Tre Hargett’s Christmas Present

On October 14, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
The war on fair elections comes earlier and earlier every year.

The war on fair elections comes earlier and earlier every year.

Secretary of State Tre Hargett got a shiny new present for Christmas and the voters of Bedford, Lincoln, and Rutherford counties got lumps of coal.

Seriously, who cares about a fancy new website and “election night results program!” if we can’t be sure that even one vote cast on the touch screen electronic voting machines used in yesterday’s House District 62 special election was counted accurately?

The most important feature of a free and fair election system is transparency – being able to verify that what goes in is what comes out. The touch-screen electronic voting machines used yesterday provide zero transparency. The votes cast on them are 100% unverifiable.

Secretary of State Hargett knows that 93 out of 95 counties cast votes on these machines and yet he continues to want us to use them in election after election. Why, as the guardian of our democratic process, doesn’t he want to fix our broken election system?

Why is Tre Hargett more concerned with shiny new toys instead of accurate elections?

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Tre Hargett Interview

On October 1, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

My Grandma Angie always used to say, “Extend the invitation. If they come, they come.” Not sure why anyone would turn down an invite from my Grandma whose meatballs were like buttah, but I guess I can understand why Secretary of State Tre Hargett might turn down our invite for an interview. I haven’t written or said very nice things about Mr. Hargett’s reasons for advocating for the repeal delay of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act or about his intention to suppress the vote. But when I called his office on Tuesday to follow up on our email request for the interview, his communications director asked if perhaps it would have been better if I had asked an interview prior to writing negatively about Mr. Hargett’s position on secure and verifiable elections on the blog or talking about it on the radio show.

Maybe. But there is precedent for this kind of thing. You know, not agreeing with someone on policy, talking about it on the air, inviting the person with whom you disagree to come on the air for an interview, and that person accepting the invitation.

Former Tennessee Democratic Party chairman Gray Sasser used to appear on Steve Gill’s show all the time. More recently, Congressman Jim Cooper went on The Ralph Bristol Show on conservative talk station 99.7 WWTN even though Mr. Bristol certainly doesn’t agree with any Democrats on health care reform. And last night we learned that faux-public interest lobbyist Rick Berman has accepted an invitation to appear on The Rachel Maddow Show next week even though she’s been exposing his deceptive practices and suspect corporate ties for weeks now.

So, the invitation stands for Mr. Hargett: come on Liberadio(!) to talk about secure and verifiable elections.

If he accepts, I’ll even make him some of my Grandma’s meatballs.

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Day 25 of Operation: Please Offer Proof (P.O.P)

On September 3, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
Look who joined the proofer movement!

Look who joined the proofer movement!

It’s been seventeen days since I last wrote to State Election Coordinator Mark Goins. I am still waiting for a reply.

Let’s start at the beginning.

In 2008, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, which would have given Tennesseans four important elements to help ensure secure and verifiable elections:

1) Paper ballots
2) Removal of unverifiable paperless touch screen electronic voting machines to be replaced with optical scan machines (to count the paper ballots)
3) The paper ballot becomes the ballot of record in case of a recount. (The touch screen electronic voting system we have now only has one mechanism in place for a recount – press the same button again and get a repeat of the exact same totals you got before).
4) Mandatory random post-election audits in 3% of precincts (to insure that the Optical Scan machines are functioning properly).

During last session, Republicans tried to kill the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, but when they couldn’t get that done they tried to delay it until 2012. The delay failed as well. Now, because they are left with no other option, Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins, are simply refusing to implement the law.

In the early part of August, I was compared to a “birther” (people who don’t believe that President Obama is an American citizen) because a) I believe the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act could be implemented and the Republican Secretary of State is simply refusing to do so, and b) I don’t think any votes ever cast during any election using the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines we use now in 93 out of 95 counties in Tennessee has ever been recorded accurately, as per the voters’ intent. Ever.

So, on August 10, 2009 I started Operation: P.O.P. (Please offer proof) – a.k.a. the “proofer” movement – in which I called on Secretary of State Hargett and State Election Coordinator Goins (who doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the voting machines we use now) to present proof to the voters of Tennessee that one vote cast electronic voting machines has ever been recorded accurately.

