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http://www.gentrylange.com/absentee_statement.html>
Statement Against Absentee Ballots and Diebold TSX Touch Screen Voting Machines
by Gentry Lange
The proposal to move King County to a mixed system of vote by mail (VBM) and Diebold TSX Touch Screen Voting machines deserves rejection.
For hundreds of years citizens of the United States have voted in public, and the votes have been counted in public, by the public. The proposal before the King County Council will fundamentally alter that here in King County. We will be voting in private, and the votes will be counted by private hands using private software, with only the illusion that it remains a public process.
The voting machines in King County, with software already controlled by corporate hands, namely Diebold Election Systems, still have a paper ballot associated with that system... useful in hand recounts. But moving to vote by mail undermines the security of the paper ballots, and removes any real ability to audit the system. Absentee ballots, rather than correcting the software ownership problem I highlighted in my campaign for King County Executive, simply make matters worse by undermining the security of the paper ballot. For the record, if you are trying to avoid the machines by using absentee ballots, absentee ballots are fed into Diebold counting machines anyway. This is exactly what the hand recount in 2004 should have called into question, something that seemed to slip unnoticed by the public and the media. Specifically the hand count overturned two machine counts.
Absentee ballots are far from a panacea to our voting problems. Absentee ballots undermine ballot secrecy, ballot security, and in off-year elections in large counties like King County, all absentee systems will actually increase the costs of running elections. The cost increase and security risks are ironic because the system is being sold as being a "cost saving" measure that will help to run more "error free" elections. There are others who are working to uncover all of these costs, however the list includes printing and increased litigation. Just Google "absentee ballots" and "problems" and you will get over half a million results, three hundred or more of which will be from recent news.
To illustrate some of the problems with absentee ballots here in Washington one need go no further back in time than to the 2004 Governor's race. Most glaringly, Andy Stephenson, well known voting activist and former candidate for Washington's Secretary of State and Larry Phillips, King County Council Member, as well as many other legal voters, had their ballots legally disenfranchised through signature verification problems. These problems were well documented by the Seattle Times. Has this problem suddenly and magically been corrected, or will the numbers of disenfranchised voters simply grow larger as more signatures are kicked back with more people voting on this absentee ballot system? Someone should ask Larry Phillips, considering his was one of the votes kicked on signature during the governor's race, yet amazingly he now supports the move to a forced absentee ballot system. New litigation is already in the courts regarding non-matching registration cards.
Rick Anderson, reported in April of last year in the Seattle Weekly, regarding the Governor's race and subsequent recount:
"...95 likely valid votes will not be counted, because they were temporarily lost, and 99 invalid votes, illegally cast by convicted state felons, have been counted. That and a litany of other deficiencies in King County's democratic process are the continuation of three years of elections-department breakdowns under the watch of Democratic King County Executive Ron Sims, and it's far from over."
Rick Anderson was right, it was far from over. It is still far from over. The reality is that the post office routinely and regularly misplaces, misdirects, or just flat out loses mail. And even a 99% delivery rate would mean close elections could easily be won or lost based on ballots lost in the mail. I fear the USPS has a greater loss rate than this judging by the amount of mail that is delivered to my address for people that do not live with me. How much mail do YOU get that should not have been delivered to your address?
Just imagine if the banking industry tried to get away with what is being proposed here in King County. Would anyone accept it? Would you trust the US post office with all your cash deposits? My guess is that most of you would not because it is a well known rule that you should not send cash through the United States mail. Well I, for one, think that you should be at least as concerned about the security of your voting system as you are about your banking system.
Rick Anderson continues in the same article to ask:
How can Logan claim he's correcting a system that's still breaking down? The other day, it was the discovery of 95 uncounted ballots in storage bins, which will not be counted unless a court rules otherwise, Logan tells me. The discovery also led to a concession that one ballot count, his office's final Mail Ballot Report, was flat wrong. That exposed another flaw in the tabulation process: Rather than tally absentee ballots when they arrive at the elections office, so the number can later be inventoried, the county based its bottom line on those eventually counted, in essence, the number of ballots it could find in the office.
The problem highlighted here is that the actual number of returned ballots can never be known. There is no real feedback loop. When I go to a polling place I sign in, then I vote in private, in a booth or behind a curtain, and then I deposit my ballot in the ballot box. It is not just the secret ballot that is secret--the whole process is made secret when it is at a polling place and you vote privately. Voting at the kitchen table invalidates the protections that make a secret ballot secret.
At the end of the day the number of ballots should match the poll books, and therein lies a good feedback loop for auditing the system. But when I vote by mail, none of this is necessarily true. If somewhere between my mailbox and the ballot box that ballot is lost, stolen, misplaced, or replaced by malicious intent, I will probably never know. So sure the county can base its bottom line number on the number of ballots that eventually show up, but this is simply not a trustworthy number by which to judge the accuracy of the system.
