Not Quite a Blog

I'm excited to announce that we have the following confirmed invited talks for EVT/WOTE 2009:

• Keynote: Larry Norden, NYU Brennan Center
• Invited Talk: Hon. Rush Holt, NJ-12 U.S. Representative
• Invited Talk: Ben Adida, Harvard Unviersity, "Voting Cryptography Tutorial for Non-Cryptographers"

In addition to 19 the dynamite technical papers, we will also have:

• A rump session consisting of presentations that run the gamut: from work in progress to humor and artistic takes on election issues (chaired by Eric Rescorla)
• A demo session consisting of prototype voting systems (and others)

Hope to see many there: http://www.usenix.org/events/evtwote09/

(I'm traveling this week in California for meetings and the Privacy Law Scholar's Conference, so Mike and Eric beat me to this announcement...)

I'm delighted to announce that the Program for the Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections 2009 (EVT/WOTE '09) is now available:

http://www.usenix.org/event/evtwote09/tech/tech.html

The workshop will be in Montreal, Canada from 10-11 August co-located with USENIX Security. As one of three co-chairs---David Jefferson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Tal Moran of Harvard being the other two---I am very excited about this year's line-up.

Our keynote address will be delivered by the Brennan Center's Larry Norden. Papers include submissions on usability, forensics, security, cryptography, end-to-end systems and auditing. We will also have a "rump" session (more from Eric) for informal presentations (works in progress, humor, etc.) and a demo session where developers and vendors can bounce their systems off of a technical crowd.

(Note for those unfamiliar: All major publishing in computer science and related fields is done at conferences... that is, if you want to get tenure or a promotion as an academic in these fields, you'd better be publishing in these venues, journals be damned. :) USENIX Security is one of three of the most prestigious venues for computer security. We've "co-located" EVT with USENIX Security for the past four years... which makes it a bit difficult to attract people from other disciplines that don't value this particular venue. Anyway, we've worked hard to make EVT and now EVT/WOTE (we combined with another workshop) a multidisciplinary venue that is rigorously peer-reviewed.)

Here are the paper titles, for your browsing:

• Now Do Voters Notice Review Screen Anomalies? A Look at Voting System Usability
• Style guide for voting system documentation: Why user-centered documentation matters to voting security
• E-Voting and Forensics: Complement or Contradiction?
• Detecting Voter Fraud in an Electronic Voting Context: An Analysis of the Unlimited Reelection Vote in Venezuela
• The New Jersey Voting-machine Lawsuit and the AVC Advantage DRE Voting
• Can DREs Provide Everlasting Security? The Case of Return-Oriented Programming and the AVC Advantage
• Understanding the Security Properties of Ballot-Based Verification Techniques
• VoteBox Nano: A Smaller, Stronger FPGA-based Voting Machine
• Some Consequences of Paper Fingerprinting for Elections
• Electing a University President using Open-Audit Voting: Analysis of real-world use of Helios
• Efficient Receipt-Free Ballot Casting Resistant to Covert Channels
• On Subliminal Channels in Encrypt-on-Cast Voting Systems
• Permutations in Pret a Voter with Paillier Encryption
• Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me: Using Scales to Select Ballots for Auditing
• Automating Voting Terminal Event Log Analysis
• On the Security of Election Audits with Low Entropy Randomness
• Interstate Voter Registration Database Matching: The Oregon-Washington 2008 Pilot Project
• Software Support for Software-Independent Auditing
• Implementing Risk-Limiting Audits in California

(Cross-posted at Freedom to Tinker.)

Short version: we now have gobs of voting system ITA reports, publicly available and hosted by the NSF ACCURATE e-voting center.

Long version: Before the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) took over the testing and certification of voting systems under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), this critical function was performed by volunteers. The National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) recognized a need for voting system testing and partnered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to establish a qualification program that would test systems as having met or exceeded the requirements of the 1990 and 2002 Voting System Standards.^*

However, as I've lamented many, many times over the years, the input, output and intermediate work product of the NASED testing regime were completely secret, due to proprietary concerns on behalf of the manufacturers. Once a system completed testing, members of the public could see that an entry was made in a publicly-available spreadsheet listing the tested components and a NASED qualification number for the system. But the public was permitted no other insight into the NASED qualification regime.