I sent a letter to that effect to Mr. Hargett and Mr. Goins and two days later I received a reply from Mr. Goins. It was clear from his response that he either didn’t understand my request or couldn’t give me an answer. First, after making sure that I knew that he was not responsible for making the decision to purchase the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines (“Decisions were made by the election commissions in each of those counties about what type of equipment to purchase”) he explained the testing procedure (“…the machines are tested prior to purchase, upon delivery and again before each election in each county…”) and suggested that I contact individual election administrators from each of the counties that use the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines to witness testing procedures.

I felt nicely put off. But I did not feel as if my question has been answered. Perhaps I made it too confusing so I broke it down and sent him another email:

Dear Mr. Goins,

Thank you for getting back to me and for reiterating the need for election equipment that meets the highest standards for security and reliability. That said, the decision to purchase the electronic voting machines is in the past so I do not feel it necessary to address the county election commissioners at this time.

I do feel it necessary, however, to concentrate on the security and verifiability of the 2010 election.

And while I do believe your explanation of the bi-partisan pre-purchase testing procedure and the invitation to contact the election administrators to see demonstrations of each machine might address my request to see the process in which the votes are cast, it does not address my request to see the process in which the votes are cast and counted accurately.

In other words, I would like verification that the software used on these machines is both recording and counting accurately.

Do you have any suggestions on how this may be accomplished?

It seemed clear enough now, I thought. On election day, can Tre Hargett, Mark Goins, any poll worker, or poll monitor look into the internal bits of a touchscreen electronic voting machine and see how the votes are being counted? Can we, as voters, feel certain that what goes in the machine is going to be what comes out at the end of the day tally? Where’s the proof?

I couldn’t wait for his reply. But I had to wait. For two days.

Ms. Mancini:

Once again I want to thank you for your interest in the election process. I also want to apologize if my previous e-mail was unclear. The purpose of testing the voting machines prior to each election is to verify not only that ballots were cast, but also that they were properly tabulated and recorded. This testing process has been used in numerous elections prior to the start of my tenure with the Division of Elections and I’m unaware of any serious concerns expressed by the participating candidates or the parties they represented. However, if you have specific questions about the voting machine hardware or software, it might be advisable to contact officials with the companies that supply the equipment. I would be happy to supply some contact information for those companies, if you are interested.

Again, thank you for your inquiry.

Again with the “not my responsiblity.” Sheesh. So I tried one more time.

Dear Mr. Goins,

I am once again writing for clarification.

Are you suggesting that the testing done on the touch-screen machines prior to an election guarantees that every vote cast on election day on said machines will be counted and counted as cast?

If so, how can you be sure?

Do the companies that make the machines provide access to the counting software so that if can be verified and studied by your office? Can the companies that make the machines guarantee that the counting software is free of bugs, i.e. perfect and never makes mistakes during either the testing process or when they are live on election day? Can the companies that make the machines guarantee that the vote count cannot be manipulated in the source code or by introducing a virus in one of the unsecure data ports? Can the companies that make the machines guarantee that if one of the machines crashed or malfunctions, as computers are prone to do, that the votes on that machine will not be irretrievably lost? Can the companies also guarantee that each machine will be perfectly calibrated as to avoid vote flipping like the kind we saw last November?

Perhaps as the gentlemen in charge of building trust in our elections, you should contact the touch-screen electronic voting machine manufacturers for satisfactory answers to the above questions.

I also suggest that you read the following reports from the Brennan Center for Justice to better understand the serious concerns Tennesseans have about touch-screen electronic voting machines: http://www.brennancenter.org/content/section/category/voting_technology.

Or, you can simply look to the example of the Voter Confidence Act, which was passed almost unanimously in 2008 the State House and Senate by candidates who represent their political parties and recognized, as most of their constituents who want fair elections now do, the inherent unreliability and insecurity of touch-screen electronic voting machines.

Thank you again for your time.

The above email was sent on August 18. It’s September and I’ve yet to hear back from either State Election Coordinator Goins or Secretary of State Hargett.

Today I will resend my last email with the following addendum:

Dear Mr. Goins,

I am resending my email of August 18, 2009 in case it got lost in the flurry of emails you must receive on a daily basis. I look forward to your reply.

