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Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment, I’m Dori Smith

We turn to the recount of Connecticut’s Second Congressional District once again with part two in our ongoing investigation into voting machine security at towns using the AccuVote Optical Scan machines made by Diebold. The machines were used in 25 towns, ten of which were in the Second District where Democrat Joe Courtney beat incumbent Rob Simmons by a mere 91 votes.

An audit of some of the towns using the optical scan voting machines for the first time revealed differences in the results of as many as six votes in Hartford. If all of the towns in the state had used the machines and all had six vote variations the election results could have been off by as much as 1014 votes. The discrepancies were caused by either voter error or changes made as a result of having poll workers look at the votes with their own eyes.

(Look for upcoming reports on the Audit. We spoke with the Republican registrars in Hartford where a city official race was found to have a six vote varietion. In the high profile race for the Senate Democrat Ned Lamont had a three vote variation and Independent joe lieberman had a one vote variation. Other variations found in the results were also in the single digits.)

Connecticut officials have already purchased the AccuVote Optical Scan machines manufactured by Diebold and provided by LHS Associates in Methuen, Massachusetts. Voting rights groups have expressed satisfaction that a paper ballot is created by the AccuVote machines. But True Vote Connecticut for example, notes the need for more clear and up to date protocols from the Secretary of State’s office for voting officials in cities and towns who will be the final line of defense against voter fraud.

You can find True Vote Connecticut at Truevotect.org and you can find part one of this investigation online at Talknationradio.org

The Secretary of State’s office has said that they too will be looking into the Talk Nation Radio investigation of voting machine vulnerabilities in the Second District during the recount. We will hear from the Secretary of State, Susan Bysiewicz and Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara in the second part of today’s program.

We turn first to Bill Bunnell a voting rights activist who was so troubled by voting machine problems that came up during the election of 2000 that he began to research voting machines and voting rights. An engineer by training Bunnell is now up to date on both the machines and the ongoing efforts in the Connecticut Secretary of State’s office to ensure the vote.

Bill Bunnell welcome to Talk Nation Radio.

Good afternoon.

Dori Smith: You have been monitoring the vote tell us about exactly what you saw when you were observing a recount in, I believe you said it was Montville Connecticut?

Bill Bunnell: Yes in the Second District. The problems right from the beginning were that there was as might have been expected confusion as to what to do. They had expected to use their back up machines. The state had provided each of the 25 towns with two Diebold AccuVote machines to be used for Election Day voting. Apparently most towns did prepare both of their machines for use on Election Day but then only put one machine on line.

So the first problem they had in Montville was in getting to put in use machines that had not been used on Election Day and in one case they had to make use of a machine that had not been programmed to run on Election Day and they accomplished that by putting in a new card, as I remember it. With that they went ahead and opened up the cardboard boxes, which they had contained and sealed with tape, as somewhat required by the handbook, with the secure ballots that were taken out of the ballot box of the machine on Election Day night.

They were a scrambled mess of papers and they proceeded to try to set these papers in order and then proceeded with different teams to complete one district and then proceed on to the next. The ballots were to have been looked at by a Democrat and a Republican to decide whether or not that ballot clearly indicated the vote and then that was passed on to the machine feeders who would put the ballot through the previously unused machine and record and this vote being recorded on a fresh memory card. I don’t know whether you found somewhat the same procedure in Bolton where I believe you were. (Indeed, we were, and we saw some variations in the details of selecting irregular ballots and determinations as to how paper ballots were screened and recounted by hand that need further review. See Talk Nation Radio report on the recount.)

Dori Smith: You had said something about the introduction of a memory card from the possession of an LHS employee. Talk about what happened when the LHS employee you said took a memory card out of his pocket?

Bill Bunnell: That wasn’t actually used. I was surprised that he had it available but they discovered that the card they had the card they needed so they did not have to end up using the card that the LHS rep had in hand. My surprise at that was that it would be that routine for them to take a card which had been under no control, no chain of custody control from the time it had been programmed at LHS.

Dori Smith: We did hear from LHS representatives that they had plans to take memory cards out if there was a machine failure and put those memory cards in what they hoped would be new working machines. Or they were going to reprogram new memory cards or use memory cards that were hopefully going to be on hand. And of course all of this handling of the memory cards was of great concern to the professor working at the University of Connecticut, Alex Shvartsman who has been looking into voting security.

When you were at the Montville sight and the LHS worker was prepared to pull out a brand new memory card and start using that one what ran through your mind? What were your first thoughts when you watched that happen?

Bill Bunnell: The first thought that went through my mind was oh no! (chuckles). Remember I’m there as a public observer. I’m not there as a party observer. They could have spoken. But really as you’ve described earlier what we’ve got as a concern here is the basic question of how much of this whole process do we outsource? Are we totally dependent upon a well intentioned, well experienced company in another state who’s going to control our election process? I don’t think there’s any question that the Connecticut elections this year had been outsourced and would not have gotten done without their (staff from LHS Associate’s) presence.

Dori Smith: When we’re observers we don’t know what the machines are doing. We’re only seeing an operation that’s very similar to a hand held calculator. The votes go in they get counted, tally one. But when it comes to counting the overall vote we’re told that it’s a fail proof system. Would you say that at this point you have certainty that it is?

Bill Bunnell: No, I don’t have certainty but I do have faith that we have a piece of paper, the ballot that has been marked and that humans can sit down and decide from that with a higher degree of certainty what the vote has been. And it is to that ultimate authority if you will that I think establishes the faith as highly as we can get to.

Going on right as we speak in Sarasota Florida is a recount of touch screen voting machines without any paper ballot available to guide a recount or to provide a recount and that is going to be a most interesting study.