Returning to the banking metaphor, I think we can all agree that sending cash through the mail is a very bad idea, but there is a deeper problem here, and that is this company called PSI, Group Inc. PSI is being handed the keys to the kingdom, because they get to "sort" all the incoming ballots.
When you hand over your absentee ballots to a private company for "sorting", there is no longer any way to actually audit the system. The banking metaphor makes it easy to understand why this should concern the average voter. Imagine if this was a banking system, and I am a bank teller. All day long I take deposits, but instead of counting the till at the end of my shift I just dump all the money, deposit slips, and receipts into a bag and give it away to a private company that sorts all the days deposits into 10s 20s, 100s, and puts the receipts in order, and credit card slips in order, because for some reason they have "sorting" expertise. After they "sort" the money and receipts the company gives it back to me, the bank teller. Should I just trust that this private company didn't pocket some of the money? What if there were no deposit slips, or receipts? Just cash. Because this is really quite similar to the system we now use for absentee ballots here in King County.
So to continue, as the bank teller, once I get the money back from this private sorting company, I then run the deposits through a bill counter. The bill counter counts the money, and says there's 10 thousand dollars. Then when "audited", I run it back through the machines, and low and behold the machines worked perfectly, right?
However, the audit was a sham wasn't it? Because before the first ballot was counted, the chain of custody of the bag was broken, and so I don't know if I gave that company 10k or 20k or 100k, do I? No, I don't. I just have to trust this company, right?
Then a customer comes to me and says, "Your auditing procedure invites corruption, and your recount is a total smoke and mirrors show to convince me that the machines counting the money are working properly." To which I reply, "But even when I hand count the money the machines are correct."
See the logical problem here?
Voter suppression in this system becomes child's play, and targeting return addresses and zip codes according to voting patterns is truly a simple task. If a private company physically in control of millions of ballots, wanted to commit any nefarious deeds they would have all the opportunity to commit the act, in private, without any oversight, and the recount would not catch this.
With a combined system where the corporations get to control the counting machines and the physical ballots, you no longer can call the system a democracy. It more properly might be called, "Corptocracy", government by and for corporation. But certainly not Democracy, government by and for the people.
Absentee ballots are totally insecure, hand counts do not matter, and the machines themselves are tragically easy to manipulate. Depositing your vote into the mail, without record, and multiple points of vulnerability that undermine both the secrecy of your vote and the security of your vote, is not a good system. To reiterate, we do not trust sending money through the mail. My question is, "Why do people seem to care so much less about the security of their vote?"
This is not just outsourcing the system to "experts"; rather, it is removing the system from public scrutiny.
Next, one might ask, if unscrupulous individuals had access to the system, what would they look like? Well they might look very much like Jeffrey Dean and John Elders, two felons with interesting connections to King County's private voting service contractors. Jeff was hired to program a multi-million dollar voter registration database, and John Elder began work printing and sorting ballots. Here's the most relevant info from the original story:
While in prison, Jeffrey Dean met and became friends with John Elder, who did five years for cocaine trafficking. At the time of this writing <2003>, Elder is still on Diebold's payroll; in fact, he manages a division and oversees the printing of both ballots and punch cards for several states. Punch cards, remember, can also be rigged, by selectively die-cutting so that some chads dislodge more easily than others. Diebold's printing division also bids on printing for Sequoia.
King County contracts the mailing of its absentee ballots out to Elder's division, and Elder's division subcontracts with a firm called PSI Group Inc. to sort the incoming absentee ballots - the most high-risk security point for absentee ballots. You see, we know how many absentee ballots we send out, but we have no idea how many are filled out and sent back in, especially if they pass through a middleman before being counted by elections officials. The elections division may tell you they count the ballots before outsourcing for precinct sorting, but in major metro areas, up to 60,000 ballots arrive in a single day and they are simply not staffed for this. It makes no sense to count ballots by precinct and then send them out for sorting.
Clearly, this kind of information should make anyone interested in finding out more. Like the fact Jeff Dean was in jail for 23 counts of embezzlement and was apparently good at installing backdoors into computer systems. It might make you question why this guy was then hired to program King County's Voter Registration database when he was released from jail. Just maybe?
This story, originally broken at a press conference called by Andy Stephenson and Bev Harris at Seattle's Labor Temple, has been repeated by many major news organizations, including The AP, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Seattle Times, The Seattle Weekly, and hundreds of other news organizations around the world... and somehow forgotten just 1.5 years later. It is well researched, and unchallenged in court as to my knowledge. In fact, what many in King County seem to be ignoring is that the county is not just moving to absentees. No, King County is also bringing in the Diebold TSX Touch Screen Voting machines which California's Secretary of State was sued over, and just lost! So apparently these same machines, now unlawful in California, are just fine for King County.