In addition, my offer for you to appear as a guest on Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini & Freddie O’Connell to discuss the issue further, still stands.

More
Day 1: Operation P.O.P.
Day 2: Operation P.O.P.
Day 4: Operation P.O.P.
Another Proofer
Day 9: Operation P.O.P.
WPLN: Voting Machine Dispute Wears On as 2010 Election Nears
If You Hold an Election, Cheaters will Come
Computer Scientist Says Yes to Paper Ballots
Media (and some bloggers) missing the point of Tennessee election reform controversy

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Sequoia Electronic Voting Machine Commandeered by Clever Attack

On August 20, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

And the computer scientists who did it by bypassed the security measures that are supposed to prevent these kinds of things:

The computer scientists were able to evade this safety mechanism using return-oriented programming. Rather than designing the malicious code from scratch, the technique reassembles programming expressions already found in the targeted software in a way that gives the researchers the ability to take complete control over the machine. It’s tantamount to kidnappers who write a ransom note using letters cut from the headline of a newspaper.

The research team – from Princeton University, the University of California at San Diego and the University of Michigan – pulled off the attack by obtaining a Sequoia AVC Advantage legally off the internet. Without access to any of the source code, they reverse engineered the hardware. They were then able to reverse engineer the software it ran by analyzing the machine’s ROM.

Sequoia and manufacturers of other brands of e-voting machines frequently discount vulnerability research into their products by pointing out that the underlying source code is closely guarded. Researchers in many studies, they argue, have unrealistic access to the devices’ inner workings.

(And this kind of maliciousness is even easier when you’re hired and paid to do it.)

So, did you understand most of that? Me neither. Because we’re not computer scientists or programmers. You know who else isn’t a computer scientist or programmer? The Tennessee State Election Coordinator, Mark Goins, who believes that we should trust these types of machines to run our elections.

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Touch-Screen Voting Machines Manufacturer ‘Quietly’ Patches Security Flaw

On August 19, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

From Wired:

Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, has patched a serious security weakness in its election tabulation software used in the majority of states, according to a lab that tested the new version and a federal commission that certified it.

The flaw in the tabulation software was discovered by Wired.com earlier this year, and involved the program’s auditing logs. The logs failed to record significant events occurring on a computer running the software, including the act of someone deleting votes during or after an election. The logs also failed to record who performed an action on the system, and listed some events with the wrong date and timestamps.

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Day 9 of Operation: Please Offer Proof (P.O.P)

On August 18, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

It’s been nine days since this proofer asked Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins to present proof to the voters of Tennessee that even one vote cast during any election using the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines we use now in 93 out of 95 counties in Tennessee has ever been recorded accurately, as per the voters’ intent.

On day three, I heard back from Mr. Goins who suggested, as if he wasn’t the person responsible for our elections, that I go elsewhere for an answer.

My response to the day three brush off was to simplify my request and make another appeal for proof:

“And while I do believe your explanation of the bi-partisan pre-purchase testing procedure and the invitation to contact the election administrators to see demonstrations of each machine might address my request to see the process in which the votes are cast, it does not address my request to see the process in which the votes are cast and counted accurately.

In other words, I would like verification that the software used on these machines is both recording and counting accurately.

Do you have any suggestions on how this may be accomplished?”

Mr. Goins responded by once again by shirking his responsibility as the dude running our elections and, however inadvertently, proving my point – he can’t offer proof:

“Once again I want to thank you for your interest in the election process. I also want to apologize if my previous e-mail was unclear. The purpose of testing the voting machines prior to each election is to verify not only that ballots were cast, but also that they were properly tabulated and recorded. This testing process has been used in numerous elections prior to the start of my tenure with the Division of Elections and I’m unaware of any serious concerns expressed by the participating candidates or the parties they represented. However, if you have specific questions about the voting machine hardware or software, it might be advisable to contact officials with the companies that supply the equipment. I would be happy to supply some contact information for those companies, if you are interested.”

I’m not sure what part of my request for proof of voting accuracy “during any election” he doesn’t get. Well, yeah, I am sure. All of it.

And perhaps as the gentlemen in charge of building trust in our elections, Mr. Goins should already have satisfactory answers from the touch-screen electronic voting machines manufacturers to the questions many Tennesseans are asking about their insecure and unverifiable voting equipment.