Dori Smith: It’s very possible that the problems we are talking about will not be identified by voting officials for lack of will. There does not seem to be a lot of initiative being shown to make sure that these details are ironed out before elections take place.

Bill Bunnell: Well I hesitate to comment on the lack of will. I think there is a lack of experience at the moment which has to be closed. We got a lot of it in the 25 towns in the past month but I must also point out that talking with you is more than the media in Connecticut combined since the time the Secretary of State announced her decisions.

The focus had been on LHS, not Diebold etcetera. But there has to be somebody looking at the details and the Secretary of State’s office is just not currently facilitated in a way that they can handle that is I think the conclusion that you have to come to from the looking that you’ve done into all of this.

Dori Smith: Bill Bunnell thanks so much for joining us.
Bill Bunnell: Thank you.

Dori Smith: Bill Bunnell is a Connecticut voting rights activist. We turn next to our interview with Ken Hajjar of LHS Associates. Although director of sales and marketing at LHS Hajjar was the machine technician on hand during the Second District recount at Mansfield, Connecticut. I asked him to describe any written instructions or protocols he may have received from the Secretary of State’s office on what he should and should not do in the event of any machine failures. Previously, Mike Carlson of LHS, on hand in Ashford, Connecticut for the Second District recount, told us he didn’t know of any written protocols from the Secretary of State’s office:

Ken Hajjar: Basically the day that we did the recount I was given one sheet of paper which was the Secretary of State’s rules and I was just told, “don’t touch anything just answer questions.” So I don’t have that with me and I’m not even sure what I did with it. I might have just thrown it away once I got through.

You know the Secretary of State has been working with some of our guidance because we have been using the same machine in four other New England states for almost 20 years. So as far as protocols and procedures are concerned a good deal of what the Secretary of State did was based on procedures that are already in place and already proven to be effective in every other New England state.

Dori Smith: What would LHS be on hand to do if the machine were to fail? You know tell me the protocol.

Ken Hajjar: Well in that case, first of all in this case that didn’t happen. None of the machines failed. If a machine were to fail either on election day or in any other circumstance it would be merely a matter of removing the memory card, there’s a little card that keeps track of the votes, bring a new machine over, put the memory card in the new machine, when you turn it on the new machine picks up right where the old machine stopped.

Dori Smith: Now what if there were a problem with the memory card itself what would you do?

Ken Hajjar: In that case you would have to bring in another memory card which had been programmed the same way as the original one, and every town by the way, had a back up memory card that had been programmed and tested. So if a memory card fails then obviously that is the worst thing that can happen. Then you would have to re-feed all of the ballots.

Dori Smith: What if for some reason that happened and they didn’t have any other memory cards to use. Did you guys bring any with you?

Ken Hajjar: Then we would have to supply them with a new memory card which would be tested by the registrars prior to being inserted in the machine.

Dori Smith: And tell me the protocol for that.

Ken Hajjar: The protocol is pretty straightforward. We have a data base of all of the elections in the state. So if somebody tells me that Durham (Connecticut) had a problem we would program a Durham card, we would bring it to Durham the Registrar would have already set up a “test deck” of ballots that had been previously hand counted, they would run that “test deck” through the machine and check the machine count against the hand count, and if they match up then they assured that the program has been positively coded correctly. Once that’s the case they insert that card into the machine and then they take all of the ballots and depending on what time of the day it was would depend on how big the stack of cards would be that would have to be re-fed.

Dori Smith: Ken Hajjar is director of sales and marketing at LHS Associates in Methuen, Mass.

Professor Alex Shvartsman, the state’s computer consultant, has told us what LHS representatives intended to do with voting machines during elections and recounts was a problem: Click here for the full interview with Professor Shvartsman.

Professor Alex Shvartsman: LHS says that, you know, “open up the machines, switch the cards,” this is highly unadvisable.

Dori Smith: The following interview with Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz and Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara took place on November 29th just after the completion of an audit of the AccuVote Optical Scan voting machines that were in use in 25 towns in Connecticut for the first time. I asked Susan Bysiewicz to go over the results of the audit:

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: We believe that all towns have finished their work and we are taking the reports that they have compiled for the audits and giving them to the University of Connecticut and Dr. Alex Shvartsman who is a computer scientist and who was our partner at the Voting Center at the University of Connecticut for his analysis and for our office’s review as well. Once we receive audit reports from all of the towns we will make public a report that compiles those results.

Dori Smith: We also interviewed Alex Shvartsman out here at Uconn and we had asked him mostly about the protocols that were in place for machine security during a Second District recount.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Right.

Dori Smith: And we also interviewed some people from LHS Associates. These were the technicians that were on site.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: The technicians on site, OK.
Dori Smith: That’s right, at Ashford, Bolton, and Mansfield. They told us that their protocols, if you will, internally or whatever, their plans, if machines failed, were to be opening machines and taking out memory cards, in some cases moving the partially used memory cards into another machine, in some cases using back up machines that they carried with them to the polls. In one case where a gentleman that I’ve just interviewed, Bill Bunnell, he was on site in Montville:

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Bill Bunnell was on site in Montville for a?

Dori Smith: He was an observer for a recount.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Great.

Dori Smith: He watched an LHS person pull a memory card from his pocket because they couldn’t find theirs temporarily, they did find theirs ultimately. But the point was we were trying to establish whether or not LHS and your office had the same understanding about the handling of the memory cards.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Our office was responsible for writing the manuals and we distributed manuals for procedures with respect to the voting machines and with respect to the recounts, OK? Those manuals are public documents and were reviewed by both the Democratic campaign for Congress and the Republican Campaign and both sides thought the recount was open, fair, transparent, and no law suit has been filed by the deadline established under our law that was November 21st, by Mr. Simmons’ campaign. And his campaign spokesperson has said that he believes that the recount that was done was done openly, fairly, and transparently, and they are obviously satisfied with the results because they have not filed a lawsuit contesting them.

