

3. Posted this in another thread:

T.L.:

I don't have contact information for them, but Pokey Anderson of the River Oaks Area Democratic Women and Rice University Professor Dan Wallach are hot on the case.

You might be able to reach them through the ROADWomen's website:

http://www.roadwomen.com

or Dalia Stokes at 713-522-2224 (her number comes from the Harris County Democratic Party's website): http://www.hcdp.org

[muse]

6. Glad to hear someone is on this.

It's been disheartening to me to hear anecdotal stories about the Harris County problems, but not hear any hard facts or news of any follow up. Thanks to everyone for posting this info. I'm glad to hear some of you are on this and know more about this than I do. You begin to feel like this is all being swept under the carpet.

[merci_me]

4. A question

would a person have cast a straight Dem ticket and only Kerry was not cast? If so, wouldn't there have been an "undervote" recorded?

If a person cast a straight Dem ticket and it didn't record the whole thing, couldn't this have caused a problem in the Hubert Vo race, if straight Dem votes didn't register?

[TexasLawyer]

5. The straight-party voting problem

may have affected races other than the presidential election. I don't know enough about the problem to say. But if it is true that whole ballots were wiped out due to not voting for amendments, and if this problem affected Dems disproportionately, then Hubert's race definitely could have been compromised. It sure bears looking into.