Tag: ballot security
We’re Missing The Chance to Fix Our Election System Before 2020 Vote

We’re Missing The Chance to Fix Our Election System Before 2020 Vote

As 2020’s elections edge closer, recent troubling developments are casting new light on an old question—what will it take for the results to be trusted?

The emergence of powerful forms of online political propaganda, the absence of progress in 2019 state legislatures on improving audits and recounts, and new revelations about the extent of Russian hacking in 2016—accessing more election administration details than previously reported—all point to the same bottom line: What evidence can be presented to a polarized electorate to legitimize the results?

To be fair, some policy experts who network with senior election officials—who have authority to order more thorough vote-verification steps without new legislation—say there is still time to act. But as 2020 gets closer, there are fewer opportunities to do so.

The question of what additional proactive steps could be a public trust counterweight is not theoretical. There are many signs that 2020 will be very fractious, starting with the emergence of new forms of political propaganda. The latest is doctored videos, such as one recently of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—slurring her words—that drew millions of views, or another video mocking ex-Vice President Joe Biden after announcing his candidacy that President Trump tweeted. An emerging norm, where seeing is not necessarily believable, underscores the need for vote count evidence trails.

The latest revelations about Russian hacking in 2016 concern different issues, but point to a similar conclusion: that, arguably, more could or should be done at the process’s finish line to legitimize outcomes. In Florida, however, the full impact of Russian meddling has not been investigated by state or federal officials, according to Ion Sancho, who recently retired after nearly three decades as Supervisor of Elections in Leon County, where Tallahassee is located.

Russian hacking is back in the news, in part, because it poses questions about 2020 readiness. The Mueller report said that election administration computers in “at least one Florida county government” had been hacked, and the FBI later said that two unnamed counties had been breached. The accessed data included all the Election Day logistics, from poll workers to payrolls, as well as voter registration data, Sancho said.

“To me, all this says is at the front end, we fail, and we cannot presume to know that any mitigation has been successful, which puts the onus on auditing [the reported results],” Sancho said. “The issue is Florida is not protected because we do not verify our totals on the machines through any kind of an audit that is reliable.”

“This Russian intervention should push all election officials to say, ‘We’ve got to audit now,’” he continued. “We’ve got to verify that those… votes are correct and assume that there could be something that happened at the front end, so now you need to ensure the process [is legitimate]—by making sure that the paper ballots are properly audited. That’s the only solution I can see.”

Legislative Action or Inaction

To be fair, many states and counties have been collaborating with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to block hackers. Those efforts have been followed by statements that voting infrastructure is better protected than ever, and the “No. 1 threat is around public confidence in the process,” as DHS’s top election expert Matt Masterson has said.

While there have been no government disclosures of successful hacks after 2016’s breaches, election officials say that voting systems are routinely targeted. Stepping back, however, it’s notable that cybersecurity has commanded more attention than other steps that could boost public assurance that election results will be accurate—or more aggressively double-checked.

In many states, 2019’s legislative sessions are now over. Odd-numbered years are when states fine-tune election laws and protocols—as it is between federal cycles and there is time to implement changes. However, 2019 has seen scant legislation to make counting votes more transparent and rigorous, especially in swing states.

The National Conference of State Legislatures’ online database listed 44 recount-related bills in 2019 from 15 states. Hawaii, which had 14 proposed bills, passed a bill requiring a mandatory recount if the margin was less than 0.25 percent, but other bills requiring that recounts be done by hand have not moved. Virginia passed a bill requiring new “standards and instructions” if there is more than one recount in play. New York has a recount bill, but it too is stalled.

On the audit front, the NCSL database lists 55 bills from 21 states. Most are pending, which means their fate is uncertain when legislatures reconvene. Of the few that passed, such as in Georgia and in Indiana, there are different timetables when the new laws are to take effect. Georgia is after the 2020 election. Indiana is before the 2020 election, although state election officials can exempt counties.

What passed in these two states merits scrutiny. It is an audit whose goal is not to verify the unofficial election night results to the greatest extent possible—to try to account for every vote in the closest contests. It is a different objective and methodology, a statistical estimate of the tabulation’s overall accuracy called a “risk-limiting audit.”

