ACLU Says BOE Voting System Switch Would Violate State Law (Cleveland)

[OhioChick]

Source: AP

POSTED: 12:22 pm EST December 27, 2007
UPDATED: 12:24 pm EST December 27, 2007

CLEVELAND -- A voting rights organization Thursday urged the Cuyahoga County elections board not to make a planned switch to new a new voting system for the March presidential primary in Ohio, warning that doing so would violate state law.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio hand delivered a letter to the board urging it to reconsider a Dec. 21 decision to abandon electronic touch-screen voting for a system in which voters fill out paper ballots that are tallied at a central location by an optical scan computer.

After Thursday's board meeting, ACLU staff attorney Carrie Davis said a lawsuit was possible, depending on decisions the board makes in the next few days.

The main issue is whether a central optical scan of ballots at the board's headquarters downtown would result in votes not being counted on ballots that are incorrectly filled out.

But the elections board in Ohio's most populated county and its director said they are moving ahead with the switch, as decided by Ohio's chief election official

Last week, the board was deadlocked on whether to make the switch and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner broke the tie by deciding the county should go to optical scan.

Read more: http://www.newsnet5.com/news/14931688/detail.html

[pnwmom]

1. I think the ACLU is wrong about this. At least paper ballots can be recounted

by hand unlike electronic ballots.

[Stevepol]

2. The ACLU has its head stuck where the sun don't shine, or worse.

If there was ever an issue that the ACLU was needed on, it's this one: the counting of votes in total secrecy without verification by private, for-profit businesses with a decided tilt toward one political party (the Republican). A fifth grader could see that this kind of vote counting is anathema to democracy and in fact makes democracy impossible. In other words, it just means that every civil liberty is meaningless if the right to vote is lost. Talk about mistaking the forest for the trees.

How in God's name these people, who are supposedly possessed of fully functioning brains and even by some standards brains of a certain level of attainment, can stand by while the whole democratic process is suborned by these criminal organizations that are so clearly destroying our whole democracy is way way beyond my capacity to understand. I can understand elections people at the local level being misguided by the vendors and not able to understand computers, but the ACLU????? What have our so-called leaders come to?

It sometimes just makes me want to give up on the human race altogether or at least give up on the idea of democracy. Democracy assumes a certain minimal level of intelligence and competence and if these people can't figure it out, what hope is there? Maybe human beings weren't meant to govern themselves. Maybe they were meant to be ruled by whoever happens to have the power at a given time, however that power is achieved.

[yardwork]

3. We've used optical scans in my town for years - they work very well.

People fill out paper ballots, which they feed into an optical scanning machine that reads and tabulates the vote, retaining the original paper ballot. Ballots that are marked improperly get kicked into a holding bin, to be reviewed by real people at the end of the day. It's generally very easy to tell the voter's intention even if they didn't fill out the paper ballot correctly.

We've never had any problems. Not sure what the ACLU's issue is on this one.

[harmonicon]

4. same here, but they actually let us run our own through the machine

no information comes up about what you voted on (there's even a sort of envelope/cover so poll workers, etc. can't see how you voted), but it will tell you if it's not reading or their was an error - if so, a poll worker will offer you a new ballot and throw the old one out. Seems logical to me.

[truthisfreedom]

9. EXACTLY! That's how it's done in Minneapolis.

I always feel confident.

[yardwork]

11. Yes. We run our own ballots through the machine, and the tally indictes that it's been read.

The system works very well. The only reason to do touch-screen voting is to mess with the votes, imo.

[Ms. Toad]

16. The issue in Cleveland

is that Cleveland is switching to central count optical scanning. All ballots will be taken to a central location for counting.

In a precinct based system, the ballot reader rejects a ballot that doesn't read properly and the voter (who is standing right there) has a chance to correct it. In a central count system (as is proposed for Cuyahoga County), the voter loses that opportunity. In most instances, the human being other than the voter who reviews the rejected ballots will be able to tell the voter's intent - but not always.

* Those voters who are used to voting for one candidate per slot may not notice a race which permits them to vote for two or more candidates. In a precinct based system, the ballot is kicked back so that the voter can review his/her and make sure s/he really intended to vote only for one even though s/he was permitted to vote for more.

* If a voter makes a mistake and incompletely erases their first choice (or forgets to erase their first choice) before marking a second choice one or more races may be read as an overvote and no vote for that race will be counted. A precinct based system will catch that error, reject the ballot, and the voter will have a chance to correct it. In a central count system, the vote for that office or issue will not be counted unless the machine is programmed to sort all overvotes for hand review AND an independent reader looking at the ballot can determine voter intent - which may not be possible.

