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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

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