In contrast, a 2019 bill backed by the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections to let counties use digital images of paper ballots to conduct more thorough recounts failed. Its opponents included Republicans (no House co-sponsors), activists who oppose using computers in vote counting, and some officials seeking less work, Sancho said.

Conversely, 2019 also saw several states pass voting-related bills intended to tilt the electorate for perceived partisan advantage.

Florida, again, offers several examples. Republicans have received wide press attention for a bill aimed at blocking 1.4 million ex-felons from expediently restoring their voting rights, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would sign. The bill requires former non-violent felons pay court fines. Critics have said the fees were akin to a poll tax.

That wide-ranging bill has other features that could alter who votes in 2020. Like many states, Florida has growing numbers of people voting by mail. The bill pushes back the window for absentee voting, which blunts impulsive last-minute voters. (That change gives officials a little more up-front time to process the ballots, its defenders said.)

The legislation also gives counties two days to fix problems with validating signatures on the mail-in ballot envelopes. In red rural counties, two days is enough time for officials to knock on affected voters’ doors, said Sancho. But in blue urban counties, where officials contact voters by postcards, he said that timetable was intentionally insufficient.

Another electorate-shaping bill passed in Texas. In that increasingly purple state, the bill would make it harder for Libertarian candidates to get on the ballot—critics say to keep voters in the GOP camp, while, conversely, making it easier for Greens to run—to dilute Democratic votes. That’s done through ballot qualification thresholds.

Meanwhile, there’s other backsliding. John Brakey, a voting transparency advocate who has been assessing North Carolina’s landscape, recently learned that election officials in the state’s most populated county do not want to install paper ballot-based voting systems before 2020—as had been expected. The officials are more comfortable with decade-old paperless technology, Brakey said, even if it cannot be independently audited.

“They don’t have the money” to buy new machines, he said. “They hope to extend the deadline. DREs [direct-recording electronic machines] are outlawed on December 31. They would rather deal with the devil they know. Even if they get money, it’s unlikely they would be ready for primary time next March.”

What to Do If 2020 Is Contested?

These examples raise troubling questions. How can such a polarized country believe the election results will be legitimate if vote counts are not more thoroughly and openly verified? And, should the presidential election be disputed, what then? Two nationally known legal scholars recently noted that Congress is currently incapable of resolving a disputed presidential result.

“No neutral referee presently exists,” wrote Ned Foley, a professor of law at Ohio State University who led the drafting of the American Law Institute principles for resolving any ballot counting disputes, and Michael McConnell, a professor of law at Stanford University and an ex-federal appellate judge, in the Hill.

“The Constitution gives Congress the role of declaring the winner of the presidential election. But Congress, being bicameral, cannot perform this important role if the Senate insists that Donald Trump won, while the House is equally adamant that the Democratic candidate did,” they wrote. “Congress, being ever more partisan, stands institutionally incapable of resolving an election contest in a way that supporters of the losing party will view as legitimate. The closer it gets to Inauguration Day, the more precarious this kind of stalemate becomes.”

The scholars proposed that Speaker Pelosi and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell each pick a person, and those two individuals pick a third member of a to-be-formed committee to serve as a “neutral referee.”

“This approach, modeled after private sector arbitration, is the simplest method for finding an umpire whom both sides can accept as fair,” they argued. “But whatever method of selection Pelosi and McConnell prefer, their chosen umpire should be ready before counting ballots begins. They should also pledge to accept the findings of the neutral arbiter unless both agree otherwise, a commitment that maintains the bipartisanship of their arrangement.”

Rarely have legal scholars suggested that a remedy outside the Constitution might be needed before a presidential election. But their view fits with the volatile 2020 landscape that is emerging. There’s a lack of vote count evidence trails and transparent audits to serve as a counterweight to the newest forms of propaganda. And Congress is not poised to handle the power struggle if the presidential result is contested.

The clock has not run out with taking proactive steps before 2020, but it is ticking, and opportunities to act are ebbing away while new worries are emerging.