So I will write to Mr. Goins once again for clarification.

I will ask him if he is suggesting that the testing done on the touch-screen machines prior to an election guarantees that every vote cast on election day on said machines will be counted and counted as cast?

And if so, I will ask, how can he be sure?

Do the companies that make the machines provide access to the counting software so that it can be verified and studied by the his office? Can the companies that make the machines guarantee that the counting software is free of bugs, i.e. perfect and never makes mistakes? Can the companies that make the machines guarantee that the vote count cannot be manipulated in the source code or by introducing a virus in one of the unsecure data ports? Can the companies that make the machines guarantee that if one of the machines crashed or malfunctions, as computers are prone to do, that the votes will not be irretrievably lost?

While Mr. Goins is waiting for his answers, he can brush up on these reports by a computer scientist, a research center, and a non-partisan public policy and law institute that have pretty much everyone else in the country rightfully convinced that the machines Tennesseans use in 93 out of 95 counties will not give us a secure and verifiable election in November of 2010.

  • The National Institute of Standards and Technology, condemned them because they they are not secure, don’t “allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software,” and “a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election.”
  • Computer Science professor Hovav Shacham who studied a machine – not even the source code! – and said on Science Friday last week that he found it to be vulnerable to attack and manipulation
  • The Brennan Center for Justice released two comprehensive studies of electronic voting systems in the United States, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World and The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost.
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Computer Scientist Says Yes to Paper Ballots

On August 17, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

One of our astute readers let us know that Computer Science professor Hovav Shacham was talking about electronic voting machines on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. The professor studied and tested a machine – not the source code – and found it to be vulnerable to attack and manipulation. And when asked what kind of machine he would use to run a trustworthy election, the computer scientist said, “paper.”

Listen to the segment:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“What we found is that an attacker who has brief physical access to a machine the night before an election, for example, when it’s left unattended outside a polling place is able to manipulate the machine in such a way that he can induce it to misbehave the net day on election day and appear to run the election faithfully but then shift votes at the end of the day from one candidate to another. And in this way the finding dovetail with those that previous studies have found for other voting machines and in fact of other studies of the same voting machine but along the way we had a couple of different features to..what we found have larger implications for voting security…what it says is that writing software and designing systems is hard and software has bugs – and that’s not altogether surprising the software that we use everyday has bugs. And, perhaps, what it says more is that relying on either having software or systems that are perfect and never make mistakes, or on having the system make mistakes only in ways that hackers would not be smart enough to be able to find, for example by stealing and analyzing a machine, is not a good way to build trust in an election…so I think what we need, we need some system whereby the voters can see an independent record of their vote so that they can check that what is recorded is the way that they intended their vote to be cast. And right now, the best way we know how to do that is with paper.”

The professor also suggests that the paper ballot becomes the ballot of record and that audits be done to make sure the paper ballot count matches the machine count.

We could have the kind of secure election the professor suggests with paper, paper ballots as ballot of record, and random audits because that’s what the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act mandates. You know what’s standing in our way? This guy.

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Another Proofer: No Chaser Joins Operation P.O.P.

On August 14, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Today, on the fifth day of Operation: P.O.P., the proofer movement gets another member. We welcome Mark Brown of the No Chaser blog as yet another Tennessee citizen who wants proof from Secretary of State Tre Hargett and/or State Election Coordinator Mark Brown Goins that a single vote has been accurately recorded by any of the 100% unverifiable touch screen electronic voting machines we use in 93 out of 95 counties.

Hello, Mark! *clap, clap, clap*

“Think about it,” he writes, “Where is the evidence that a single vote has been accurately recorded by any of these machines? Voters aren’t given a receipt that shows how their votes were recorded. The voting machines don’t even display that information onscreen. Not a single Tennessee voter has the slightest clue how his or her vote actually went down in the record.”

See, much like the Birthers who want to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate to prove he’s an American citizen. The Proofers, like me and No Chaser Mark, need to see evidence of how our votes are being counted.

You know, “vote in secret, count in public” instead of “vote in secret, count in secret.”