Researchers were convinced from what evidence was available that the quality of the testing was highly inadequate and that the expertise didn't exist within either the testing laboratories to perform adequate testing or the NASED technical committee to competently review the ultimate test reports submitted by the laboratories (called Independent Testing Authorities (ITA)). Naturally, when reports of problems started to crop-up, like the various Hursti vulnerabilities with Diebold memory cards, the NASED system scrambled to figure out what went wrong.

I know have more moderate views with respect to the NASED regime: sure, it was pretty bad and a lot of serious vulnerabilities slipped through the cracks, but I'm not yet convinced that just having the right people or a different process in place would have resulted in fewer problems in the field. To have fixed the NASED system would have required improvements on all fronts: the technology, the testing paradigms, the people involved and the testing and certification process.

The EAC has since taken over testing and certification. Their process is notable in its much higher level of openness and accountability; the test plans are published (previously claimed as proprietary by the testing labs), the test reports are published (previously claimed as proprietary by the vendors) and the process is specified in detail with a program manual, a laboratory manual, notices of clarification, etc.

This is all great and it helps to increase the transparency of the EAC certification program. But, what about the past? What about the testing that NASED did? Well, we don't know much about it for a number of reasons, chief among them that we never saw any of the materials mentioned above that are now available in the new EAC system.

Through a fortunate FOIA request made of the EAC on behalf of election sleuth Susan Greenhalgh, we now have available a slew of ITA reports from one of the ITAs, Ciber.

The reports are available at the following location (hosted by our NSF ACCURATE e-voting center):

http://accurate-voting.org/docs/ita-reports/

These reports cover the Software ITA testing performed by the ITA Ciber for the following voting systems:

• Automark AIMS 1.0.9
• Diebold GEMS 1.18.19
• Diebold GEMS 1.18.22
• Diebold GEMS 1.18.24
• Diebold AccuVote-TSx Model D
• Diebold AccuVote-TSx Model D w/ AccuView Printer
• Diebold Assure 1.0
• Diebold Assure 1.1
• Diebold Election Media Processor 4.6.2
• Diebold Optical Scan Accumulator Adapter
• Hart System 4.0
• Hart System 4.1
• Hart System 6.0
• Hart System 6.2
• Hart System 6.2.1

I'll be looking at these in my leisure over coming weeks and pointing out interesting features of these reports and the associated correspondence included in the FOIA production.

^*The distinction between certification and qualification, although vague, appears to be that under the NASED system, states did the ultimate certification of a voting system for fitness in future elections.

Co-founder of VotersUnite! and good friend, John Gideon, died last night in Seattle after suddenly coming down with (what appears to have been) bacterial meningitis.

I haven't seen an obituary yet, but when one is written, it will show that he spent his life in service to this country, with the last few years as a central pivot point in the election integrity movement.

(BradBlog has a moving post about John up now; however, as John knew, I don't endorse, link to or otherwise traffic in Brad Friedman. So, you'll have to go find it yourself.)

Frankly, I am having a hard time getting much done today, as my thoughts constantly return to John, and the uncertain future of all things election-related. It's so true that "we don't know what we had until it's gone", but I'd like to think I appreciated John and his work quite a bit when he was still with us. However, to fill his shoes is going to be a big task; one that will take many of us to pitch in where we can.

I'd like to point something out and make a proposal. John was underappreciated, in my opinion. People who knew him probably knew him best through either his 7-days-a-week Daily Voting News which aggregated all news stories about voting technology for over five years. He also tirelessly worked to keep all of us honest; through intellectual inquiry for people like me, through watchdog-like activity and public records requests for election officials and by not pulling punches when it came to getting to the bottom of advocate positions and perspectives.

