Vote Counting Must Include Paper Audit

Marian Beddill is a retired civil engineer and former owner of a GIS software company. Beddill used computers in her professional work beginning in the late 1960’s. She has been politically active since moving to Bellingham in 1992, including being on the Board of the local LWV.

If you cannot trust the way your votes are counted, nothing much else in politics matters.”
—Marian G. Beddill

The requirements for, and the status of, the various systems for voting and vote counting are of great interest to all citizens, and to all who care about the democratic and representative method of government of, by and for the people.

Systems for voting and vote-counting must be SARA: Secure, Accessible, Re-countable and Accurate(*), in order to be trustworthy and maintain or gain the confidence of the voters. (*the League of Women Voters U.S., 2004).

In business and finance, an audit is an ordinary and regular practice to verify financial reporting. The purposes are to discourage fraud, to instill confidence in the accuracy of the reporting and to enable corrective (and maybe punitive) action if discrepancies are found. Almost by definition, an audit is done by someone else—not by the person who manages and prepared the original financial records and reports.

The same must be true for voting—an audit should be able to review the original documents, and perform an independent inspection and verification of the summary report, which are the vote-totals for races and issues. The original documents of votes are the ballots cast by and verified by the voter. Votes are like water—they get put into and carried in suitable totes and we don’t want any of them to leak out or to get contaminated. (See: http://NoLeakyBuckets.org.) And, like a bucket that has holes, all of them must be plugged in order to maintain the bucket’s integrity. Even one leak will cause failure of the system—be it water in a bucket or votes in a system of collection, transport, counting and reporting.

I have concentrated my civic action efforts on one particular rusty spot in the voting system—computers—for three main reasons. First, I care about democracy, and believe that the government should do its job fairly. Second, I have experience in computer programming, dating back to the very first small computers in the 1960s (that’s 40 years of using them and knowing their powers and their foibles). And thirdly, because computers and their programs used for voting replicate their processes, an error or fraudulent process will do its thing in thousands of places, all at the same time. Thus its impact will be very large and all in the same way.

But there are many pieces in the election management system, and the others are also important. Five areas of concern that merit diligence on the part of citizens concerned about voting integrity are that voting may be undermined by: voter registration problems, erroneous purging, problems with new ID requirements, difficulties with voting systems and failure to count provisional ballots.

The SARA criteria must apply to all methods of voting. There are several principal methods of casting, collecting and counting ballots in the U.S.—with and without paper, and at the polling place or at the central office. A full list is at the NoLeakyBuckets.org Web site.

The voter-verified paper ballot (also referred to as the voter-verified paper audit trail) is the only known method of full, true auditing of the intent of the voter. A physical record is necessary of the ballot selections made by the voter, which have been verified by the voter before finishing the process of casting her ballot and then placed into the hopper for counting.

Computer programming is imprecise—programs crash or return odd results. Problems with accuracy occur, whether by human error, random disasters or intentional acts. One major potential weak point is the ease with which computer records can be changed, such as duplicating the records and using one set for some purposes and another set for others. Elections programs actually do that, which casts doubt on the validity of all reported outputs. A key question is having a way to recover—when that happens.

Funny thing for me to say since I am a strong proponent of computer use and have been for 40 years, but I have no confidence in the use of computers for voting. Computers and 100 percent voter-verified paper ballots are okay, but not the computer alone.

A closely related issue is how to recover from errors in the voting and elections system, if they happen (or are just alleged to have happened). In other uses of computers, we have recourse. With banks, merchandise, contracts, etc., we can present receipts and ask the business to give the money back. In elections, can we un-elect the winner? How many citizens say there were errors-or probably were-would it take to reverse a certified election? What would be the evidence that would meet court standards to convince a judge or jury? It is not available, because our votes must be kept secret, so there is a very high probability that no case can be made.

Returning to the four criteria-SARA: Security-nobody else can mess with your votes (complicated with the privacy need). Accessibility-all who are qualified can cast a ballot. Recountable and Accuracy: That’s where computers-alone-fail.

The recommendations and requirements for federal and state certification are a cruel joke. The local “L&A” tests are even worse. We cannot review the source code-the actual instructions—since the manufacturers of the software refuse to permit people to see them.

Also, software changes are routinely made at the last minute, totally negating any prior checking of the programs.

There is hope, however. Nevada just broke the ice, and has used large-scale for the first time, a DRE (Direct Recording Electronic voting machines) with paper ballots. There are two such models that make me and my associates happy:

•A ballot generator: it just uses the computer’s fancy abilities to print a paper ballot, which is later inserted into the scanning and counting machines and can be RE-counted by hand; and

•A DRE with a paper ballot: now on the market.

Finally, having the paper ballots has no merit if they are not (or cannot) be used for verification. The second rule required is the random recount for system double-checking. Laws should require that some set of precincts be chosen randomly, and all the paper ballots from those precincts are brought out and counted by hand or by a different machine from a different vendor.

That’s auditing. That would give me confidence in computerized/paper trail voting. §