But lest one might think that this is a partisan issue, and that somehow in speaking out against this Vote-By Mail proposal I am helping the Republican Party, if you look up what happened in Florida and Ohio in 2000 AND 2004, it is the Democrats crying foul over alleged hanky panky with absentee ballots. There are literally hundreds of news articles around the country which tell the story of the problems of absentee ballot systems. For starters, I'd recommend Greg Palast's article, "Madame Butterfly Flies Off with Ballots, Florida Fixed Again? Absentee Ballots Go Absent" on Florida 2004. This article details just some of the ways the absentee ballot system is useful for vote fraud. While in 2000, the BBC reported, "Authorities are investigating the apparent loss of 58,000 absentee forms in Broward County while officials have said replacements are being sent out." Hmm...
And in Ohio 2004, still posted on the website Democrats.com:
A careful review of the absentee vote in one Ohio county revealed that many more absentee votes were cast than there were absentee voters identified:
"When there are more votes than voters, there is a big problem" stated Dr. Werner Lange, author of this study which would have been completed weeks earlier if Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign, had not unlawfully ordered all 88 boards of elections to prevent public inspection of poll books until after certification of the vote.
The absentee vote inflation rate for these five communities averages 5.5 fraudulent voters per precinct. If this pattern of inflated absentee votes holds for all of Ohio's 11,366 precincts, then there were some 62,513 absentee votes in Ohio up for grabs in the last election. Who grabbed them and how they did so should be the subject of an immediate congressional investigation.
So it seems that Democrats across the nation are concerned about absentee ballot problems, just not here in King County. In King County our elected leaders either are shockingly unaware of these problems, or quizzically, they are embracing this problematic system. Why is that?
And even more recently, the AP reported on absentee ballot stuffing allegations in Kentucky. While closer to home, just last week in Snohomish County, absentee ballots were not even mailed out to 344 voters... a number that is ironically larger than the margin off victory in the last Washington State Governor's race.
I could go on, but anyone can use Google and find more examples than I have time to present. Therefore I will summarize the top 10 concerns regarding an "all-absentee" balloting system:
1. Absentee ballots are not "secret ballots"
2. A private company sorts our incoming absentee ballots
3. The whole system of Absentee Ballots is insecure
4. Cost to the county will actually increase
5. The Signature Verification Process is error prone
6. Voter Suppression, Vote Buying, Vote Stuffing become far easier in this system
7. Double voting, and other inherent errors exist in the system
8. Studies show a short term spike, but long term decline in voter participation, in all absentee systems
9. The post office looses mail, the county loses ballots, and people lose their own ballots
10. The Absentee System might drastically alter the Precinct System, and impact the PCOs.
If we are going to sacrifice the secret ballot on the altar of convenience, we should at least be provided with all the facts before making such a drastic change to King County's Voting system. Where are these facts? The politicians pushing this proposal offer little that convinces me that this new system is a move in the right direction.
To me, the solution to the voting controversy is simple. We need to, as a country, go back to the system of precinct level hand counts on paper ballots. The precinct level hand counted system has always proven to be the least prone to fraud. This has been shown in scientific studies. And is easy for the layman to understand. There are several ways to make this system feasible in large jurisdictions, and many nations hand count entire elections efficiently and accurately. These include Germany, Switzerland and Canada.
For now, I am joining the call for a public vote on this drastic change. If the politicians and pundits are so sure that the majority of the people really want to sacrifice democracy for convenience, let's debate the issue a few months longer, and then let the people decide.
After all, I liked voting absentee, that is until I learned a bit about it.
Absentee Ballot Problems In The News
Washington State
http://www.soundpolitics.com/archives/006238.html
A 20% error rate in King County's Absentee system. No, it can't be.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/231105_focus03.html
And interesting report from a poll worker, gives relevant testimony on absentee ballot problems from a poll-workers perspective.
http://www.theolympian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050519/NEWS04/50519004
King County's absentee-ballot supervisor has testified that she collaborated with her boss when she filled out a report that falsely showed all ballots were accounted for in the November election.
Florida
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=366
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3960679.stm
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110204I.shtml
Ohio
http://www.democrats.com/ohio-absentee
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0412/S00154.htm
Pennsylvania
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04288/395646.stm
Diebold TSX Problems In the News
California
http://www.calvoter.org/news/blog/2005_07_01_blogarchive.html
http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=9334
Pennsylvania
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6324
Florida
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=350&Itemid=51
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002808.htm
The Harri Hursti Report
http://democrats.com/node/8896
The May 11th, 2006, Security Report on TSX machines
http://www.first.org/newsroom/globalsecurity/23356.html
John Giddeon's recent Op-Ed
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jgideon_060515_e_voting_train_wreck.htm
Additional Reading
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
A whole lot of info, articles, and scholarly sources.
http://www.answers.com/topic/absentee-ballot
A legal history of absentee ballots.
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-1.htm
Lots and lots of info, Vote Fraud And Election Issues Book Map.
http://simplyappalling.blogspot.com/2005/04/absentee-ballot-fraud-lesson-unlearned.html
Absentee voting fraud in England
http://www.news.uiuc.edu/NEWS/06/0413ballot.html
Legal scholar takes on Absentee Ballots as fraught with risks.
Whose Vote Is Counted?
A long paper on absentee ballot problems.
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