Take A Step Back-- And Not Just In Iowa

Apparently, there's only one way to insure legitimate elections-- paper ballots. Yesterday, after an Iowa caucus that delegitimized itself technologically, NY Times reporter Kevin Roose seems to have come to the same conclusion. A lot of people have. He suggested that "Americans should vote by etching our preferred candidate’s name into a stone tablet with a hammer and chisel. Or maybe by dropping pebbles into a series of urns, as the ancient Greeks did. Or possibly just by voting the way we voted for much of the 20th century, on punch-card machines that spit out paper ballots to be hand-counted by election workers, with zero iPhones in sight."

I would still rather see a good old fashioned, hand-counted paper ballot with no machines of any kind. Roose seems to agree. "Basically," he wrote, "we should be begging for the most analog election technology possible. Because what happened on Monday night-- a long and confusing delay in vote counting, due in part to a mobile app that was hastily designed and inadequately tested before being deployed in one of America’s most important elections-- was an inexcusable failure. It caused distress and confusion, set off innumerable conspiracy theories, and started the 2020 election season by undermining trust in the democratic process. And all because Iowa Democrats wanted a new app."

The app, whose name was kept secret by Democratic officials, was compared to a “fancy calculator” that was supposed to help Iowa caucus chairs send their results to the state Democratic Party. But as my colleagues reported, it posed problems for caucus precinct chairs all day.

Some chairs weren’t able to use it at all. Others had connectivity issues, or simply didn’t know how to work the app, and were forced to endure long hold times on a phone hotline instead.

There is no indication that any of these technical issues changed the results of the caucuses, or that any systems were hacked or compromised. And there were nontechnical issues that may have added to the chaos, such as new rules and worksheets that were designed to simplify the caucus process but seemed mostly to have sown confusion.

Regardless, the damage was done. The hours spent waiting for overdue results created an information vacuum, which was quickly filled by conspiracy theorists. By nightfall, liberals and conservatives alike were tossing around allegations of vote tampering and election rigging, and casting doubt over the legitimacy of the caucuses.

Democrats quickly began blaming Shadow, the tech start-up that built the app, and Acronym, a Democratic digital strategy operation that invested in Shadow. These firms do deserve scrutiny, not least because it appears that they neglected to quickly respond when reports of user issues began surfacing on Monday.

(Late Monday, Acronym put out a statement, saying that it did not provide technology to the Iowa Democratic Party and that it was merely an investor in Shadow.)

But Democrats should also blame their party’s leadership for entrusting such an important process to new technology in the first place-- not just in Iowa but in places like Nevada, where Democrats are reportedly planning to use a similar mobile app to tally votes in that state’s caucuses this month.

It’s enough to make you wonder: Have these party officials ever been to a polling site or a caucus venue? They are not pristine WeWorks with blazing fast internet connections and an army of Geek Squad workers on call. They are mostly high school gyms, nursing homes and church basements with cinder-block walls and horrible cellphone service. The people who work at them are volunteers, and many are-- how can I put this delicately?-- members of the generation that still refers to the TV remote as “the clicker.”

Using a proprietary app to report vote totals is the kind of thing that sounds simple on a start-up’s whiteboard but utterly falls apart in a chaotic real-world environment, where connections drop, phones malfunction and poorly tested apps strain under a surge of traffic. Add an army of frenzied poll workers, impatient voters and twitchy news media, and you might as well have asked the caucus workers to whip up their own JavaScript.

I’m not opposed to technology in political campaigning. Want to use Facebook ads to drum up donors? Go for it. Want to put your voter database on the blockchain? Be my guest.

But when it comes to the actual business of registering and counting people’s votes, many of the smartest tech experts I know fiercely oppose high-tech solutions, like “paperless” digital voting machines and mobile voting apps. After all, every piece of technology involved in the voting process is a possible point of failure. And the larger and more interconnected the technical system, the more vulnerable it is to an attack.

“Many of the leading opponents of paperless voting machines were, and still are, computer scientists, because we understand the vulnerability of voting equipment in a way most election officials don’t,” said Barbara Simons, a computer scientist and board chair of Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit, in an interview with The Atlantic in 2017.

In Iowa, there is a silver lining: The caucus system doesn’t use voting machines at all, and its public, open-air nature means that it is less susceptible to tampering than a secret ballot. In addition, state officials this year required caucusgoers to fill out paper “presidential preference cards,” which could be used in case of a recount. So despite the delays, there is at least some certainty that the results will be accurate when they are finally announced.

And it may be too close to November’s elections to overhaul state election technology, or to institute the kind of much-needed election security reforms that have been repeatedly proposed by Democrats (and blocked by Republicans) since 2016.

So unless something changes, get used to the era of the voting day software glitch. Because we’ve invited tech into our elections, whether or not it’s up for the task.

As I was putting this post together, the Iowa Democratic Party started releasing caucus results. I'm shutting down all my electronic and starting away from Twitter, which is probably exploding-- especially from the people I follow. I mean Bernie took the most votes, but the Democratic Party awarded Mayo the most delegates? That's going to go over well. Biden had half as many voters as Bernie-- 28,220 in the first release to Biden's 14,176-- and yet Bernie gets 338 delegates to Biden's 210. This is all pretty cockeyed... and delegitimizing. Let me know if you make sense out of this:

Democracy? Paper Ballots

On Thursday the non-partisan Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, condemned Señor Trumpanzee’s latest statements promoting false claims of widespread vote fraud— but not the real widespread vote fraud Trump and the Kremlin engaged in. Instead of talking about what the Russians were up to, Trump-- at event in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia,  claimed that in many places, such as California, individuals cast multiple votes, once again claiming that there are "millions and millions of people" engaged in vote fraud. The committee’s response:

President Trump's false and baseless claims that millions of people vote fraudulently in our country not only damage the standing of our democracy across the globe, they incentivize officials to propose voter suppression policies intended to impair the rights of African American, Latino and other minority voters. These reckless claims also damage the integrity of our electoral process in the midst of a midterm election cycle now underway. As the midterm election cycle continues, we will remain vigilant in ensuring that officials do not use the President's false claims as a basis to suppress the rights of voters.