IMAGE: Citizens vote on a basketball court at a recreation center serving as polling place during the U.S. general election in Greenville, North Carolina, U.S. November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake

Blockchain Ballots? Pilot Project in Denver To Test Mobile Voting App

Blockchain Ballots? Pilot Project in Denver To Test Mobile Voting App

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The debate over online voting—whether an electronic ballot can be sufficiently trusted—is heading into a higher orbit in Denver. City election officials will open their pilot of the nation’s most advanced smartphone mobile voting app that several hundred overseas residents will use in May’s elections to independent examination by observers.

“We wanted and we asked Voatz [the app maker] to develop a means by which outside observers can conduct their own audits independently of the election conducted through the blockchain,” said Jocelyn Bucaro, Denver deputy director of elections.

The blockchain is a way to secure data by putting encrypted, unchangeable pieces of a file, in this case an electronic ballot marked by a smartphone, on computers in different locations that later will be reassembled, printed and counted with other ballots.

“We are hopeful that by the time that we are actually tabulating results for this election, we will have an offering… to be registered election observers through the blockchain to conduct their own audit of what we are reporting,” Bucaro said.

“We’d be the first entity ever to do a third-party digital audit of an election,” said Forrest Senti, Business and Government Initiatives director at the National Cybersecurity Center (NCC), based in Colorado Springs, which has worked with Denver for the past year to plan the pilot and will set up the ballot-handling audit including outside participants.

Observers can assess an “end-to-end verifiable” process, the city’s announcement said. That technical phrase is key, as it is the exacting security and accountability standard that academic critics of online voting have said must be satisfied before considering its use.

Many critics have never expected a voting system developer to assert they can meet that “end-to-end” standard. For years, they have said, and many still say, that software has holes that can be exploited to tilt election outcomes. That conclusion has bolstered the argument that there is no substitute for human-made ink marks on paper ballots. Some leaders in this community were neither impressed with Denver’s staging of an audit inviting skeptics nor even curious about the technologies involved.

“That’s not good enough,” said Jim Soper, a computer programmer and election integrity organizer. “An audit is not a red team test—a hack test,” he said, adding, “A lot of critical outsiders would not participate… They will invite their own people who will not be as critical or as skeptical as they need to be. We have seen this kind of stuff before.”

“Our country is moving toward paper ballots for a reason. Software is hard. Even the most long-term, experienced voting system vendors in our country cannot get it right—and this is a newbie start-up, who comes in with an app, who claims a bunch of stuff,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, founder of the U.S. Vote Foundation, which for the past 15 years has helped overseas voters. “We’re trading one set of problems for another set of problems, and we’re equally unprepared for the new set.”

These hard responses reflect views that were formed when the manufacturers of paperless voting systems over-promised and under-delivered the machinery that many states bought after Florida’s flawed 2000 presidential election. Today, most of the country has gone back to using voting systems built around paper ballots. But what Denver is doing is not resurrecting these old and flawed systems, and it could have far-ranging implications.

Local Pilot, National Stakes

The city’s use of a mobile voting app, following 2018 pilots in West Virginia, is part of a bigger play that could reshape how millions of Americans vote. In short, the smartphone would replace what voters do when they sign into a poll book at a precinct, and then the phone would be used as a ballot-marking device—an electronic pen. The ballots, which are created by the election officials, would be copied and carried by the blockchain.

More specifically, a smartphone’s features are being used to credential the voter; verify their government-issued photo IDs; test that the person using the device is alive and not an avatar or fake; bind that phone to that voter and one ballot; and submit the ballot via the encrypted blockchain. Voatz and its allies in philanthropy, policy and government circles see smartphone voting as a potential option for major slices of society: citizens abroad, people with disabilities, and even states and counties that now vote by mail.

“That’s why we are doing this in the first place. We want to be able to bring people into the room and be able to understand that potential,” said Senti of the NCC, which spent a year assessing the city’s election infrastructure, creating technical guidelines for using blockchains in elections, vetted vendors and will oversee the open audit.

“We are going to have some people from the E.A.C. [Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency regulating overall voting systems] here at the end of the month and be able to have that conversation, and say, ‘Look, we’re leaving these people that want to test these technologies and bring these pilot opportunities to markets, and to provide a voice,’” he said. “The UOCAVA [overseas] population is 3.3 million registered voters, and the turnout is around 7 percent. That is an election [margin in a national race].”

