'Electronic Voting is The Real Threat to Elections'

'USA Today' Notices: 'Electronic Voting is The Real Threat to Elections'

Also allows ink for 'Internet Voting' voting shill, lobbyist...

By Brad Friedman on 9/20/2012

 

Meanwhile, as the War Over Which Americans Get to Exercise Their Right to Vote rages on, concern about how the votes of those who do get to vote, will (or won't) be tabulated, goes largely unnoticed. Again.

USA Today takes a moment to mention that point in an unbylined editorial headlined 'Electronic voting is the real threat to elections'. Their headline may understate the very real concerns about access to the polls, because these two issues --- both access to the polls and accurate, transparent tabulation of ballots --- have always been two sides of the same coin.
Both issues must be assured for an election with anything close to integrity.

But, given the, necessarily, extraordinary focus on the first issue this year, access, it's nice that the paper has taken a moment to highlight just a few of the continuing causes of concern for the actual tabulation of votes.

Nothing has gotten better since 2010 or 2008 or even 2004. We've covered all of the examples for reasons to be concerned that they point to in the editorial, of course, and many more, over the years here at The BRAD BLOG.

And, naturally, since the paper is still a corporate media outlet, they just had to "balance" their fairly decent, fact-based editorial with an additional "opposing view" editorial, filled with a bunch of misleading, dishonest bullshit about Internet Voting, of all things, from a corporate lobbyist hack...

First, here's the beginning of the paper's not-terrible, largely fact-based editorial (NOTE: The links in the following are their own, not ours, most of our coverage of these matters was in far greater detail, as regular readers will know)...

The process is...shockingly vulnerable to problems from software failure to malicious hacking. While state lawmakers burn enormous energy in a partisan fight over in-person vote fraud, which is virtually nonexistent, they're largely ignoring far likelier ways votes can be lost, stolen or changed.

 How? Sometimes, technology or the humans running it simply fail:

• In March, malfunctioning software sent votes to the wrong candidate and the wrong municipal election in Palm Beach County, Fla. The mistake was corrected only after a court-approved hand count.
• In an election in Pennington County, S.D., in 2009, a software glitch almost doubled the number of votes actually cast.
• In Carteret County, N.C., 4,530 electronic votes simply disappeared in 2004 when the voting machine ran out of storage capacity and no one noticed until too late.
• In 2010, a University of Michigan assistant professor of computer science and three assistants hacked into Washington, D.C.'s online voting system during a test. They manipulated it undetected, even programming it to play the Michigan fight song. While inside, the hackers blocked probes from Iran, India and China. Washington officials canceled plans for online voting.

Experiences like these argue for great caution about expanding electronic voting, but too many states are choosing convenience over reliability. Sixteen states, for example, use electronic voting devices with no paper backup, according to a study by the Verified Voting Foundation, Common Cause and the Rutgers School of Law.

This means there's no way to know whether the machine has recorded a vote accurately or, for that matter, recorded it at all. And there's no way for elections officials to conduct a verifiable recount if things go wrong.

The paper does not have all of their facts straight in the rest of the editorial, and they seem to misunderstand both the solution (which is publicly hand-counted paper ballots at the polling place on Election Night) and don't seem to fully appreciate the very serious concerns of paper ballots tabulated by optical-scan computers. Still, given the dearth of coverage elsewhere once again this election season, we're glad they took a moment to notice any of it, frankly.

Of course, since this is still the corporate mainstream media, their definition of "Fair and Balanced" is, at best: when telling the truth about something, be sure to "balance" it with an "opposing view" from a corporate lobbyist shill who just pulls things out of their ass. And so they include a link to an "opposing" editorial from Bob Carey, identified by the paper as "president of the Abraham & Roetzel government affairs firm. Until May of this year, he was director of the Defense Department's Federal Voting Assistance Program."

Not noted by the paper is that Carey was the former Legislative Affairs director for former Republican Senators George Allen (who went on to disgrace himself by using a racial slur during a campaign event) and Spencer Abraham (who went on to become George W. Bush's Energy Secretary.)

Also not noted by USA Today, at least not in plain language, is that Abraham & Roetzel is a corporate lobbying firm.

In Carey's misleading and obnoxiously-headlined "opposing view" piece, "Paper voting system is broken", Carey makes the pitch for unsecurable, unverifiable Internet Voting, naturally, as that is also what he pushed for while at the Pentagon, despite the near-entirety of the computer science and security world's unambiguous warnings against it.

We can't find record of Abraham & Roetzel actually serving as a registered lobbyist for for-profit Internet Voting firms such as Scytl or the failed Everyone Counts (where former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission chair Paul DeGregorio has cashed in on his former title by serving as Chief Operating Officer), but Carey was just allowed to make one helluva pitch for their business in the pages of "The Nation's Newspaper".

It looks like the voters get just half-a-loaf, if that much, from USA Today's coverage. But even that much is more than we've gotten elsewhere of late when it comes to the privatized, unverified, unoverseeable computer tabulation that will be used once again to determine the President, the balance of Congress, and local races and initiatives in all 50 states this November.

Is democracy all it is cracked up to be?