So, now the proposal: I think the best way to honor John Gideon would be to set up an award, scholarship or fellowship for under-appreciated election integrity work. There are too damn many ways for people who are at the forefront of their work to be recognized: MacArthur awards, Nobels, Fields, Turings, etc. What we need more of are honors for people that are just doing their goddamn jobs, doing them well, consistently and happy to continue to do so. That was John.

Many of my colleagues were disappointed to hear that Riverside County, California had both not completed its hand tally of paper records but also that this tally lasted well into the new year.

Riverside Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore answers recent criticisms in an Op-Ed in the Press Enterprise ("Redundant Tallying"). Among other things, she says:

Of the record 657,000 ballots cast in Riverside County, 72,251 were cast electronically. This was more than were cast any other county in the state. In San Bernardino County, for instance, only 20,000 votes were cast electronically -- a difference of more than 50,000 ballots.

This continues to puzzle me. Most counties severely restricted and discouraged use of DREs in order to avoid having tens of thousands of paper records to manually tally. This almost feels as if Dunmore specifically encouraged their use in order to make a point that the 100% manual count requirement from the SoS would be burdensome for counties that didn't use optical scan technology.

Dunmore goes on to vocalize a frequent refrain:

In the end, the results of our mandated hand tally, once completed, were exactly the same as the results reported by the voting units on Election Day. No discrepancies. No errors. They were 100 percent correct. [...]

While I understand that the secretary of state's requirements are designed to ensure accuracy, Riverside County has utilized electronic voting for more than eight years, and each election's results have proved accurate.

Great! That's exactly what a good audit of working technology should show. Of course, the implication here is "Why should we do this?". Well, we don't look at companies and say, "Jeez, the audits of your books for the last few years have been perfect. Why don't you stop doing audits of your books?" The reality is that audits are an increasingly necessary part of election administration and the post-election canvass process. If anything, we need to regularize more, richer notions of audits -- more than just hand tallies -- into election administration.

Dunmore finishes with a lament about costs of voting systems:

The hand-tally mandate is a deterrent to using the millions of dollars in electronic voting equipment we have sitting idle. It would be a disservice to voters to eliminate early-voting programs because of a duplicative mandate that saps resources. But that is a decision we must carefully weigh in these difficult budget times.

Yes, this is tough; early voting poses a real problem in that the preferred technology, optical scan, is very hard to support for early voting. We want to make early voting easy for voters and election administrators. Unfortunately, the voting systems we have today are both expensive and of low quality.

To be clear, I don't agree that a 100% count is required, technically, of each vote cast on a DRE+VVPAT system. In fact, manual tallies of a random sample of machines where the sample size is contingent upon the margin in close races should do the trick nicely. Can anyone defend a 100% manual tally of DREs? To me, it only makes political sense as a deterrent.

We want smarter audits, not blunt ones.

(Please forward widely! You can find email-appropriate text, in Markdown format, here: http://josephhall.org/tmp/cfp_evt09.text.)

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2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE '09)

August 10--11, 2009
Montreal, Canada

Sponsored by USENIX: The Advanced Computing Systems Association, ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections and IAVoSS: The International Association for Voting System Sciences

EVT/WOTE '09 will be co-located with the 18th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '09), August 10--14, 2009.

Important Dates

Refereed paper submissions due: April 17, 2009, 11:59 p.m. PDT
Notification of acceptance: May 26, 2009
Final files due: June 23, 2009

Workshop Organizers

Program Chairs

• David Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Joseph Lorenzo Hall, University of California, Berkeley/Princeton University
• Tal Moran, Harvard University

Program Committee

• Ben Adida, Harvard University
• Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology
• Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research
• Aaron Burstein, University of California, Berkeley
• Joseph Calandrino, Princeton University
• Aggelos Kiayias, University of Connecticut
• Andy Neff
• Lawrence Norden, New York University
• Whitney Quesenbery, WQUsability
• Eric Rescorla, RTFM, Inc.
• Ron Rivest, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Daniel Sandler, Rice University
• Vanessa Teague, University of Melbourne
• David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley
• Ping Yee, Google
• Additional Program Committee Members to be decided shortly

Overview

In the United States and many other countries, most votes are counted and transported electronically, but there are numerous practical and policy implications of introducing electronic machines into the voting process. Both voting technology and its regulations are very much in flux, with open concerns including accuracy, reliability, robustness, security, transparency, equality, privacy, usability, and accessibility.