Dori Smith: Now we are looking towards the 2007-2008 period where the machines will be used in every town, or many of the towns right?

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Absolutely, and you should know that this same machine is used in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. They have used exactly the same machines. Vermont has done a small audit of two precincts. No state that we are aware of in our Northeastern area or indeed anywhere else in the country, has done an audit of and hand count of the paper ballots and optical scan machines. And we have done this voluntarily. Not because any state law or federal law requires us to but we’ve done it because we think it is very important to the integrity of our voting process, it’s very important to voters, to have confidence in our results. And what we found in the audits was that the optical scan machines were extremely accurate in counting the votes and in fact, most of the races that we audited were unchanged and there were just a few cases where they changed by a vote or two. And the reason why there were tiny variations had to do with the fact that some voters improperly marked their ballots. They circled the circle rather than blackening the oval as an example.

Dori Smith: I was at the polls and again interviewed Alex Shvartsman the professor that your office hired to look into machine security.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Yes.

Dori Smith: Professor Alex Shvartsman said that he didn’t agree with or approve of the plans that LHS personnel had outlined to open these machines, change the memory cards out. The opening of the machines and the changing of the memory cards disturbed him. He said this was not a good idea.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: I don’t understand at what polling place you observed memory cards being taken out or changed.

Dori Smith: We interviewed three people from LHS. All of them said that they would be if there were to be a glitch, and again this is with an eye toward making the vote as safe as possible for the foreseeable future, all of them said that they had plans to open the machines, take out:

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: They may have had plans but none of them did open the machine and change memory cards during the voting process.

Dori Smith: But that was the plan that they had to use, that they were going to use had there been a machine glitch.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz: Well I would beg to differ that they would take a memory card out of a machine. There are spare machines that are ready to go if there is a failure of a scanner machine but we had no reports of that and I’d like to put you on the phone with my Deputy for that question if you don’t mind.

Dori Smith: Not at all, thank you.

(Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara explained that she had not been able to hear our end of the conversation as we had a bit of trouble with a speaker phone hook up to the radio station at WHUS, the University of Connecticut radio station.)

Dori Smith: What we were looking at and what we noted and it was me and also Bill Bunnell.

Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara: Oh sure I’ve talked with Bill a lot.

Dori Smith: OK so he was on hand in Montville and the concern was—why do LHS officials play such a big role in terms of providing the officials on site with soup to nuts information and then opening the machines, and then in some cases providing back up equipment right there during a recount? In other words why did they play such a big key role? And again, when I spoke with these officials from these towns they couldn’t find any protocols on what to do if the machines failed and in some cases they said well we might them but those turned out to be provided by LHS and they were the machine manuals. They couldn’t find anything from the Secretary’s office and there was confusion about the responsibilities on their end.

Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara: Sure.

Dori Smith: You know versus the responsibilities of LHS people like Mike Carlson (Ashford) or Tom Burge (Bolton) or Ken (Hajjar) who was in Mansfield.

Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara: From the standpoint of why are LHS folks there at all on Election Day, when we developed the contract for these new machines it included technical support to be available at each of the 169 towns on election day as a support to local election officials who were newly using this equipment. So when we developed this contract and what it was we thought would benefit the state there wasn’t a single registrar who thought it was a bad idea to have technical support from LHS in their town on Election Day.

I do have the protocol that was developed and approved by our office. It’s a single page about their role because I share the concern, and certainly the Secretary does because these are Connecticut’s elections, and quite frankly, while I’m interested in what they do in Texas or in Massachusetts these are ultimately Connecticut elections that fall under the purview of our Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz. So we did include that provision for support in the contract. So that’s why they were there. We also had an outline of what they were to do and not to do which included specifically that unless an election official needed help the election official was to be walked through the procedure for fixing any equipment but the why is kind of because this is brand new equipment and our folks were saying, “we need technical support and it needs to be on site.”

But for someone saying that they didn’t have it I don’t know, again if you spoke to a line poll worker I’m not saying that they are telling you something untrue but I can tell you that I have it and that it was promulgated through this office. That there was confusion is concerning to me but it is also part of the reason that we are conducting regional debriefing sessions in the next two weeks to get together with all of the towns to find out what was working, what wasn’t.

Dori Smith: When I asked one worker in Ashford what she would do in terms of a machine failure she said she wouldn’t be giving LHS authority to handle a machine but her senior said that she would immediately call the representative from LHS and that person would be doing these repairs under her direction. The question is to what extent does Evelyn Falsgraf in Ashford, Connecticut, understand what she might be seeing with regard to these voting cards, memory cards, and new machines that we are just getting use to even having?

Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara: Sure and I guess part of the problem is the situation you just described is not mutually exclusive. It doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have a technician and whether that ultimately has to be a technician who is employed at the polling place? Maybe something we’d look at. But the idea that a technician would be doing something under someone else’s direction use to happen with the levers right?

Not every registrar can pull apart a lever and do something that has to be done with it. So at the same time that someone says, “I’ll handle all of this I’ll do whatever I can and call in help,” I don’t see those two as necessarily mutually exclusive. I think the bigger issue for us and the one that I think we need to be looking at as we expand this is what have we learned from these 25 towns? What are the vulnerabilities?

It is difficult for us because I’m sure you learned in the first day you started looking at elections that Miss so and so from Ashford who is elected by the people there is not my employee. So what I can do is I can document for you the extent to which we promulgate manuals, the extent to which we train on them twice a year for registrars, twice a year for town clerks, the extent to which I have been out in the field doing training on the telephone based technology. And all I can do is make that guidance available but if you’re telling me that you have evidence or reason to believe that someone didn’t follow the recount manual, you know whether I then look at that and say, OK, is that an elections enforcement issue? Is it something else?

