Not Quite a Blog

[Cross-posted to OurVoteLive blog]

In my last voting machine incident roundup, I talked briefly about new voting machine incidents from the OurVoteLive call database. Three days later, there are about 100 or so incidents specifically tagged by call center operators as being a possible machine issue.

Here are some incidents that recently caught my eye and why (these are in order of decreasing seriousness, in my opinion):

• Disability access problems. We've seen a distressing number of incidents reported about various problems with accessible voting systems. Two incidents from earlier this month (OVL#2619 and OVL#3559) report an audio ballot that is "reading the wrong names" and that accessible voting machines in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin are unavailable during early voting, only on election day. Two more recent incidents (OVL#18139 and OVL#19495), report a non-functioning audio ballot and what appears to be a case of "vote-flipping" -- although I don't like using that term -- in an audio ballot interface.

  I know from reports from colleagues with disabilities that disability voting support has been very inconsistent this year. In some cases, the machines aren't set up until a voter with a disability arrives, in other cases machines simply aren't working in a way that a disabled voter could vote privately and independently. In my own work, I was once testing a voting machine and able to inadvertently get the audio ballot into an infinite loop; the technician on-site had to reset the machine. It's unfortunate that accessible voting isn't more usable by people with disabilities after so much R&D and training has gone into its development and deployment.

• Bleeding pens. An incident report from Lake Forrest, Illinois (OVL#15104) reports that the pens used to mark optical scan ballots ballots are bleeding through the paper. Black ballpoint pens are a good bet for any optical scan ballot, but felt-tip or other very wet pens could very well bleed through to the other side of the ballot. If there are only contests on one side of the ballot, there's not a big problem. If there are contests on both side of the ballot, it's conceivable that the bleed-through might change how the optical scan system reads the ballot.

• Capacity issues. Among the multitude of reports of very long lines in early voting, incident OVL#15857 shows just how bad high turnout can get. The caller reports after waiting in a long early voting line, she was confronted with an optical scan machine where "ballots were crammed in and spilling out of the machine." After being told that she was "holding up the line" by a pollworker, she cast her ballot and was unsure if it would be read properly. This is unfortunate and there would come a point where, if a replacement machine hadn't arrived, pollworkers should consider either securely emptying the ballot box to make room for more ballots or temporarily accepting ballots without scanning them in an auxiliary ballot box. Yikes.

• Possible evidence of selective calibration. A caller from Manassas, Virginia reports (OVL#14318) a possible miscalibration of the machine; however, in this case the extent of the miscalibration seems to vary across the screen. In the EVEREST study of voting systems in Ohio (I was part of that team), we pointed out (see pg. 71) that selective miscalibration could be used as a way to frustrate voter intentions. However, Manassas uses the Sequoia AVC Edge, and in the EVEREST report that attack was specific to the ES&S iVotronic which has a more complicated calibration algorithm (involving 20 individual calibration targets instead of a handful). Anyway, this isn't direct evidence that this is happening or that anyone intentionally miscalibrated a machine, it's just the first evidence I've seen of a voter noting a difference in miscalibration across the screen.

• Where's my receipt? A number of incidents report voters being frustrated with not getting a receipt after voting (OVL#4998, OVL#5668, OVL#17022). One voter from Pasco County, Florida, which uses a very new piece of optical scan equipment -- the DS200 -- from ES&S, reports "Machine was designed to dispense receipts and voter saw evidence of past receipts in machine." What is happening here is that 1) the voter mistakenly thinks he should receive a receipt for his cast ballot and 2) the voter mistakenly thinks the receipt printer on the DS200 is for that purpose. Voters frequently think they should receive some sort of receipt for voting. Of course, the "I Voted" sticker is as close as most people get: allowing people to leave the polling place with an official record of how they voted could be used for vote buying or coercion. As for the receipt printer on the DS200, that's actually an event log -- something that records all errors, messages, etc. from the machine and is used to print zero tapes at the beginning of the day and totals tapes at the end of the day.

• Usability/Education issue. A voter from North Carolina (OVL#16759) mistook a message from a voting machine that was asking him to "confirm" that he intended to not make choices in a few contests for it asking him to "confirm" that he wanted to go back and fill in the rest of his ballot. This misunderstanding meant that he cast his ballot before fully filling it out. Voters need to practice working with these kinds of machines, they need to be educated about what to expect when they vote and they need to read the instructions very carefully.

• GOTV-related issue. A voter in Texas (OVL#15441) calls to report that he voted early but is still getting calls from campaigns saying he didn't vote. To support Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaigns, many jurisdictions publish a list during early voting and on election day of registered voters who have not yet voted. Campaigns can then selectively contact those voters to persuade them to get out and vote. Here, it appears that he is listed as not yet having voted. This could mean that he signed in on the wrong line, or that a pollworker forgot to cross off his name. We can't be sure. There's little chance that his vote was not counted, however.

• Fleeing voter. Similar to the premature voter I pointed out in the last roundup (OVL#10678), we now have a report of a fleeing voter (OVL#13960). This voter from West Virginia reports that he left his machine in the "review mode", or the last page of the ballot that summarizes the voter's selections, instead of casting his ballot. Jurisdictions have different procedures for dealing with "fleeing voters" and I'm uncertain as to what they do in Wheeling West Virginia with their ES&S iVotronic machines. I would hope that the next voter in line would have alerted the pollworkers and that they would have cast the ballot.

For a bit of levity, here are a couple of ones I found a bit funny:

• Lolcats? A voter from Cataret County, North Carolina (OVL#14507) is concerned given how his county has made national news in the past with machine problems. The incident description concludes: "Voter wondering is he can request watchdogs for the polling places[?]". That phrasing is very lolcat-esque and makes me wonder if this isn't a gang of punk rock kittehs waiting to pounce on "watchdogs"... Arf!

• Simpsons? A caller from Florida (OVL#6287) seems like they've watch the leaked Simpsons clip from tomorrow night's halloween special one too many times: the voter claims that the voting machine said, "Thank you for voting for McCain" after he attempted to vote for Barack Obama and cast is ballot.