Enforce the TVCA!
Providing a paper trail protects voters' rights; it's also the law.
by Gerard Stranch and John BonifazArticle Tools
In 2008, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Nashville passed the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA), joining the growing national trend of 26 other states requiring voter-verifiable paper ballots and "optical scan" machines to read them for all Tennessee elections.
At last, Tennessee voters would have a "paper trail," a concrete record to check the accuracy of a vote count in case of computer glitches, recounts, and allegations of fraud.
Since then, a few election officials have done their best to stonewall this reform, refusing to implement it, calling for its repeal, and using misleading information as ammunition. Flyer readers saw this last week in the guest Viewpoint of Shelby County election administrator Rich Holden.
With the help of local lawyers like Shelby County commissioner and University of Memphis law professor Steve Mulroy, we're going to court on behalf of Common Cause Tennessee to try to force these officials to obey the law.
Holden uses inflated figures — estimating Shelby County's paper ballot costs at $400,000 per election. But Hamilton County has been using paper ballots for years at a cost of less than 25 cents a ballot and uses estimates of likely voter turnout to determine the number of ballots to print. Using those parameters, the highest-turnout race in Shelby County's election cycle would cost less than $100,000 and most elections far less. The estimate provided is inflated by well over a factor of four.
Holden also argues that federal dollars will only pay for one machine per precinct, so Shelby County will have to pony up for extra machines. But in counties where optiscan is used, you don't need more than one machine per precinct.
Critics further complain of costs for storage and handling of the paper ballots. But the reality is that where counties switched from touch-screen to optiscan they've saved money, because there are far fewer machines to store and maintain, the machines themselves are cheaper and easier to maintain, and the machines need to be replaced less frequently.
Most incredibly, Holden complains that optiscan will be a slower process because of the need for "ballot on demand" machines to print out ballots. In fact, though, optiscan dramatically reduces wait time for voters.
Right now, a touchscreen voter toggling through screen after screen of a lengthy Shelby County ballot can take as long as 15 minutes to vote, while long lines of waiting voters stream out the door. You can only let from one to three voters vote at a time, depending on how many expensive touch-screen machines you can afford at a given polling location.
With optiscan, 15 voters at 15 privacy carrels can pencil in their choices at their leisure, causing no delay. When they're done, they feed their ballots into the optical reader in literally less than a second. No wait.
Ultimately, it shouldn't matter what election officials think: The law says they have to implement optiscan by November 2010.
But election officials have gotten clever, arguing that the law's text allows only machines federally certified to 2005 standards, and no such machines exist.
This would be an effective argument if that's what the law really said, but it's not. Nowhere in the TVCA's text does it say "2005 standards." It uses the phrase "applicable voluntary voting system guidelines," a technical term that both the federal certifying agency and the federal statute which created it make clear can refer either to the 2005 standards or to 2002 standards, for which plenty of certified machines exist.
State election officials have gone out of their way to interpret the TVCA to make it impossible to implement. This flies in the face of the basic principle of statutory construction that a law should be interpreted to resolve internal contradictions and make it enforceable.
We can't explain why the current Republican leadership of the Tennessee General Assembly and its appointed election bureaucrats, who only last year embraced "paper trail" reform, are now so determined to kill it. We can only hope the court will tell them to obey the law.
In the meantime, Flyer readers deserve the facts about "paper trail" reform, not self-serving distortions.
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Thank you for setting the record straight.
The TVCA was amended so many times that even legislators were surprised to learn they had mandated paper ballots. Activist are not experts they operate on theory, election officials are knowledgeable and experienced regarding election requirements.
Shelby has over 500,000 registered voters. We are not Hamilton or any other county. Each election must prepare for registered voters whether or not they turnout -- how else could one conduct an election? To have that many multi-page paper ballots readily available would be very, very expensive. To store those multi-page paper ballots for almost two years as required, is staggering. Think about the 300 candidates in our August 2006 election -- they caused something more than 50 different ballot faces --500,000 registered voters x 50 different ballot faces = major stacks of paper to be available, transported, stored and protected. That year Shelby had the largest ever election conducted in TN -- Hamilton did not.
One computer operated scanner per precinct? This is where the activist really stumble -- a backup is mandatory.
One of the most strange things about this argument is the attempt to make it partisan - Dems vs Repb. The fact is that Democrats were in charge when touch screen machines were instituted in Tennessee and had been in charge of elections for decades.
Nationally, according to "the news" there may have been problems, but Shelby has not had those problems we have a good Election system. Dead voters were a result of the poll workers, not the machines. Paper present an even greater opportunity for the unlawful.