That’s, as you can imagine sort of a problem for us because what you described initially with respect to the Second Congressional District, there were optical scan towns involved in the recount back in 1994. The procedure that was used then is still embodied in our regulations and so if you are saying folks weren’t following that, that’s certainly an issue. If you are saying with respect to all 25 optical scan towns there are questions with respect to providing more clarification about the role of on site support? Obviously this on site support is for the first few elections under the contract as we roll out brand new equipment. But that’s something that, part of what I’m figuring, is this debriefing is going to help us to get at. Were people using them? Were they not? There was a written protocol but if you’re telling me so and so told you they didn’t see it or didn’t remember it or, you know, I’m not disputing that at all.

Dori Smith: Let me clarify, you can go to my web site Talknationradio.org or Talknationradio.com and read the entire transcript of the program we aired the week before last where we had these poll workers and officials and we had professor Alex Shvartsman and others on the show including LHS employees. But let me just say I’m delighted to have you on the phone.

Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara: And I would be happy to work with you on an ongoing basis. Obviously we’re just beginning this. The other issue you haven’t raised that I’ll raise for you is the issue of the programming of these cards and the extent to which the state’s, and I use state’s plural, rely upon outside vendors, forget whether it’s our machine or another machine, the state’s rely on outside vendors to do the programming. So what we are talking about with Alex Shvartsman is the extent to which we either no longer have that be the case or we have Alex do an encrypted code that LHS is not aware of that will allow us to pick up some things? And or do a random sample of memory cards? Because I think there are very legitimate issues that relate to security that we are fortunate enough to have a vehicle for it getting some good information on and also doing something about by virtue of this relationship with UConn and True Vote and Common Cause and the League. We have done more than other states have also in including those folks in our decision making and ensuring that this is all transparent. But you know as far as I’m concerned nobody has a greater interest in a good election than I do because the buck stops here.

Dori Smith: Lesley Mara thank you so much for taking so much time to talk with us and do thank Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz as well.

Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara: Will do, thank you.

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS, WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 pm. Talknationradio.org and talknation.org for transcripts and discussions.

VoTeR Center UConn Voting Technology Research Center

A Talk Nation Investigation Reveals that Poll Workers, Voting Machine Providers, Voting Officials, and Officials at the Secretary of State’s Office, had different ideas about how voting machines were to be handled on Election Day 2006 and during the recount of the 2nd Congressional District.

Audio

There were paper trails, but also a trail of confusion over who should have access to the machines. Despite warnings in October from state voting machine evaluators, Connecticut Secretary of State, Susan Bysiewicz failed to provide adequate information for elections officials about to engage in an official recount.

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights and the environment. I’m Dori Smith

Ashford voting official: That’s four overseas ballots. Four votes for Joe Courtney.

Democrats are savoring another big win in Connecticut after a recount showed Joe Courtney beating Republican Rob Simmons by 91 votes in Connecticut’s Second Congressional District. Courtney’s campaign gained momentum as more and more unions got behind him. He was for bringing US troops home from Iraq and had argued for greater accountability for the Bush Administration.

Joe Courtney disagreed with Simmons “yes” vote on the Military Commissions Act. And the former State Representative and lawyer is expected to take a strong interest in civil rights and liberties as well as health care. Courtney helped the state develop a working prescription drug plan for low income families.

Ashford voting official: Technically we could figure it all out. I’ll give them to you. For Simmons its 737 and for Courtney it’s 1041. Simmons had the same number of votes as last time. Courtney had one additional vote.

Joe Courtney began with a 167 point lead and supporters of both candidates watched nervously as one town after another added or subtracted votes during the troubled recount. To make matters more complicated for election officials 25 towns used AccuVote Optical Scan Voting Machines for the first time. Ten of those towns were in the Second District. And 16 votes were incorrectly counted by Second District officials using the Optical Scan machines.

Voting rights groups have been concerned about a lack of uniform protocols for poll workers to use when operating the AccuVote Optical Scan machines manufactured by Diebold in Texas. The company has had trouble with glitches in the past. But this time there would be a paper trail and machine experts and voters were all reassured. Yet, human error did creep in.

There was a lack of uniform decision-making about how votes should be read when the machines couldn’t read them and which votes should be accepted or discarded if he marks were unclear. Then came the question of what to do in the event that a machine jammed or failed.

We went to recounts in two towns in Connecticut’s Second District and got on the phone to ask elections officials and voting machine technicians what the protocols were for dealing with malfunctioning machines and unclear ballots.

The Secretary of State’s office reported that in the event of a glitch ballots were to be counted by hand. Elections officials in the towns we went to couldn’t locate any written protocols from the Secretary of State’s office; meanwhile two employees of LHS, the company providing the machines out of Massachusetts said they were supposed to be opening machines, removing memory cards, reprogramming memory cards and possibly even using back up machines they had hand carried to the polls. It was a security nightmare and at its core was a tolerance for the basic principles of outsourcing America’s elections to private companies.

This election more than any other should have led Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz to write air tight rules for dealing with voting machines. Her experts found serious security flaws with the memory cards in October.

We turn to Professor Michael Fischer of Yale University for help in understanding what was going on. Fischer helped found True Vote Connecticut. The group that was instrumental in making a paper ballot mandatory for Connecticut voters.

Michael Fischer: The machines have some serious security problems that were uncovered by the Uconn group that the Secretary of the State of Connecticut contracted with to evaluate the security of the machines. And what they have shown in that these machines are completely vulnerable to mis-programming of the memory cards so it becomes crucial protect the memory cards while the machines are being set up and used to protect them from possible tampering. It also is crucial that the memory cards are programmed correctly in the first place.

Dori Smith: Why don’t you tell us the perfect scenario for how a voting machine would be handled during either the voting or recounting of the votes?

