Interview with Deputy Secretary of State Lesley Mara on Voting Machine Glitches
Breaking News re LHS Violations and State Elections
See previous programming on this topic here and here and check out our recent report on CTNewsJunkie
Talk Nation Radio complaint to SEEC Docket No. 2007-385
Produced by Dori Smith
TRT: 30:42 (feel free to cut to length, we had no ability to do further edit today. Sorry for delay)
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The first general election using the new Diebold optical scan machines has resulted in 39 recounts and a field day for bloggers. Nineteen voting machines were taken off line due to various kinds of failures and for many poll workers and voting officials who had to carry out the recounts it was an exhausting and often frustrating process.
We interviewed officials in five towns where we asked if there were memory card failures during the set up of the machines. In three towns they reported problems such as the case we reported last week in Stafford where LHS was contacted and a memory card switch was made.
The State’s voting machine security team at the University of CT is about to release a report on memory card research they conducted but it is not clear that it will contain data about cards that failed prior to their collected memory cards for random testing. A handful of cards failed during the testing, according to the Secretary of the State’s office.
We are obtaining numbers and seeking further information to try to confirm that CT is one of the states Diebold will study as part of their inquiry into 25,000 Optical Scan machines that are now known to have failure rates exceeding the acceptable level. The problem lies with the J40 pin and memory card interfacing but we are awaiting news from Diebold on whether or not Connecticut machines have this part. If so we could see a recall of the technology for repairs or even more dramatic developments.
In New Hartford, CT a result was changed after the recount. A Democrat, Thomas Klebart gained only one vote to beat Republican Roy Litchfield for a seat on the Board of Finance. It wasn’t a voting machine problem, however, we have been trying to obtain some numbers on memory card failures and when I asked New Hartford Town Clerk Donna Laplant about that topic she said there were some glitches. We are tracking memory card failures..
In East Haven a recount triggered by a close Mayoral race didn’t change the results, however, it resulted in yet another recount. The saga drew national attention after some 130 vote difference was found in the result. The Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz attributed the problem to human error. She said a stack of ballots may have been hand counted twice. The winner, Democratic Mayor elect April Capone-Almon, gained four votes in the end to win by 25 ballots.
Some of the officials in East Haven were less than satisfied with the procedures set up for the recount and the Secretary of State’s office admitted that there was a need for more clarity during the 2nd recount.
The Middletown Press reported on a troubling series of events that left Middlefield Town Clerk Donna Golub mystified. She said nine ballots were still unaccounted for as of November 14th and quote ‘Nobody knows where they went or how to account for them’.
Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz once again said she suspected the problem was human error but the winner, Republican incumbent Jon Brayshaw said he thinks the machines are a little suspect, adding “It seems to me they would have worked out all the bugs before they put these machines out there.”
We have been hearing a groundswell of complaints about the Secretary of the State after conducting interviews with poll workers in various places. The problem is complicated by confusion over new voting machine security protocols released shortly before the election. In 2006 local voting officials we interviewed were unclear about whether or not to feed nonconforming ballots back into machines during recounts. That may be part of the problem in Middlefield.
Recounts of the 2nd district race during the first limited use of the machines in 2006 found mystifying variations of several votes time after time, a problem that cropped up again during the audit. The underlying problem here appears to be that poll workers and state officials are unclear about what the new machines are doing when they fail.
We hear my interview with Deputy Secreary of State Lesley Mara as she responds to questions about LHS and what her office has tried to do by responding to problems we reported to them, yet they emphasize reassuring voters and there has been a tendency on the part of Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, to try to downplay any failures of the new voting technology. They have been reassuring voters while behind the scenes they struggle to providing adequate oversight for machines and the election process itself.
In fact we tracked a variation in memory card performance and comments from three LHS staff members who said they would swap failing cards to document a growing threat to CT voting machine security. The state is investigating the problem and has given my October 30th 2007 complaint to the Connecticut Election Enforcement Board a docket number (SEEC Docket no. 2007-385) and assigned an attorney.
While we were encouraged by the Secretary of the State’s updates to security protocols, her office has been struggling to keep up with the demands imposed by the new voting systems in general. There are a few developments that have been very positive, the Registrars of Voter we spoke with in limited research do understand that LHS staff members are present at polls as advisor’s and will not be doing repairs. The voting machines that fail will be taken off line, not repaired. And there is a greater emphasis on hand counting irregular ballots, more logic in the security protocols. Towns have had to come up to speed on three different versions of protocols at this point and problems in any of these areas could be related.
The glaring problem is the continued role of LHS which is named over and over again in providing reports about voting machine failures, advising registrars as to action plans when machines fail,and reporting to the Secretary of State’s office.
There is a welcome added layer of research into memory cards by University of Connecticut computer scientist, Alexander Shvartsman. He is under contract with the SOTS. However, we will be interested to read his report now that we have established that memory card failures did occur during the initial testing phase, before Shvartsman picked up cards to test them. We would like to know if he tracked memory card failures like the ones we documented in three out of five towns where we specifically asked officials if any memory cards had failed throughout the entire election process. In the three towns we identified with failing memory cards, the registrars simply contacted LHS and the cards were exchanged.
Technical experts and voting rights activists have argued that any kind of failure of voting technology ought to result in immediate research into what happened, careful documentation, and acute control over chain-of-custody.
Letting vendors or manufacturers track problems invites delays in correcting problems, and there is a clear example of this happening in the story being reported by M.C. Moewe who found failure rates for machines reaching percentages as high as one in ten, or 9.7 percent with machines in use in Florida that are similar to Connecticut’s machines. Diebold has now admitted that there is a problem with the J-40 connector that interfaces with the memory card and they are looking into the cost of providing repairs. We will be reporting on any necessary related repairs to Connecticut machines in upcoming broadcasts.
You can read an interview with a Diebold spokesperson in the November 12, 2007 issue of the Daytona News Journal Online and Moewe’s continued reports on this topic appear in that publication as well.
Deputy Secretary of State Lesley Mara said voters should look at the counter, and there have been reports of counters not changing. I can personally verify that this happens since I looked at the counter prior to casting my own vote in Connecticut in 2007 and there was no change to the number after the machine accepted my vote.
We hear another instance described by an official in Suffield, CT Suffield’s Republican Registrar Lynn Joyal said there had not been problems with machines, however, a voter there said the vote counter didn’t change when the vote was cast. There is a report of the incident.
The technology that was expected to revolutionize voting and provide greater speed, security, and accuracy, has instead resulted in a need for complex security protocols with detailed descriptions of what to do in the event of a wide range of failures. The complexity has meant more dependency on the vendor for the machines, LHS Associates. We are working on trying to obtain information about any records that may have been kept because when any kind of variation crops up you can learn a lot about machines and protocols.
See: http://www.talknationradio.org for audio links, transcripts and discussions. Contact Dori Smith at talknationradio@gmail.com
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