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Should America Return to Paper Ballots? Part 2

The New York Analysis concludes its study of electronic ballots vs. paper voting.

A study in the Atlantic by Dan Gilmor notes that “Accountability is a crapshoot. In some jurisdictions, voters use machines that create electronic tallies with no ‘paper trail’—that is, no tangible evidence whatsoever that the voter’s choices were honored. A “recount” in such places means asking the machine whether it was right the first time… For reasons that remain unclear, Congress has been largely uninterested in doing what’s needed to make voting safe, secure, and verifiable (perhaps because the existing system is how members got elected)…Barring a national commitment to getting this right, maybe the answer is to change direction entirely. Maybe we should abandon electronic voting systems and do everything on paper, and count by hand. We’d wait longer for results, a lot longer. If it ensured accurate results, though, I’d call that a reasonable trade.

Fox News  reports that Georgia is looking to return to paper ballots. “The most secure elections in the world are conducted with a piece of paper and a pencil,” said Georgia State Rep. Scot Turner. “It allows you to continue into the future to verify the result.”  Turner has proposed a bill that would retire Georgia’s electronic touch-screen voting machines and switch to paper ballots that voters would fill out and then be counted by optical scan machines. The technology has been in use for decades to score standardized tests for grade-school students.”

You should prevent hand practice and indulge in lovemaking with viagra brand online a trusted female. If any of these serious symptoms are noticed then immediate visit to doctor is essential. cialis tadalafil online The best thing about penis enlargement supplements is cost of viagra pills that they also improve overall sexual stamina. Well, it viagra free shipping is all a false. Cyperscoop reasons that “Paper ballots may seem like an antiquated voting practice, but hacking fears are now pushing an increasing number of states toward a return to the basics. State legislatures and election directors are heeding warnings from Washington that hackers may tamper with electronic voting systems in the 2018 midterm elections. On the national level, lawmakers have made several attempts to push legislation aiming to strengthen election cybersecurity through grants to upgrade equipment and to increase cooperation between the federal government and lower jurisdictions. So far, no such legislation has passed either chamber of Congress. Amid all this national attention, a number of states have started to act on their own bolster the integrity of elections they run. With these states, the focus has been on doing away with direct-recording electronic voting machines (DREs) that don’t produce a paper record. Experts and advocates say it might be impossible to create an unhackable system, so the next best thing would be to ensure that a system is fully auditable, so that any tampering would be detected with a review.”

The National Association of Secretaries of State  notes that “Just as we must have contingency plans for floods and all kinds of natural phenomena, we must also be ready to deal with man-made threats. The risks posed by foreign government hackers, cyber criminals and everyday hacktivists are not new to election officials. States and localities are committed to working with national security agencies and other federal partners, including the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to solicit input on threats and risk mitigation in our elections. States are already deploying numerous resources for this election cycle, including extensive testing for cyber threats described by the recent FBI alert, and best practices guidelines produced by the EAC. Additional steps may be taken based upon credible or specific threats that are identified in the run-up to Election Day. Secretaries of State are also part of a DHS Election Infrastructure Cybersecurity Working Group, created for sharing resources, best practices and technical advice. To be clear: The equipment that people vote on is NOT connected to the Internet. Vote counting is NEVER done with systems connected to the Internet, and tabulation systems are not networked. Election systems must be physically secured when not in use, with public accuracy and performance testing that anyone can observe. Post-election audits can help to further guard against deliberate manipulation of the election, as well as unintentional software, hardware or programming issues. Again, there are no documented cases of flawed voting results linked to alleged cyber hacking.”

Of course, there have been calls in some states to allow voting via internet, despite the NASS statement.

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Should America Return to Paper Ballots?

Accurate voting is vital to the American system of government, and an area of bipartisan concern. Yet, according to some critics, a potential threat to the security of balloting has been voluntarily adopted, and there are now calls for a reversal of that process.

The replacement of simple lever machines and even more basic paper ballots has swept across the nation, particularly since 2010. A Stanford study examined the merits of electronic voting: “One of the significant benefits of this new system is the possibility for increased efficiency.  With Electronic Voting Machines voters can submit their votes, and be reasonably confident that their vote will count (namely avoiding the “hanging chad” problem that handicapped the 2000 presidential elections in the United States).  New Electronic Voting Machines can also stop voters from common election faults, such as picking too many or no candidates, also thereby increasing the general effectiveness of voting… technology adds more steps to the process and thus increases the possibility of error with each additional step, all of which are largely unseen by the voter.

“Not only does the technology create more errors in the electronic workings, but the voters can also commit mistakes due to confusion with the user interface. The terminology is confusing, different machines produce different interfaces, and even the audio guides to help the disabled may prove more confusing than helpful.

“With the advent of electronic machine voting also comes the higher possibilities of fraudulent machines and practices. First of all, the technology is ‘black box software,’ meaning that the public is not allowed access into the software that controls the voting machines. Although companies protect their software to protect against fraud (and to beat back competition), this also leaves the public with no idea of how the voting software works. It would be simple for the company to manipulate the software to produce fraudulent results. Also, the vendors who market the machines are in competition with each other, and there is no guarantee that they are producing the machines in the best interest of the voters and the accuracy of the ballots.