Michael Fischer: Let me address the recount procedures first. There are regulations that are created and maintained by the Secretary of the State’s office; regulations that so far as I’m aware are in effect for recounting the Optical Scan machines were produced in, I believe, 1999, before many of the security vulnerabilities were understood. And so they prescribed for a recount that most of the ballots simply get fed through the scanner a second time. Now, this is not adequate to insure the integrity of the elections because if the scanner has been compromised through fraudulent programming of the memory card and they run it through a second scanner with a copy of that memory card, the rigged results of the election would be the same in the recount as they were originally.

So the only way to uncover that kind of fraud is to actually hand count the ballots and my understanding is that has not been done as part of this recount.

Dori Smith: In terms of the proper handling of these specific machines during a recount would you say that there would be a best case scenario in terms of who would handle these machines? In other words would it be a problem for someone from a voting machine supplier to be changing the machines in case one had malfunctioned, to be providing the replacement machine and going ahead and dealing with the memory cards and so on. Is that a problem and if so what should happen?

Michael Fischer: Absolutely. I don’t know of anything that undermines the confidence of an election more than to have the vendor of the machine come in and modify the machine during the election process or the recount process. There were incidents of this occurring in the 2004 election in Ohio and they fueled much of the distrust in voting that we have seen right now, and for good reason because a technician going into the machine again has complete control over what the outcome of that machine is.

Dori Smith: Let’s say hypothetically that there were backup machines or auxiliary machines and those were used during the recount. And I watched two of these and I did observe that some of the poll workers seemed to know, and I asked them, some knew that they were supposed to be handling the machines if there was a problem. Others did not know and seemed to be very dependent on asking the LHS representatives what to do and in relying on them to make changes if changes needed to be made. And so I did look into this further and found in fact that the LHS representatives did say that they were there to fix the machines, that they were there in the event that there was a need for a different machine, in fact they had one in their car. And so the protocol was not the same or was not exact in the minds of these LHS people versus the people at the polls who were the voting officials. Just talk about how air tight that whole thing needs to be.

Michael Fischer: The voting officials need to follow the rules as described by the Connecticut statutes and as fleshed out by regulations from the Secretary of the State. So if they are left in a position without having adequate procedures to follow it’s the Secretary of State from which those procedures should come. It is not responsible to then turn to a private company and say, “oh, we don’t know what the regulations should be we’ll just let this private company tell us.”

Dori Smith: If LHS were to both provide the machine and then make repairs during an election would you say that that has some resemblance to outsourcing of this election?

Michael Fischer: Exactly. LHS is a private company and they also happen to be located outside of our state. I’m not going to say anything about whether they did or did not act inappropriately. I have no information on that. But I can say that they had the power to corrupt the election if they had chosen to do so. And I do not think that any individual or any private company should be given the power to determine the outcome of our elections.

Dori Smith: Michael Fischer is a professor of computer science at Yale and one of the founding members of True Vote Connecticut. Truevotect.org His group was instrumental in helping pass legislation to require a paper ballot.

We spoke with two LHS employees who were present during Second District recounts. We met Tom Burge in Bolton, Connecticut and spoke with him as the ballots were being recounted. Then we phoned him at LHS the next day and I asked him to describe what happened when a ballot jammed.

Tom Burge: A ballot went through and it was jammed and the ballot was read and it tells you that on the read out. It said “counted ballot jammed in reader” and all we had to do was slide the machine out and drop the ballot into the ballot box. And all of the observers saw it as, you know, you did that, and that was the only jam the whole night long.

Dori Smith: And so that was your task to do that?

Tom Burge: Pretty much and just answer any specific questions about the machines to anyone that was there.

Dori Smith: What were your instructions in case the failure had been more significant? What would you have then done, lets say the machine stopped functioning in the middle of a recount.

Tom Burge: If the machine stopped functioning we’d try to determine why that happened. They have another back up machine at the town of Bolton so what you would do in that case would be to take the memory card out, break the seal on the memory card they had there, and use another machine if that machine could not be read; so you would just replace the machine and put the memory card in which stores all of the information, the ballot information, the totals, and put the memory card into the new machine to be read. And that would all be done with the moderator there and all of the observers there too.

Dori Smith: And so the memory card would be, in other words it would have read to a certain point and then you would.

Tom Burge: Right. Once you take the memory card out there is a count on it and once you put the new memory card, not the new memory card but the old memory card in again, when they are using it it will come out with the same count.

Dori Smith: What if for whatever reason there was a problem with that second machine? What would you do then?

Tom Burge: I brought a back up machine with me so we had, they had a back up machine there and I brought a back up machine with me from LHS so there was at least two back up machines.

Dori Smith: Tom Burge of LHS Associates, providers of Connecticut’s new AccuVote Optical Scan voting machines manufactured by Diebold.

Daniel Tapper, the Secretary of State’s communication director, said ballots would be hand counted if there were glitches with the machines. He also said LHS technicians like Burge would not be handling the machines at all during the recount process. We asked another LHS technician, Mike Carlson, to talk about what he thought he was supposed to do on site in Ashford, Connecticut, during the second district recount.

Mike Carlson: We’re here for other things, I mean the machine could seize and not, you know they are putting a lot of ballots through these machines. Like in Old Lyme they put 3500 ballots through this machine all at the same time. If that machine malfunctions for any reason we’re here to have back up machines to support the process in case the machine should fail. If the memory card fails to record ballots for any reason as it would on November 7th, it can happen, so we’re here with back up equipment to assure that we can retest the election, reprogram the memory card, put it in election mode and insure that the process can be either restarted if necessary from scratch or can continue from where it stopped if indeed the scanner broke down.