This year, the organizers of the USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology workshop (EVT) have merged EVT with the IAVoSS Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (WOTE) to create a joint two-day workshop (EVT/WOTE '09). EVT/WOTE seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines, ranging from computer science and human-computer interaction experts through political scientists, legal experts, election administrators, and voting equipment vendors. EVT/WOTE seeks to publish original research on important problems in all aspects of electronic voting.

Soliciting New Material

In addition to the areas in which EVT has seen very strong submissions in the past (below), we are especially interested in the following types of contributions:

• Technical work from vendor engineers and developers.
• Scholarly work concerning legal and policy challenges.
• Work involving research with or about accessibility.
• Assessments, proposals and policy prescriptions involving registration technologies (e-pollbooks, online registration).
• Papers based on direct experiences with recent elections, possibly from election officials and their staff.

Standard Material

In general, we welcome papers on voting topics including but not limited to:

• Voter registration and pre-voting processes;
• Vote collection;
• Vote tabulation;
• Election auditing;
• Design, implementation, and evaluation of new voting technologies and protocols;
• Scientific evaluations of existing voting technologies;
• System testing methodologies;
• Deployment and lifecycle issues;
• Threat mitigation;
• Usability;
• Accessibility;
• Legal issues, including the ADA, HAVA, intellectual property, and nondisclosure agreements on voting system evaluations, and;
• Issues with and evolution of voting technology standards.
• Election integrity
• Ballot integrity
• Ballot secrecy
• Voter anonymity
• Voter authentication
• Receipts and coercion resistance
• Anonymous channels
• Secure bulletin boards
• Threat models
• Formal security analysis
• Electoral systems
• Case studies of electronic voting experiments
• Privacy, verifiability, and transparency in e-voting

EVT/WOTE '09 will be a two-day event, Monday, August 10, and Tuesday, August 11, 2009, co-located with the 18th USENIX Security Symposium in Montreal, Canada. In addition to paper presentations, the workshop may include panel discussions with substantial time devoted to questions and answers. The Proceedings of the workshop will be published electronically. Attendance at the workshop will be open to the public, although talks and refereed paper presentations will be by invitation only.

Refereed Paper Submission Instructions

All submissions must be in English and must include a title and the authors' names and affiliations. Papers must not be anonymized. We will consider both short position papers (up to eight (8) pages long) and longer, conference-style submissions (up to a maximum of sixteen (16) pages). Longer, conference-style papers, if rejected, will not be reconsidered as shorter position papers. Papers should be formatted 11 point font, a4 or letter paper and reasonable margins. If you wish, please make use of this LaTeX style file and sample LaTeX file (see the corresponding PDF here) when preparing your paper for submission. The page limits do not include the bibliography nor any appendices. Appendices may be used for material that does not fit in the main body of the paper (such as extended legal arguments or technical proofs). Note that reviewers are not required to read the appendices, so the papers should be intelligible without them. Papers that exceed the main paper page limit may be summarily rejected.

Each submission should have a contact author who should provide full contact information (email, phone, fax, mailing address). One author of each accepted paper will be required to present the work at the workshop.

Authors are required to submit papers by 11:59 p.m. PDT, April 17, 2009. This is a hard deadline; no extensions will be given. All submissions to EVT/WOTE '09 must be electronic, in PDF format, via a this Web form. Authors are encouraged to follow the U.S. National Science Foundation's guidelines for preparing PDF grant submissions:

https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/documents/pdf_create/pdfcreate_01.jsp

All submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, correctness, and clarity. In addition to citing relevant published work, authors should relate their submission to any other relevant submissions of theirs in other venues that are under review at the same time as their submission to the EVT/WOTE '09.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, and plagiarism constitute dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may, on the recommendation of a program chair, take action against authors who have committed them. In some cases, program committees may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the integrity of papers under consideration. If a violation of these principles is found, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, barring the authors from submitting to or participating in USENIX conferences for a set period, contacting the authors' institutions, and publicizing the details of the case.