The committee is also pointed out that Señor T’s statements come more than 2 months after he was forced to sign an executive order dismantling his and Kobach’s failed Election Integrity Commission.

Is democracy a lost cause now that Russia has managed to put Trump into the Oval Office? Gee, I hope not. I bet you do too ("you" meaning DWT readers; I know lots of other people don’t care one way or the other; kakistocracy is just fine with them). I’m more certain than ever that paper ballots are the way to go to save our system of government. That video above was published by the New York Times-- Alex Halderman, University of Michigan Computer Science Professor and Verified Voting Technology Fellow, successfully demonstrating how vulnerable American voting machines are. Marian K. Schneider, president of Verified Voting explains the reason for the video: "We want people to understand in a visual way how something like this might happen. Although it is only a risk and not a certainty that something like this could occur, we need to be prepared and able to recover. These machines don’t allow us to do that. It’s time we prepare to monitor, detect, respond and recover from any potential attacks that undermine the democracy." If Haldermnan could do it, the Kremlin could do it too... and I have no doubt that they did.

As Halderman says in the clip, "All cyber security experts who have given electronic voting machines any thought agree, these machines have got to go. Paper plus audits; all elections should be done this way." The clip (above)-- which I urge you to watch and send to your friends and colleagues-- shows why using paper ballots or having a voter-verified paper trail and implementing widespread, statistically sound audits like RLA’s is needed to verify our vote. Maybe the Russians already have worse candidates in mind after Trump... well, not worse, but just as bad.

A caveat… there will always be determined crooks-- I mean it’s politics and look what kind of people that vocation tends to attract-- who will find ways to cheat. But there are few people, even in politics, as low as Russians. I bet if you sniff around her family tree, you find that Wasserman Schultz was Russian too. Tim Canova: "After our 2016 run against Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her corrupt political machine, a number of election integrity experts expressed serious concerns about the official results. Rather than ignoring their research, I decided to try to verify the vote by inspecting the ballots under Florida’s public records law.

"All too often, election frauds are swept under the rug, especially when it’s establishment Democrats cheating progressive and grassroots Democrats. We saw this happen in state after state where Bernie Sanders and his campaign were cheated. In New York City alone, more than 200,000 citizens were purged from the voting rolls in the days prior to New York’s 2016 presidential primary. The New York City Board of Elections admitted to all this, and yet there’s been no real punishment for the massive fraud.

"I was determined to shine a light on any corruption that may have rigged my own election results against Wasserman Schultz. I felt that I owed nothing less to the thousands of supporters who stepped up to make donations and volunteer their time to my campaign. So, when Dr. Brenda Snipes, the Broward Supervisor of Elections stonewalled our public records request, I filed a lawsuit last June to enforce our rights.

"Incredibly, while the lawsuit was pending, the Supervisor destroyed all of our paper ballots in violation of federal law!" Another video:

Today Progressive States Network devotes its e-newsletter to "Election Integrity," and reports a dramatic swing back to paper ballots

Did you know that this November a majority of U.S. voters will use paper ballots?

by Ken

The Progressive States Network puts out a twice-weekly e-mail newsletter, which

chronicles the victories and setbacks of the progressive movements in America's states; shine a light on the best practices and the worst schemes; and help legislators, activists, and journalists across the country connect what is happening in their own backyard and across the country.

Today's edition is likely to be of interest to a lot of DWT readers concerned about the growing threat of election-stealing. It's devoted entirely to the broad subject: Election Integrity – How We Lost It and How States are Getting It Back, also the title of Christian Smith-Socaris's lead article. In addition, there are articles on:

* Protecting Ballot Integrity

* Post-Election Audits That Work

* Stopping the Privatization of Elections

Along the way imagine my surprise to learn, for example, that:

(a) The writers consider paper ballots "the only true secure option," judging the problems with VVPATs (electronic voting machines with “voter verified paper audit trails”) too serious to be solvable; and --

(b) Instead of moving toward fancier and fancier electronic equipment, as everyone assumed would be the case with reforms paid for in part by the Help America Vote Act, the country is actually moving back to paper ballots.

This November, for the first time, a majority of voters in the country will cast a paper ballot on election day and just 36% will use electronic machines, marking movement in the direction of more secure paper-based elections. At least one state is also trying to recover funds spent on problem plagued machines, contending that machine companies have not fulfilled their contractual obligations to supply reliable voting equipment. Diebold, the most prominent manufacturer of voting systems has changed the name of its voting technology subsidiary so that voting machine problems don’t effect the reputation of the entire company.

Clearly the move away from electronic voting machines is a tremendous victory for voters and a boon for fair elections. However, other clear threats to the integrity of our elections remain. The controversy over electronic voting machines motivated many to look more closely at the safeguards that protect our election systems from fraud and manipulation, and what has been found is troubling. Paper ballots are clearly not enough to make our elections secure; we also need a reliable way to verify election results. Recognition of this fact has moved the election integrity debate forward into two additional areas: post-election audits and publicly controlled elections.

If you go to the above link to view this issue of Stateside Dispatch, you can also sign up to receive it regularly.

#