Guber Candidate Ron Ramsey takes aim at fair elections.

Guber Candidate Ron Ramsey takes aim at fair elections.

Last week, Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey appeared with Republican Secretary of State Tre Hargett and at an event in Kingsport and told business leaders that not only wouldn’t they follow the law and implement the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA), but delaying it would be a legislative priority during the next session of the Tennessee General Assembly.

Clearly, GOP leadership does not want the voters in Tennessee to have confidence in their elections.

They also clearly want to suppress voter turnout.

I wrote earlier of all the ways in which the Tennessee GOP can suppress the vote (voter roll purging, creating partisan election administrations, baseless accusations of voter fraud, etc.) and why they feel it necessary to do so (“…our leverage in elections…goes up as the voting populace goes down…,” Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich).

Keeping the 100% unverifiable touch-screen electronic voting machines in Tennessee is simply another tool in their arsenal of voter suppression tactics.

Using electronic voting machines as a tool of voter suppression can be accomplished in two ways:

1) It takes much longer to vote on a touch-screen electronic voting machine than on paper ballot, thereby creating long lines that discourage participation. Only one voter can vote on a machines at one time, but 10, 20, 30, etc. voters can all vote on paper ballots at the same time.

2) The allocation of voting machines, which is controlled by county election commissions (all 95 county election commissions are now controlled by a Republican majority), can be manipulated so that voting precincts in certain areas are allocated too few voting machines, thereby creating long lines which, you got it, discourages voter participation.

Don’t let Tre Hargett and Ron Ramsey tell you that “it’s about the money.” The state has over 35 million dollars in reserve from the federal government that can only be spent on the purchase of new voting equipment.

And don’t let them tell you that there are no machines available to purchase that could count the paper ballots required by the new law. 49 states and two Tennessee counties have already used these types of machines in election after election without incident.

Delaying the TVCA and keeping the touch-screen electronic voting machines we use now is undoubtedly another voter suppression tactic to add to their arsenal

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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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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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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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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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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:

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“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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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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Are these the little dudes counting the votes inside the machines?

Are these the little dudes counting the votes inside the machines?

We represent the Lolliproof Guild. The Lolliproof Guild. The Lolliproof Guild. And in the name of the Lolliproof Guuuuiiiild…We wish to welcome you to Disenfranchise Land!

It’s been four days since I asked for Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins for proof 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 3, yesterday, I heard back from Mr. Goins via email. It’s clear, however, that he didn’t quite understand my request.

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:

Rutherford, Bedford and Lincoln counties are all scheduled to hold elections Oct. 13. Typically, the testing of the machines is done a few days prior to each election, so I encourage you to contact the election administrators in those counties to make sure you’re aware of the time and location of the testing.

For Rutherford County, contact Hooper Penuel at (615) 898-7743. For Bedford County, contact Summer Leverette at (931) 684-0531. For Lincoln County, contact Shelia Allen at (931) 433-6220.

Rutherford and Bedford County both use Micro Vote Infinity equipment, while Lincoln County uses ESS iVotronic equipment.

If you’re interested in seeing a test of the Hart eSlate equipment, it is used in Dickson County, where an election is scheduled for Sept. 24. The contact there is Linda Medley at (615) 789-6021.

And if you’re interested in seeing a test of the Premier (formerly Diebold) equipment, it will be in use in Shelby County’s Oct. 15 election. The contact there is Rich Holden at (901) 545-2600.

I feel nicely put off. But I do not feel as if my request has been answered. Perhaps I made it too confusing. Let me break it down more directly:

“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?”

Operation P.O.P. continues.

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Mac McLean, reporting for the Bristol Herald Courier and TriCities.com, writes today that Sullivan County election officials decided “they don’t need to file a lawsuit seeking to block the state’s paper ballots law from going into effect” and will instead leave “the job of solving a bureaucratic quagmire created by the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act up to the very state officials who set it in motion last year.”

The Voter Confidence Act requires counties to buy and start using optical scan voting machines with paper ballots in time for the November 2010 election.

And the “bureaucratic quagmire” consists of the Secretary of State and the State Election Coordinator, who refuse to implement the law.

In preparation for the new law, Sullivan County “bought a set of the machines in 2006 and used them for early voting during the 2008 election’s early voting period and again in the 2009 city elections,” according to Elections Administrator Jason Booher.

But, Booher is misinformed when he tells McLean that they can no longer use the machines because the new law says they have to meet “a set of standards the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) adopted in 2005.”

Two things. First, nowhere in the law is the phrase “2005 Election Assistance Commission standards,” and two, the EAC standards state very clearly state that they are voluntary.

In other words, as a state, we can use any paper ballot counting machines we want to use. It’s our choice…kind of a states’ rights thing. Booher can use the machines he purchased in 2006 and Tre Hargett can allow the other county Election Administrators to purchase machines like the ones that have been working without incident in Hamilton, Pickett and, apparently, Sullivan counties.

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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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