Statistical analysis can reveal election fraud, a paper says. But the problems with democracy go deeper, argues Philip Ball.
27 January 2012

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing,” Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said. “The people who count them decide everything.” A paper uploaded to a preprint server this month suggests that little has changed in Russia.

Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1.

This is not a new accusation. Some, such as Russian physicist Sergey Shpilkin, have claimed that Russian voting statistics show suspicious peaks at multiples of 5% or 10%, as though ballot officials have simply assigned rounded proportions of votes to meet predetermined figures. And last December, The Wall Street Journal conducted its own analysis of the election statistics, which led political scientists at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago to concur that the data showed potential signs of fraud.

Naturally, Putin denies this. But for those who suspect that neither he nor The Wall Street Journal is exactly the most neutral of sources on Russian politics, Klimek and his colleagues offer a welcome alternative. They say that the statistical distribution of votes in the Duma election diverges from a normal (bell-curve or Gaussian) distribution — the expected outcome of a set of independent choices — by over one hundred times more than would be expected for an unbiased election.

The same is true for the Ugandan presidential election of February 2011. Both of these statistical distributions are, even at a glance, profoundly different from those of recent elections in, say, Austria, Switzerland or Spain (see Figure, below).

Expand

Plots of voter turnout versus number of votes for the winner clearly show something fishy is going on in Russia and Uganda, with many districts reporting 100% turnout and 100% of votes going to the winner (red circles).
REF. 1

Breaking down the numbers into scatter plots, with the voter turnout plotted against the number of votes for the winner in each voting district, lays the problems bare. Most countries show a single, broad peak, but both Russia and Uganda also have an extra, smaller peak. For both countries, distortion in the main peak suggests ballot rigging — for Russia, this afflicts about 64% of districts.

But the smaller peaks suggest much cruder fraud. They correspond to districts showing both 100% turnout and 100% votes for the winning party. As if.

No perfect system

It is good to see science expose these corruptions of democracy. Yet science also hints that, in general, democracy isn’t quite what it is popularly sold as. Take the choice of voting system. One of the most celebrated results of the branch of economics known as social choice theory is that there can be no perfectly fair means of deciding the outcome of a democratic vote. Possible voting schemes are manifold — first-past-the-post (used in the United Kingdom), proportional representation (Scandinavian countries), schemes for ranking candidates rather than simply selecting one, and so on — and their relative merits are hotly debated.

But as Kenneth Arrow, winner of the 1972 economics Nobel prize, showed in the 1950s, none of these systems can satisfy all the criteria of fairness and logic that one might demand2 — for example, that a system under which candidate A would be elected from A, B and C should ideally also select A if B is the only alternative. Arrow's ‘impossibility theorem’ implies that societies must either accept that democratic majority rule has some undesirable consequences, or find fairer alternatives — which none has.

Other considerations can also undermine the democratic principle: for example, bipartisan votes may fall within the margin of statistical error. As demonstrated in the US presidential election of 2000, between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the result is then not democratic but legalistic.

Furthermore, analysis of voting statistics suggests that, regardless of the voting system, political choices are not free and independent (as most definitions of democracy pretend), but partly the collective result of peer influence. That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law3, 4. Klimek and his colleagues find less extreme, but still significant, deviations from Gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections1. They assume that some of these deviations result from collective effects such as voter mobilization: targeted, often single-issue campaigns to sway votes.

In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions. On the one hand, you could say that this is just how democratic societies work. On the other, it makes voting a nonlinear process in which small effects (media bias or party budgets, say) can have disproportionately big consequences. At the very least, it makes voting a more complex and less transparent process than is normally assumed.

This isn’t to invalidate Winston Churchill’s dictum that democracy is the least bad political system. But let us not fool ourselves about what it entails.


References

1. Klimek, P., Yegorov, Y., Hanel, R. & Thurner, S. http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3087 (2012).
   
   
2. Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1… in article


3. … Klimek and his colleagues find less extreme, but still significant, deviations from Gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections^1… in article


4. Arrow, K. J. Social Choice and Individual Values (Yale University Press, 1951).
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   • But as Kenneth Arrow, winner of the 1972 economics Nobel prize, showed in the 1950s, none of these systems can satisfy all the criteria of fairness and logic that one might demand² — for example, that a system under which candidate A would be elected from A, B and C should ideally also select A if B is the only alternative… in article
5. Costa Filho, R. N., Almeida, M. P., Andrade Jr, J. S. & Moreira, J. E. Phys. Rev. E 60, 1067–1068(1999).
   • Article
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   • … That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law^3, 4… in article
6. Costa Filho, R. N., Almeida, M. P., Moreira, J. E. & Andrade Jr, J. S. Physica A 322, 698–700 (2003).
   • Article
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   • … That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law^3, 4… in article
7. Fortunato, S. & Castellano, C. Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 138701 (2007).
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   • PubMed
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   • In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation^5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions… in article
8. Stauffer, D. in Encyclopedia of Complexity & System Science (ed. Meyers, R. A.) 6380–6388 (Springer, 2009).
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   • In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation^5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions… in article

Computer Rigged Elections

Election Fraud Testimony

vidlink