Note, however, that we expect that many papers accepted for EVT/WOTE '09 will eventually be extended as full papers suitable for presentation at future conferences or for future journal publications.

Authors uncertain whether their submission meets USENIX's guidelines should contact the program chairs at evtwote09chairs@usenix.org or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX EVT/WOTE '09 Web site; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

Authors will be notified of acceptance decisions via email on or before May 26, 2009. If you do not receive notification by that date, contact the program chairs at evtwote09chairs@usenix.org. Each accepted submission may be assigned a member of the program committee to act as its shepherd during the preparation of the final paper. The assigned member will act as a conduit for feedback from the committee to the authors.

All papers will be available online to registered attendees prior to the workshop and will be available online to everyone starting on August 10. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org.

Panel Discussions

Depending on the quantity and quality of paper submissions, the program chairs may set aside one or two sessions for panel discussions. Ideas for panel discussions, including a title, brief description, and list of individuals participating on the panel, should be sent to evtwote09chairs@usenix.org by the paper submission deadline.

System Demos

We intend to provide an opportunity to demo systems and prototypes during the Workshop. Please contact the program chairs at evtwote09chairs@usenix.org.

Registration Materials

Complete program and registration information will be available in July 2009 on the workshop Web site. If you would like to receive the latest USENIX conference information, please join our mailing list.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sent a letter to Chair Gineen Beach of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) outlining three proposals that she thinks will markedly improve the integrity of voting systems in the country.

I've put a copy of Bowen's letter here (87kB PDF).

Bowen's three proposals are:

• Vulnerability Reporting -- The EAC should require that vendors disclose vulnerabilities, flaws, problems, etc. to the EAC as the system certification authority and to all the state election directors that use the affected equipment.
• Uniform Incident Reporting -- The EAC should create and adopt procedures that jurisdictions can follow to collect and report data about incidents they experience with their voting systems.
• Voting System Performance Measurement -- As part of the Election Day Survey, the EAC should systematically collect data from election officials about how voting systems perform during general elections.

In my opinion, each of these would be a welcome move for the EAC.

These proposals would put into place a number of essential missing elements of administering computerized elections equipment. First, for the users of these systems, election officials, it can be extremely frustrating and debilitating if they suspect that some voting system flaw is responsible for problems they're experiencing. Often, when errors arise, contingency planning requires detailed knowledge about specific details of a voting system flaw. Without knowing as much as possible about the problem they're facing, election officials can exacerbate the problem. At best, not knowing about a potential flaw can do what Bowen describes: doom the election official, and others with the same equipment, to repeatedly encounter the flaw in subsequent elections. Of course, vendors are the most likely to have useful information on a given flaw, and they should be required to report this information to both the EAC and election officials.

Often the most information we have about voting system incidents come from reports from local journalists. These reporters don't tend to cover high technology too often; their reports are often incomplete and in many cases simply and obviously incorrect. Having a standardized set of elements that an election official can collect and report about voting system incidents will help to ensure that the data comes directly from those experiencing a given problem. The EAC should design such procedures and then a system for collecting and reporting these issues to other election officials and the public.

Finally, many of us were disappointed to learn that the 2008 Election Day survey would not include questions about voting system performance. Election Day is a unique and hard-to-replicate event where very little systematic data is collected about voting machine performance. The OurVoteLive and MyVote1 efforts go a long way towards actionable, qualitative data that can help to increase enfranchisement. However, self-reported data from the operators of the machinery of our democracy would be a gold mine in terms of identifying and examining trends in how this machinery performs, both good and bad.

I know a number of people, including Susannah Goodman at Common Cause as well as John Gideon and Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite!, who have been championing one or another of these proposals in their advocacy. The fact that Debra Bowen has penned this letter is a testament to the reason behind their efforts.