"Jeff," above, makes no sense. He continues the tactic of trying to repeat lies so many times that they are accepted as truth.
Shannon Williford
Again, as I posted last week, below is information on actual election problems in Memphis using the current equipment. It comes from Black Box Voting.
Jeff's arguments are vapid. He says Shelby has not had problems? Hah. See below. We're not talking of a few dead voters (wrong, but small in number), we're talking about the current machines which can be accidently or purposefully made to change hundreds or even thousands of votes. And the very physicallity of paper makes it more difficult to vote illegally. There's a real ballot to be hidden or destroyed or replaced, not merely a vapor trail in a computer that cannot be physically examined at all!
And nobody is making it a Repub vs. Dem problem except the Repubs, who want to undermine the law as it was passed nearly unanimously. I'm a conservative that votes the person not the party. I just want to know my vote is counted.
A backup machine is, of course NOT needed when we use PAPER BALLOTS. The lack of a scanner machine - should it go out, though, unlike the current faulty computer machines, they rarely do - will not slow down the voting process one bit. Voters can mark ballots and drop them into a ballot box. Canada can hand-count a whole national election in 4 hours; yet Memphis needs a backup machine to count paper ballots in every precinct? I think not.
This from Black Box Voting:
Memphis: Candidates in Memphis asked Black Box Voting for help securing public records from the Aug. 3, 2006 election. Black Box Voting recommended getting a copy of the Diebold GEMS database, along with the Windows event log. What we found shocked us: The sheer number of legal and security violations in the event log were horrifying, and it also showed that Shelby County — or someone — was accessing the file during the middle of a Temporary Restraining Order prohibiting this.
- A remote access program called PC Anywhere was found resident in the system
- Evidence of insertion of an encrypted Lexar Jump Drive was present
- Evidence of attempts to alter or write HTML files (used to report results) was present
- Apparently without a firewall, the GEMS system was opened up to the County Network
- A prohibited program, Microsoft Access, which makes editing the election chimpanzee-easy, was installed on the system AND USED shortly after the election.
To read more about Memphis, click here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1…
Shannon Williford
Nashville
Thanks to Shannon for putting some of the real facts out there. Thanks to Professor Mulroy and his associates for standing up for all of Tennessee's voters, be they Democrat, Republican or Independent. The real bottom line is that no one- not Mr. Holden here in Shelby County, not Mr. Goins on Nashville or Secretary of State Hargett-can assure us that there have been no problems in Tennessee in the past and that there will be none in the future using our current machines. There is absolutely no way to know if election results have been changed as there is no way to audit the accuracy of the count.
What is known without question is that the basic software running these machines has insufficient security built into it and that there have been documented edits of code after machines were supposedly secured in many voting venues across the nation. As noted by Shannon, this includes Shelby County. Here is what computer scientists from Princeton and Berkeley said in their 2007 report to the State of California:
"Our study of the Diebold source code found that the system does not meet the requirements for a security-critical system. It is built upon an inherently fragile design and suffers from implementation flaws that can expose the entire voting system to attacks. These vulnerabilities, if exploited, could jeopardize voter privacy and the integrity of elections. An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive—malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers. Even with a paper trail, malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day.
We conclude that these problems arose because of a failure to design and build the system with security as a central focus, which led to the inconsistent application of accepted security engineering practices.”
These conclusions echo conclusions from other computer scientists, including those in charge of the National Science Foundation electronic voting project. The question is not whether these machines need to be replaced, but why are we using them at all. Those initial purchase decisions were made under a Democratic controlled Election Commission system. So why is this now a partisan issue? Shouldn’t both parties want honest elections? Why is Tre Hargett determined to use machines that represent a real security threat? Why has he trumped up a silly squabble over semantics to block the will of the legislature? With all our serious problems, why has Sen. Ramsey declared postponing implementation of the law priority number one? Something doesn’t add up logically here.
I believe Mr. Holden is committed to running a bipartisan office dedicated to fair elections. But his op-ed piece did not address these extremely serious security issues. They will remain a cloud over every election as long as we continue to use these flawed Diebold machines. As the California report concluded “…the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer it so that it is secure by design.” Our legislature has chosen to repair our election system by replacing these risky machines. We need to get on with that task before the important 2010 elections.
WE ALL NEED TO PUSH FOR VERIFIABLE, RECOUNTABLE BALLOTS. CONTACT LEGISLATORS. INVOLVE YOUR FRIENDS. POST ON BLOGS. WRITE LETTERS.
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