Dori Smith: Let’s say you are standing there and one of the town officials, the elections officials is running ballots for the re-canvass and all of a sudden the machine stops functioning. What does Mike Carlson do next?

Mike Carlson: The moderator would come to me and say, “Mike we seem to have a problem with the machine. I would go forward and look at the machine and then based upon what was happening, for example, if the AccuVote refused to take ballots in most cases the AccuVote probably had something in the soft optics that would allow, that would stop its taking ballots. It could have been a piece of paper it could have been anything, so it ceases to take the ballot. In that particular case we would take our spare machine, we would break the seal on the memory card because the memory card is sealed in that machine.

The moderator would tell everybody that the machine has ceased to function and we are going with the back up. We would break the seal on the existing memory card. We would let everybody know that we have done that. We would take the memory card out of the disabled scanner. We would bring a new scanner on board. We would insert the memory card into the new scanner. We would reseal that memory card. We would tell everybody what the new seal number was and the memory card, because there is memory in the card, would automatically pick up the election as to where it ceased to take ballots.

So for example if we were running ballots through and it was then the public counter said 300 and the machine failed to take any more ballots. Removing the memory card and putting the new memory card into a new scanner, once we fired that scanner back up the election would be at 300 because the memory card remembers where it left off. It would not lose any ballots. We would not have to start from scratch. It would pick up exactly where we left off.

Dori Smith: So you could keep going with that same machine.

Mike Carlson: Correct. If there was a memory card failure, say for example in the middle of the election the memory card said “OK to format”. So the memory card ceased to, the public count went away and the memory card just lost it, when you looked at the LCD display it was completely blank or it would say “OK to format” or something with the memory card? Then in that particular case we would have to reprogram a back up memory card, which I was given. We would have to run the test spec, the 25 ballot test spec that the towns prepared to run on the machines on Tuesday, November 7th. We would re run that test spec, we would prove the memory card and then we would put the machine back into election mode and then take the ballots that were sitting in the container and re-feed them one by one until we get caught back up. And that’s how we would handle a memory card failure.

Dori Smith: OK, and in terms of the Secretary of State’s office and their written instructions to you, are those available somewhere online? Those written instructions about on a step by step basis what you are

Mike Carlson: I’ll have to–I’ll have to talk to my bosses to see if there was if there was anything that definitive written down. I mean this is protocol at LHS, and it’s within the moderator’s handbook, and it’s within our training that we know what happens during days when it’s either a memory card failure or a machine failure how we are supposed to handle it. Is it documented? I’m not sure. I can try to find out. Maybe you can call the Secretary of State to see if that’s documented. I don’t have anything on me.

Dori Smith: In terms of what the Secretary of State ordered to keep the elections uniform you all were not given a working protocol from her you were using your own internal protocols?

Mike Carlson: No before I left the office in conversation with John Silvestro and Gary Bergeron who are the President and Vice President of LHS in communications with the Secretary of State; we were given marching orders as to how LHS was supposed to conduct themselves during the election. And it was a simple one page sheet. It told how and what machine they were supposed to use, if the machine wasn’t prepared for election that they had to prepare it for election, how the ballots were going to be looked at and what ballots are going to be re-fed through the machine and which ones are going to be held back for hand counting; and that LHS was supposed to take a technical role in this and that was all. And that was basically the instructions that I was given before I left LHS to do my first recount in Mansfield. Everything else would be protocol that we would follow on any election day on a machine failure. I’ve been doing AccuVote elections in the State of Massachusetts for about 9 years. So I understand the protocols and what’s supposed to happen when machines fail and how to fix the failure.

Dori Smith: OK, and in just

Mike Carlson: Was that documented? To me? And where, no, it wasn’t, it was documented to me in how I was supposed to conduct myself or what we were looking for. But as far as handling equipment that was kind of innate to what I’m supposed to do on any election.

Dori Smith: So um.

Mike Carlson: If the Secretary of State has something I’ll have to contact John Yorker, somebody in the Secretary of State’s office, and see if there was a document like that. I know the moderators have their handbooks which were written specifically for them and they have their owner’s instructions that were written specifically for them as to how they were supposed to handle these recounts.

Dori Smith: I had asked a question of the Secretary of State’s office myself and I received a paragraph explanation back in return to my question of, you know, what your role would be on the scene and here, I’m just going to read a few sentences for you:

It says here: “LHS Associates which markets and services the optical scan machines used in this election are on hand to answer questions elections officials may have regarding the operation of the machine. However, they will not be handling the machines at all during the recount process. Designated local elections officials are the only ones who will be handling the machines themselves in case something goes wrong with an optical scan machine during the recount and a perfect machine cannot be located within the town, the paper ballots will then be counted by hand.”

Mike Carlson: But we had back up equipment so that was, that, we had back up equipment. I don’t think the Secretary of State, I don’t think they, I don’t think they didn’t know that we had back up equipment with us. Every team had two scanners as back up so one of our directives when we left LHS to insure that anybody who was going to be doing the recounts had back up equipment.

Dori Smith: Mike Carlson of LHS Associates. He was present at the recount going on at Ashford, Connecticut, where voting officials kindly allowed us to approach with questions as they were wrapping up their recount. We asked about the contents of written instructions laid out on the table that they had been using that night.

Dori Smith: And Lauren Olson, you are an elections official here?

Lauren Olson: Yes. I’m a Deputy Registrar of Voters.

Dori Smith: Lauren what would have happened if that machine had malfunctioned. What would have been the next step?

Lauren Olson: We have another back up machine.

Dori Smith: I notice there is a gentleman here from LHS. Would he have been the one to set up the new machine?

Lauren Olson: No I think it would have been the registrars. We’ve done the ones for the election but I think that we would also do the back up one as well.

Dori Smith: Did you have written instructions from the Secretary of State about all of the steps to take if a machine malfunctioned?