You'd be surprised how many people I talk to who refuse to register to vote do so because they think (correctly or incorrectly) that this will lead to them being called less for jury duty. Well, I usually say, not everyone votes; that is, the judicial machinery typically has to use other sources of data on local residents to fill out their jury pools, such as motor vehicle records. By saying this, I'm trying to make the case---although I must admit I cannot know for sure---that it's more valuable to play a regular part in representative democracy than to fear the occasional jury duty call (and, besides, you'll probably get those anyway if you drive, etc.).

Now, from the San Mateo County Elections Blog, we learn that the case can be even worse: if your DMV and voter registration records don't match, you might get called for jury duty much more often ("Jury Duty pool comes from DMV and Voter Registration"). The take-away seems to be that it's in your best interests to make sure that your DMV and voter registration records agree such that the powers that be think there's only one human out there at your physical, mailing, etc. addresses with various permutations on your name.

Unfortunately, this only increases the relevance of the arguments from the people I describe at the beginning of this post. Sigh.

One thing I think everyone should take a moment to consider is standardizing their own name. What the hell, you say? Well, about ten years ago I settled on always writing my name down the same way, "Joseph Lorenzo Hall" (this was right after I had decided not to change my name due to my name being "Joseph L. Hall" in the drafts of my first real paper). People can call me whatever they want, but when they write a name down---or use a name in an official capacity---that refers to me, it should be the full thing, "Joseph Lorenzo Hall". I think, but cannot prove, that this has lead to some real benefit to me.

Link: http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/edley-pew-2008.mp3

The high-point of last weeks' Pew/JEHT conference, "Voting in America", was seeing the Dean of Berkeley Law, Chris Edley, give a keynote during dinner on Tuesday. With his permission, I am making available audio from his address. Find it here (30 minutes long and 18MB in size):

Chris starts by talking from the perspective of being part of the Obama transition team and to what extent election reform will be a focus. He then goes on to describe his views on federalism vs. localism in election administration, building a consensus vision for election reform and how we need to spark desire for election reform by arguing in terms of fundamental values.

Read on for my summary of his talk...

Disclaimer: any errors in the summary below are my own, and apologies for the few instances of side-talk in the audio.

In terms of the transition, he comes out the gate saying that there are, undoubtedly, more pressing matters demanding the incoming Presidents attention (i.e., the economy, national security, energy & climate change, health care, education and immigration):

I don't expect weekly meetings with the President to talk about election administration. Frankly, we probably don't want him to be having weekly meetings about election administration given [this list of priorities].

He then went on to the meat of his remarks, describing a few areas where he thinks reform should go forward.

He first talked about the divided philosophies at work in election administration. He was surprised in previous work, with the US Commission on Civil Rights and the Carter-Ford Commission, that many people involved with elections "think of the franchise as this precious jewel box that they have to guard carefully... and be very careful about who can hold it, open it and polish it." This is in contrast with people who consider voting as "something that should be shared widely so that democracy can flourish." Bridging this divide is one important assignment for election reformers... in his words: "The distinction between election administration and voting rights should disappear, and we should be united on an agenda of election rights."

Chris then went on to describe the complexity of the politics surrounding elections: "Our governance strategy for election administration [...] puts us in a situation where the infrastructure of our democracy is competing with potholes... and parks... and prisons... and health care... and pensions... and education." Federalism, often ends up protecting election officials when they make wacky, disparate decisions about the administration of elections. In Edley's view:

I would suggest to you that our aspirations for democracy in the 21st century are not the same as they were in the latter part of the 18th century. The strategy for bringing about the quality of democracy we want, I think is going to require some compromises on our commitments to localism in this arena. [...] I think we passed a milestone [in Florida 2000] in which localism is going to be increasingly forced to deal with the demands of a national sense of what is fair, what is efficient and what is truly democratic.

Edley then described how the real problems we have are in terms of inequality: the huge disparities in spoiled ballots, purged voters, waits in lines, etc.:

The question is whether the quality of the democratic infrastructure is coded to your ZIP code or your color. The next great challenge is to think of Bush v. Gore, not in the technical sense but in the aspirational sense, that everyone in the polity deserves the same quality of support for their effort to engage in the political process.