While we wait for Mr. Hargett and Mr. Goins, Mark also wants to know why other conservative officials in Tennessee continue to ignore their requests from “hard-working left-wing bloggers”:

Stacey Campfield, where’s the birth certificate we asked for last Sunday? Ron Ramsey, ready to give us those text messages you exchanged with Paul Stanley? Ron and Mark Norris, when are you going to tell us exactly how you handled the sex scandals involving “Family Values” conservatives Mike Faulk and Jeff Miller?

Tick, tock.

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Clarksville Online: Prevent Election Fiascoes in Tennessee – Enact Paper Ballot Law Now

On August 12, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Reader Blayne directed our attention to an article up at Clarksville Online, the voice of Clarksville, written by Joyce McCloy of NC Coalition for Verified Voting and Voting News Blog.

In the article Joyce writes that a “A perfect storm is brewing for Tennessee voters for the 2010 election:”

Tennessee is set up for an election debacle, thanks to the states’ reliance on paperless electronic voting. Currently 93 out of 95 counties in Tennessee use these machines.

Unless the Secretary of State Hargett takes swift and certain prompt action, thousands of votes will be at risk in the 2010 election. Computer scientists agree that any electronic voting machine can fail without warning. SOS Hargett should pay attention to the lessons learned by other states.

North Carolina found out the hard way that paperless voting machines can lose thousands of votes. In the November 2004 Presidential Election, 4,400 votes were permanently lost by “state of the art” computerized voting machines. The AP described that election as “A Florida-style nightmare …with thousands of votes missing and the outcome of two statewide races still up in the air.” On top of that, the outcome of one statewide election contest was too close to call. There would have been a $3 million dollar “do-over” election if one of the candidates hadn’t voluntarily withdrawn. (See North Carolina Ballot Blues)

So why take a chance? Tennessee has time to act now and protect the 2010 election from mishaps. North Carolina adopted a paper ballot law in August 2005 and had new voting machines running an election in April 2006. Thanks to these paper ballot optical scan machines, North Carolina saw a our undervote rate for President cut in half in the 2008 election. (An undervote occurs when for some reason a ballot is cast but no vote is registered for the candidate.)

Tennessee, she also writes, “already has warning signs of an election meltdown to come,” and she chronicles a list of problems during previous elections in Davidson, Knox, Williamson, Hawkins, Shelby, and Sullivan counties.

In addition, there is a video of statements by voters in Carteret County, North Carolina who lost their votes on a paperless machine in the November, 2004 election.

Finally, Joyce provides example of several states that have enacted paper ballot laws successfully and asks that all Tennesseans Contact Secretary of State Tre Hargett by email at tre.hargett@tn.gov or by phone at (615) 741-2819 to demand he implement the Voter Confidence Act and paper ballots by the 2010 election.

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Poll Workers Are Not Equipped to Reconcile or Verify Precinct Election Results

On August 6, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
Not the Tennessean Editor.

Not the Tennessean Editor.

Please do not take this personally, Tennessean Letter to the Editor writer John Henderson, because no one is impugning your integrity as a poll worker or the decrying the unsung hard work you do every election day. But to say that the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machine system we use to vote on in 93 out of 95 counties could only be compromised by a “well-organized effort by the entire group of poll workers” is to give yourself as a designated poll worker too much power.

Think about it this way. You wrote in your letter that though the machines “are computer based, each machine produces a paper tape record for each election. This tape must be certified by the precinct officer and two other workers at the start of the voting day, and again at the end of the day.”

“Additionally,” you say, “the total votes cast must be reconciled against the total number of ‘Application to Vote’ forms received, one signed by each voter and verified by the registrar.”

All of that is true. But you neglected to mention how the votes are tallied inside the machine. And you probably did so because you, like the rest of us who do not have access to the secret software used to count the votes, have no idea how they are counted.

We don’t know if votes are being flipped. We don’t know if one candidate is automatically getting every third vote despite who it is actually being cast for.

Although we may know, because of the systems in place that you describe, that the number of votes cast match the number of people who came in to vote, we don’t know how each of those votes is being counted.

In other words, our votes are being cast in secret, as they should be, but they are also being counted in secret, which violates the most basic rule of a free and fair election.

I invite you, John Henderson, any other election worker or official, and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins, to offer evidence that any vote ever cast on any of the electronic voting machines we use now, during any election, has ever been recorded accurately, as per the voters’ intent.

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