Lauren Olson: Yes.

Dori Smith: And did that say anything about whether or not the LHS technician would ever handle the machine?

Lauren Olson: He would not.

Dori Smith: He would never handle it.

Lauren Olson. Yes.

Dori Smith: So in the event that let’s say that machine needed to be swapped out with a new machine how would that occur? I mean in other words he wouldn’t touch it?

Lauren Olson: No. It would have to be done by the registrars. He’s just there for guidance.

Dori Smith: Now in other cases I’ve heard differing information. So let me just pursue that a little bit. The Secretary of State has a specific page of protocols on what happens if the machine malfunctions?

Lauren Olson: That I’m not certain. You would have to check with the registrar.

Dori Smith: OK. So in other words you wouldn’t know if you have it there on the table.

Lauren Olson: I may have it but I’m not certain off the top of my head.

Dori Smith: Because what I was told is that they are working on it and that there isn’t a written protocol as such, and he, (pointed to Mike Carlson) when I interviewed him earlier that he was working under a protocol from LHS.

Lauren Olson: I don’t know about that. I just know that we were told that we would take care of any of the malfunctions of the machines. We have the procedures for doing that.

Dori Smith: And so let’s say the memory card from that machine. If the machine needed to be changed what would you do with the memory card situation?

Lauren Olson: I don’t know that would be up to the registrars. I’m just a deputy so I can’t answer those questions.

Dori Smith: Oh I see OK well maybe I will ask her about it and sorry to take your time.

Lauren Olson: It’s OK. No problem.

Dori Smith: I’m pursuing the aspect of this in my story of uniform voting and protocols for what happens if.

Lauren Olson: I liked my old lever machines better. (Laughs, group around her laughs.)

Dori Smith: Moderator Evelyn Falsgraf and others at the Ashford site couldn’t locate the instructions on handling malfunctioning machines. One member of their team suggested that it might be somewhere upstairs. There should be no doubt that this tightly run group would have arrived at the best possible decision they could have. But the question is why didn’t the Secretary of State’s office provide more clear written instructions for them?

Evelyn you are the moderator at the recount?

Evelyn Falsgraf: Yes.

Dori Smith: Can you tell me if you have a written protocol from the Secretary of State’s office regarding what the exact steps and protocols would be in the event one of these machines would mechanically fail something wrong with the machine, in terms of what exact steps are taken?

Evelyn Falsgraf: Yes, I call the representative from LHS.

Dori Smith: But I mean if there was reason to let’s say switch from that machine to another auxiliary machine. Who would physically do that?

Evelyn Falsgraf: It would be done under my direction. But it would be done by whoever I appointed and it would probably be the registrars and the representative from the machine company.

Dori Smith: And is that written in the protocol?

Evelyn Falsgraf: I don’t believe so. At least I haven’t seen it written.

Poll Worker: Why don’t you ask the mechanic?
Another poll worker 2: Yeah I would think that;
Evelyn Falsgraf: I would defer to the company knowing more about the machine than I do.

Dori Smith: Elections officials readily asked Mike Carlson questions which was just what they were supposed to do when a ballot jammed.

(Audio from Tuesday November 14, 2006 recount in Ashford, Connecticut)

Poll worker: Hey Mike?
Mike Carlson: Yeah.
Poll Worker: It says “invalid ballot see official”.
Mike Carlson: Turn it over, turn it upside down and see if it goes. (Ballot went through.) There you go.

Dori Smith: But would they have let Carlson do more under pressure. Another elections official in Ashford said he thought memory cards would not be removed in the event that a machine failed but rather another machine would be selected with another memory card that had been pre-tested. The two memory cards would then be added up, he thought. Others agreed that the memory cards were not to be taken out though uncertainty prevailed.

Dori Smith: The gentleman here from LHS told me earlier in the day when I interviewed him that he had an auxiliary machine with him that he brought.

Poll Worker 3: Yes.

Dori Smith: So what would happen if your machines here failed, all of them, and then you needed to take measures to use the machine he brought? How would you do that?

Poll Worker 3: I haven’t gone that far having two spare machines but I would ask the representative from LHS the proper procedure for carrying on under those circumstances.

Dori Smith: So under those circumstances there is a possibility that the machine that he brought could be used and your memory card that had been in use in the machines in here would be put in that machine?

Poll Worker 3: You know I would probably ask for guidance on that because we have two spare machines. The probability of both of those machines failing is low. I would go upstairs and look for that particular procedure before I did it.

Dori Smith: But you think you have it in a protocol.

Poll Worker 4 in background: We were instructed not to remove the memory cards.

Dori Smith: You were instructed not to?

Poll Worker 4: Right.

Poll Worker 3: We’re instructed to use another pre qualified machine which is what we’d do, which is what we did tonight. This was an additional pre-qualified machine.

Dori Smith: Professor Alex Shvartsman is under contract with the State of Connecticut to look at voting machine security. He and others at the Voting Research Technology Center at the University of Connecticut’s School of Engineering reported that AccuVote Optical Scan machines could be compromised with off the shelf equipment in a matter of minutes even if the machine has its removable memory card sealed in place. They recommended the State keep a strict physical custody chain, tamper resistant protection of the voting equipment, and random post election audit. I asked him to talk about what the LHS representatives had said that they would take out memory cards and put them in new machines during votes or recounts.

Professor Alex Shvartsman: Our recommendation also included something that LHS, for example, does not do, and that is should the machine malfunction for whatever reason the machine is not to be unsealed, the cards are not to be handled and instead a second machine, which is usually available in each polling place be prepped into service. I believe this was exactly the procedure that was followed. I realize that LHS says that, you know, open up the machines, switch the cards, this is highly unadvisable.