This means the voters in Cuyahoga County will have their votes treated differently than voters in other counties - both touch screen and precinct based optical scanning system voters get informed if they have potentially made a mistake and get a chance to correct it; Cuyahoga County voters will not - and as a result under the proposed system will be more likely than voters in the rest of the state to have their vote not counted (or miscounted). Given the heavily Democratic flavor of Cuyahoga County, that would not be my preference.

Aside from the ACLU's concern, election tampering existed long before votes were counted by machines. Ballots which are moved before being counted are much more easily altered/lost than either of the two predominant machine counting methods - precinct based optical scan or touch screen ballots. In the former case, the voter feeds the ballot into the machine and it is counted immediately. There are always the paper ballots which can be compared against the machine totals for confirmation. If the ballots are moved before being counted and a bag of ballots goes missing, extra ballots added, or altered ballots are substituted for real ballots, on the way to the counting machine there will be - at worst - no evidence (even electronic) that there was a misdeed, and - at best - no way of sorting the legitimate ballots from the added/altered ballots. When we used (central count) punch card systems, it was common practice in at least one county close to Cuyahoga for unguarded bags of uncounted ballots to be left sitting in the hallways of the county administration building - I'm not convinced the sloppy physical security practices have changed that much. In the latter case (touch screens), if ballots are to be carted to a central location before being counted, it takes no special skills to swap paper ballots - at least with touch screens the average John Doe pollworker/voter does not have the skill to electronically rig an election through any of the means widely discussed here and elsewhere.

[Toots]

15. How certain are you that some votes have not been switched?

As long as it is a computer that has been programmed by someone there is a chance that it could be faulty. I say vote on paper and have people count the votes. Yes it would involve more man hours but it would also gaurantee a fair and accurate count..Canada does exactly this and has the counts available within twenty four hours..

[Acadia Blue]

5. This is insane

[rcsl1998]

6. OK - Here's What I Don't Understand...

...in RI we have optical scan. The paper ballots are filled out and we feed the ballot into an on-site optical scan tabulator. If there is an error (such as voting for 2 candidates for the same office or any other way in which a vote could be spoiled) the ballot is rejected ON THE SPOT. The ballot is confiscated and a new fresh ballot is provided to re-do correctly. When we got the optical scan (sorry, I don't know which company - but NOT Diebold), our Secretary of State was on all the local news showing how they worked and how it would 'spit out' a spoiled ballot (it DID require a switch to be turned on to do this function). The ballots remained on-site if any recount was necessary. I don't understand how there could be ANY spoiled ballots using the system that we are using. Please help me to understand this need to transport ballots to a 'central tabulator' - I don't get it...

[L. Coyote]

7. At least op scan ballots can be hand counted at the precinct, and central tabulation

does not have to be the final word. But, they are arguing about which central tabulation system to use. Ballots need to be counted, not moved around town first, then counted!

[Le Taz Hot]

8. The ACLU???

Oy! I love this organization but every now and then . . . :wtf:

[Kokonoe]

10. Why even vote when some will surely run out of gas

or make a wrong turn

[AndyTiedye]

12. Do the Existing Machines in Cuyahoga County Produce a Paper Trail?

[OhioChick]

14. Yes.....

Mostly difficult to read, though.

[mod mom]

13. Here's a great solution by OSU Law Professor Ed Foley (@ precinct AND centrally):

Look to Minnesota for vote-counting solution
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:05 AM
By EDWARD B. FOLEY

hio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is concerned that computers used to count ballots at precincts are vulnerable to hacking. In a major report released last Friday, she recommends instead counting ballots centrally at Ohio's 88 county boards of election.

Whatever the risk of hacking, however, it is a mistake to eliminate the counting of ballots at local precincts.

Ballots have been known to go missing during transport from precinct to main office. In the old days, ballot boxes sometimes would end up in the river. In 2006, during the much-troubled May primary in Cuyahoga County, election officials misplaced 70 cartridges containing the votes from 200 precincts.

A better way to address Brunner's concern would be to count ballots twice, first at the precincts and then again after they've arrived at headquarters. That way, if ballots were lost en route, voters would not be disenfranchised.

The general point is that we should rely on recounts, or audits, to address our concerns about potential counting errors, including those caused by software sabotage. There are different types of recounts, machine and manual, as well as different types of audits. A mandatory audit of 10 percent of precincts, no matter how close the margin of victory, is obviously stricter than an initial audit of only 3 percent of precincts unless the result is close enough to require a more rigorous review.

-snip

http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/editorials/stories/2007/12/19/foley19.ART_ART_12-19-07_A17_R88QJGF.html?sid=101