“Lastly, vote accuracy is also an issue, because voters have no way of confirming there vote, and there is also no way of conducting a recount with direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting. With DRE, there is no paper trail, no verification, and thus no scrutiny of the processes. Voter anonymity is also a problem. Voters have to provide much of their personal information to the systems for voter verification, and with that comes the problem of keeping voter information safe and keeping voters anonymous.”
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The attraction of electronic devises has been explained by Jesse Emspsak, writing in Live Science:  “With all the vulnerabilities of machines, why not simply use paper ballots, and hand-count them, as some smaller districts do, or even some major democracies…The answer comes down to U.S. election structure, [according to Warren Stewart, communications director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting technologies.] Americans vote on several candidates in each state, and in California and some other states, voters also weigh in on ballot measures…Of course, one could go to paper-based systems and hand-counting, but it would take a lot longer to count the votes. That might not be a bad thing, Stewart said.

But significant unease about the potential for tampering, either by partisan interests within the nation or by hostile nations abroad, exists.

Bruce Schneier  a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School who serves on the advisory board of Verified Voting, recently noted in a Guardian editorial: “Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper. Last year, the Defcon hackers’ conference sponsored a Voting Village. Organizers collected 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines and electronic poll books. By the end of the weekend, conference attendees had found ways to compromise every piece of test equipment: to load malicious software, compromise vote tallies and audit logs, or cause equipment to fail. It’s important to understand that these were not well-funded nation-state attackers. These were not even academics who had been studying the problem for weeks. These were bored hackers, with no experience with voting machines, playing around between parties one weekend.”

The Report Concludes Tomorrow.

Illustration by Pixabay

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Honest Balloting Issues Will Affect 2016 Campaign

A small taste of the expected honest balloting controversy that will affect the 2016 elections has already occurred in Baltimore.

According to True the Vote  a federal lawsuit has been filed against the Baltimore and Maryland Boards of Elections, alleging  that those who voted in Baltimore City “suffered injury” because of  ‘process-based irregularities.’ Specifics include charges that 1,000 more votes were counted than the number of verified and qualified voters, and 1,188 provisional ballots were counted “without verifying whether the voters were in fact authorized to vote,” and there were also 465 uncounted provisional ballots.

The Baltimore Sun reports that the ballots were given to people who showed up to vote but whose names were not on the registered voters list for the primary election at the precincts in question. The ballots are supposed to be set aside so officials can determine later if the voter was eligible. The Sun noted that “These voters would not appear on the check-in list of those registered. State officials believe that in some cases, these ballots were not set aside but were scanned into the total.”

The problems of inaccurate voter registration rolls and voting by those not authorized to do so is  a nationwide problem.

The poor condition of voter registration rolls across the U.S. is also illustrated by what the Daily Signal calls the “Zombie Voter” problem, where numerous votes are cast in the names of individuals who have died. According to the publication, “An investigation by California’s CBSLA2 and KCAL9 found that hundreds of deceased persons are still on voter registration rolls in the [L.A.] area, and that many of these names have been voting for years in Los Angeles.”

Opposition, mainly by Progressives to common-sense measures to update and verify voter registration rolls, enact voter identification requirements, and insure that only U.S. citizens cast ballots may result in hotly contested election results.

On the West Coast, reports the LA Times, some Democrats have filed a lawsuit calling for voter registration to be extended right up until election day, which would provide almost no time to investigate the eligibility of voters.

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In New York City, a majority of the NY City Council—a solidly Democrat body– is in favor of a measure to give immigrants, legal and illegal, the right to vote. That would swell the voter rolls by 20%.

In Kansas, Judge Julie A. Robinson has ruled that demanding those seeking to vote provide proof of citizenship when they register at motor vehicle bureaus provides an inappropriate burden. Robinson states that election officials should merely rely on the word of those seeking to register.

The effort to prevent challenges to non-citizen voting is supported predominantly by Democrats, and, reports National Review, groups such as the League of Women Voters and the NAACP.

Fox News Latino  found that half a million drivers’ licenses to illegal have been issued in California recently.  Without adequate challenges to verify citizenship, it is believed that many of those have also registered to vote.

In some locales, internet voting has been approved. This has raised concerns over the possibility of fraud as well as pressure on voters who, outside of the scrutiny of polling sites, may be compelled to vote in a specific manner by others. Examples of hacking into voting systems has been observed in the U.S., the Philippines, Turkey, and Mexico.

A National legislative attempt to provide a more accurate vote has been ignored by many jurisdictions. The Help America Vote Act  (HAVA)  was passed by Congress in 2002 to make sweeping reforms to the nation’s voting process. It created new mandatory minimum standards. HAVA also established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to assist the states regarding compliance, and to distribute funds for that purpose. HAVA requires that the states implement programs and procedures concerning provisional voting, voting information, updated equipment, statewide voter registration databases, voter identification procedures, and administrative complaint procedures.