Dori Smith: If the LHS representatives who were on hand for the recount in the Second District were under the impression that it was their responsibility should a machine malfunction, to go ahead and open that machine up, take the memory card out, and put it into a second machine, what would have happened if the people at the polls didn’t know that that was wrong?

Professor Alex Shvartsman: Well that’s a very valid concern. My understanding, however, is that there was a special communication about a week or two before the election going to all polling places and to all polling workers that this is something that they should not do under any circumstances. In fact, I have certain knowledge because I discussed this with some of the Mansfield workers where I voted and they in fact were aware of this and so that’s what I understand.

(We were able to reach Mansfield, CT, Republican Registrar Beverly Miela, on Thursday the 16th of November. She said she believed her office worked from protocols in the machine manuals provided by LHS and that they also received some written information from the Secretary of State’s office.)

Dori Smith: Then are there protocols from the Secretary of State’s office about how machines will be handled during recounts?

Professor Alex Shvartsman: I am not aware of any particular protocols specifically designed to deal with the situation where a recount is in order so it may be possible that there was confusion. I do not know.

Dori Smith: Professor Alex Shvartsman is in the Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Connecticut.

Some of the other questions raised during the Second District recounts we observed in Bolton and Ashford Connecticut came up when ballots were being studied that the election officials and observers from the two campaigns thought might have been read wrong by the machine. Some thought ballots were to be run through the machine that had just been used for the recount to see if the machine would count them. Others said this would ruin the tally on the recount machine.

In Bolton officials let observers from the campaign speak up about which ballots were to be separated out for a hand recount and inspection. Ashford officials were more strict about who made decisions.

An observer for the Republican Party and Rob Simmons said she felt elections officials were relying too much on the LHS technicians to tell them what to do.

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS, Radio for the People at Uconn, the University of Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen live, Wed. at 5 PM. Talknation.org and Talknationradio.org for transcripts and discussions.

Indy Media Tool Kit on this story:

See: CTNewsJunkie

If you are interested in covering the story of Connecticut’s AccuVote Voting machines you might consider the following:

1. Ask your registrar of voters, moderator and other election officials, if they used the LHS machine manuals as a protocol for Election Day 2006 or any recounts held afterward.

2. Ask them if they received a set of protocols from the Secretary of State on the way machines would be changed if glitches occurred and who should be touching, changing, adjusting, or “fixing” machines during elections and recounts or where any equipment would come from that was to be used during official polls and recounts.

3. Visit the web sites of voting rights organizations like True Vote Connecticut for information about the use of the AccuVote machines.

Voting machine expert Avi Rubin on the UConn Voter Center Report: Diebold AV-OS is vulnerable to serious attacks.

Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal A. Kiayias L. Michel A. Russell A. A. Shvartsman,
UConn Voter Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Connecticut {akiayias,ldm,acr,aas}@cse.uconn.edu
with the assistance of M. Korman, A. See, N. Shashidhar, D. Walluck
October 30, 2006

University of Connecticut News story on the vulnerability of the AccuVote Optical Scan voting machines.

Kevin T. A. McCarthy (Dem) Lauren Olson, Deputy (Dem) Sue A. Cowen (Rep) Geraldine Dunphy, Deputy (Rep)
Town of Ashford, CT registrar of voters, Kevin T. A. McCarthy (Dem) Lauren Olson, Deputy
(Dem) Sue A. Cowen (Rep) Geraldine Dunphy, Deputy (Rep)

Bolton Connecticut’s Registrars of Voters Dorothy R. Neil (R) Monita Hebert (D)

How Long Will it Take to recount Second District Votes in Connecticut?
by, Dori Smith

On November 8, 2006 the Secretary of State ordered a recount of Connecticut’s Second District where Democrat Joe Courtney currently leads by 167 votes. Cities have five business days to complete the recount. Results are not expected until next week.

As of 10:30 a.m. Thursday the Town Clerk of Norwich, DeeAnne Brennan, had just received the official written notice of the re-canvass. Her anticipated start date for the recount of all ten Norwich precincts is Monday, November 13, 2006, she said.

The Clerk received calls from a few people wanting to know why her town’s results seemed to come in so late Tuesday night. But unofficial results had been posted on the internet between 10:30 to 10:45. Radio station WTIC was reporting the Norwich results even as TV stations were reporting that they were not out yet as of 11:00 pm.

Incumbent Republican, Rob Simmons, expressed unwillingness to concede the vote because he had been beaten by a narrow margin of less than 200 votes.

Simmons mentioned Norwich in one of his last reports of the evening, saying they couldn’t know the winner because Norwich had not yet come in. He also referred to voting machine problems in Norwich, but DeeAnne Brennan said she didn’t know what he might have been referring to. She had not heard of any serious problems with the Norwich vote, she said.

3 Part Series by Dori Smith and David Morse on Rob Simmons, R-CT-2nd district, who ran a CIA interrogation center during the war in Vietnam. He now supports the President and Vice President on interrogation techniques.

The report raises questions about the way Simmons’ background as a CIA interrogator during the Vietnam War may have affected his “Yes” vote for the Military Commissions Act. Did Simmons violate the Geneva Conventions when he admits he withheld medical care from wounded detainees? Why does he continue to criticize the findings of the Church and Pike Committee who looked into CIA and FBI wrongdoing in the 1970s? When Smith asked him about the criticism and the ongoing controversy over the Military Commissions Act, Simmons called the Church and Pike reports, “hogwash” and then asserted, “I’m a Vietnam Veteran, but that doesn’t mean I’m Lieutenant Calley.”–Why is Rob Simmons so defensive?

Part 1
A Report on the CIA Interrogator turned Congressman and his support for the
Military Commissions Act of 2006

Part 2 Twin Catastrophes: Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

Part 3 On the Campaign Trail with the “Soldier-Spy”