Edley does recognize that "fairness" is a large gray area, but that there are real problems in how "fair" our election experience actually is. Referencing the Governor of Virginia's comments that people wait in lines for other things---why not voting?---and the Secretary of State of Florida's similar comments that day about waiting in line at Disney World:

This is not Zimbabwe. We should not create a new poll tax in the form of a 2, 3, 4 hour wait to cast a vote.

That is, for example, large disparities in wait times within a jurisdiction are patently unfair. We need to work to address these sources of unfairness.

So, what are the next steps in Edley's mind? He made the point that national voter ID is not seen as an anathema in other countries. This is to say, by example, we need to use technologies to give us leverage to improve the process and promote fairness where we can:

[On the Carter-Ford Commission,] the reason were were enthusiastic about touchscreens is that we sensed the potential for assisting language minorities and people with disabilities. We sensed the potential of making voting as flexible as getting money out of an ATM; the possibility that the technology, wherever you were in the country, could flash on the screen the ballot appropriate for the jurisdiction in which we reside.

We should decide collectively what is that vision---5, 10, 15 years from now---so that we're moving in the same direction on multiple paths. That consensus-building effort is the single most important thing we can do in the next two years.

Edley then talked briefly about voter fraud. From his perspective, he sees largely unfounded claims about the extent of voter fraud. So he called for a substantial research investment in understand the characteristics of vote fraud.

He wraps his talk up about talking about fomenting reform via attention to nuts and bolts versus focusing change in terms of values:

What we have to do is not to improve the quality of election administration, what we have to do is be advocates for, be warriors for election rights. It's making people believe that they have a right to world-class infrastructure for this democracy. To let people believe they have a right to be able vote with ease and have their vote counted and have their officials be accountable. It's not just about public administration: it's about our freedoms, it's about our character and it's about our hopes. Now, that's sex.... and it's a hell of a lot more important than potholes.

[cross-posted to the OurVoteLive blog]

I'm going to try and do today what I didn't have time to do yesterday: some discussion of voting machine and voting technology incidents. Since I was based out of OVL's Simpson Thatcher call center in NYC, I'll first talk about the main states we covered: New Jersey and Michigan.

New Jersey - Early on we were getting tons of reports about broken machines and emergency ballots. In a number of cases poll workers were confused and were offering provisional ballots instead of emergency ballots. In follow-up on a few cases, this was simply poll workers issuing emergency ballots and having voters place them in provisional envelopes without asking the voters to fill out the provisional information (affidavit?). Places we followed up with further here ensured us that they were no longer using the provisional envelopes past the mid-morning. Unfortunately, some of these polling places will undoubtedly run out of emergency ballots by the end of the day. Two other consistent problems with the AVC Advantages are "premature voters" and "fleeing voters". In these cases voters either: 1) report accidentally casting their ballot -- pressing the "VOTE" button -- after making only a few selections on the ballot (casting an incomplete ballot) and 2) report either entering a booth with an uncast ballot on it or realizing later that they neglected to cast their ballot. A few voters reported what might be broken buttons or dead lights on the Advantage... they report having pushed a button next to their candidate of choice and the button not lighting up. It's hard to tell here if the button is broken -- vote not registered or cast -- or the light is broken -- vote cast but not apparent.

Michigan - The big story in Michigan was that optical scanners were breaking down en masse. I have a feeling this is related to the fact that some MI jurisdictions have not been able to perform preventive maintenance on their machines since they were purchased three years ago due to contractual warranty restrictions (see this letter to EAC from the Oakland County, MI Clerk: http://tinyurl.com/64hrmn). Most of the MI reports concerned broken, dysfunctional or nonfunctional optical scanners. Some voters were surprised that they have to cast their ballots into auxiliary bins or ballot boxes instead of the scanner; some refuse to do so and wait, causing very long lines. The other story in MI is a lack or shortage of privacy sleeves. These are essentially large manila folders and it appears that voters have to wait in line with their ballot in a privacy sleeve before casting their vote, thus the shortage given long lines.

More later...