Rarely has a local trial involving so few voters had such big stakes hovering overhead or behind-the-scenes players pushing for a new paradigm. But what is unfolding in Denver didn’t appear overnight. It is a result of many factors, including the absence of actively engaged federal arbiters in recent years—agencies whose reports inventorying internet voting globally or assessing voting system threats have not anticipated the building blocks of the Voatz app, or briefly discuss what the app uses to verify identities.

“It is unfortunate. There’s no federal standard to vet a system like this. I don’t know if they will ever create a standard to do something like this,” said Nimit Sawhney, founder and CEO of Voatz. “The new VVSG 2.0 [EAC’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines] standard allows this [app] to be a part of a bigger voting system, but not a primary voting system. So it might be a while before you see these standards at all. So, in that regime, that scenario, we have to rely on third parties, and those third parties include the FBI, DHS and all those people [at think tanks, in philanthropy and government] as well.”

The technologies that are the building blocks of Voatz’s system underscore how the ground beneath the online voting debate has shifted. These recent developments are the emergence of biometrics as security features in smartphones (2013), the use of blockchains, or distributed ledgers, in finance—notably for cyber-currencies (2016), and a digital identity proofing industry that has grown in recent years.

A 2011 EAC report discussing surveying internet voting, after noting that “a single comprehensive standard for developing and testing internet voting does not exist,” says that election jurisdictions must make their own judgments about “the risks associated with multiple voting channels.” The report emphasizes that every voting system has trade-offs. The open question is where to draw the line on risks in the process.

When asked, Denver’s Bucaro said it was easy to assess risk when it came to a pilot for several hundred overseas voters in a local election.

“We are only using this for a population of voters that already, under federal law, receive their ballots, and, in Colorado, can cast their ballots electronically,” she said. “So, for us, the decision was a bit simpler, because one question we wanted to answer was, ‘Was this more secure than what we were otherwise offering to our military and overseas citizens?’ And the answer is yes. This is a more secure method than asking our voters to fill out their ballot online and return it to us as an email attachment. That’s easy.”

Thus, what Denver and its partners are doing is using a pilot to assess new technologies in a real-world setting, which is how new voting systems or any technology evolves, said Larry Moore, the former CEO of Clear Ballot, which pioneered the use of digital ballot images to account for every vote cast in an audit, and who is advising the start-up.

“We are not saying today that the Voatz system should be rolled out to millions of voters. No one in Voatz is saying that,” Moore said. “What we are saying is that we are anxious to pilot this in real-world settings that cannot be simulated in a lab, where problems come up and we try to solve them in a way that is lasting and is true. It is only through real-world pilots that we can really make progress.”

To date, as Voatz’s critics accurately have pointed out, the start-up has mostly tested its app within trusted circles and has not said what it is doing to protect potential voter privacy concerns, as the app is using a lot of data via the smartphone.

Voatz and its allies say that more closed approach is because there is a history of critics, including some of the advisers who articulated the “end-to-end” security standard in a 2015 report from Dzieduszycka-Suinat’s organization, working to stop any online voting. Some even tried to sabotage a 2016 trial by putting up a fake online voting website to lure unsuspecting voters in a party-run caucus in Utah. Soper defended that effort as a “spoof” to show that what’s seen online cannot be trusted. “They are there to make a technological point,” he said.

But Denver’s pilot and invitation to third parties to independently audit the core of its system—the use of blockchains—opens a new chapter in this narrative. The pilot and audit could push the online voting debate into an orbit where specifics and new technologies are evaluated, even if it is not the red team hacking test that Soper seeks. Or it could be like Krazy Glue fortifying already hardened positions.

“I think if you are against any form of internet voting, chances are it’s hard to convince you,” Bucaro said. “However, I will say this. I think it’s beneficial to have skeptics in the room. I think the more skeptics we have, questioning every aspect of this, the better, because they may think of something that the developers didn’t consider. They may test it in a way that the developers didn’t test. So I think to have them at the table, even if we don’t convince them that this is something that can be secure—or even if we can’t sell it to them—having their perspective is still very important.”