Article discounting HCPB sounds like 5th grade report. Shame on CSM & Pfaffenberger

[diva77]

Thanks to sfexpat2000 for posting this in the ER daily digest 5.30.08. I am very surprised that this slipped thru quality control at the CSM. It reminds me of the papers we'd have to write for class in 5th grade - you look up one article in the encyclopedia, change a few words, then hand it in as your own paper. Mr. Pfaffenberger needs to look up a few more articles on HCPB and he should reference whatever information he looked up, if any at all, for this inadequate article.


Return to paper ballots? Not so fast.
History shows that the US gave them up for good reason.
By Bryan Pfaffenberger

from the May 30, 2008 edition

Charlottesville, Va. - The paper ballot is making a comeback. Across America, election officials are ending their experiment with electronic touch-screen voting machines – a failure in the view of most experts – and replacing them with computerized tallying of paper ballots.

Some want to push the machines out entirely. To restore public confidence, they say, let's count the ballots by hand and allow citizens to observe and videotape the process.

But wait a minute. Today, fewer than 1 percent of America's votes are counted by hand. If hand counting is so great, why did we give it up?

History gives a clear answer and a sharp warning: We gave up hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) for good reason – and resuming their use might be a very bad idea.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0530/p09s01-coop.html

[kster]

1. Bryan Pfaffenberger might be right, so lets have ON TV debate about it,

that will never happen because the Media and the Politicians till this day REMAIN SILENT about anything to do with the COUNTING OF BALLOTS, we have the INTERNET more and more people are learning how the Politicians along with the Media are scamming the elections, but they will not give up the scam.

Like a bunch of school yard kids who have done something wrong, then they make a deal to remain silent about, it so they don't get caught.

Its getting funnier by the minute, kinda like watching a two year old that puts his/her hands over his/her eyes and believes that no one can see them.

The Media and our Politicians have become a JOKE, AN ALL OUT JOKE, PERIOD!

K&R

[eridani]

2. According to the article, only lever machines are actual voting machines

Complete refusal to actually deal with the options that are there, and no mention of DREs at all.

[Bill Bored]

5. Levers are the only acceptable voting machines.

It's ludicrous to think that any software based system can compare to a system where every possible vote, every possible combination of votes, and every bit of "programming" can be tested before and after an election, and have the same result as it would during an election when the actual votes are cast. This is only possible with a lever machine!

Show me a "Logic and Accuracy" test or a "Source Code Review" or even an audit of Ballot Definition Programming (which is ONLY done on memory cards by the University of CT -- nowhere else!) that can make that claim.

Show me any piece of software that cannot be rigged to affect thousands of machines.

Show me any e-vote counting system that can be reliably tested, certified, inspected and used in actual elections with as much confidence as that engendered over the last century by lever machines.

The reason we are going back to paper is because of the unreliability and lack of transparency of software. Paper was NOT the preferred voting method in most of the country, although as the author points out, HCPB elections can work well when administered properly and professionally by non-partisan election officials. Let me know when you find some, won't you?

And lever machines are still an option in the whole state of NY where we will be electing a President on them this year, as the ONLY state not yet dependent on electronic vote counting.

I fear for our future though if the levers are replaced without the necessary safeguards, few of which exist in any other state in the nation at this time.

It's not about being anti-paper. It's about not settling for any system that depends on trusting insiders, be they programmers or hand counters. Given the choice, I'd trust the hand counters of course, with observers, assuming you can get the observers to show up and actually observe! But even that system needs to be audited and in NY, there have been laws to do so on the books for decades. However, it's been quite a while since we've had to use them, due to our lever elections and newer, less effective laws are slowly taking their place. That sucks, but could be changed.

Cut Pfaffenberger some slack though. He's making some good points and I didn't see him advocating for any e-vote counting like many other so-called election integrity advocates have done in what used to be lever states.

[eridani]

6. Levers = no possibility of auditing = unacceptable

When you vote with a lever machine, you destroy all records of the previous vote. A recount is impossible by definition. Number one requirement of any system is auditability, closely followed by actually DOING the auditing. However, if you have them, I'd certainly oppose replacing them with DREs.

Any possible voting system can be scammed, including HCPB. I don't trust people counting ballots by hand any more than I trust them to program optical scanners. As you have pointed out, getting observers is key.

The Repubs tried to cheat in recount of the WA state 2004 gubernatorial race, which was foiled only by he presence of a lot of observers. Two separate optical scan counts and the final handcount agreed within 0.1% of each other--it was the best possible audit. The fly in the ointment is that it took several weeks to do just one contest.

[Bill Bored]

7. I'm glad that WA was able to recount, but not so everywhere.

Recounts were historically considered to be golden opportunities for fraud. Now they're considered to be the "gold standard." Look how far we've come!

[eridani]

8. That's because there was extensive public oversight

As Paul Lehto always says, the issue is one of checks and balances. Optical scanning is good enough for lotteries (which are far more effectively regulated than our elections). Combining that with mandatory handcounted audits, the protocol to be determined by competent statisticians, provides that. Getting the same result with two different methods increases confidence in that result.

[Bill Bored]

9. Ha! When was the last time an election official consutled a statistician?

Come to think of it, when was the first time?

I don't think the lottery, an ATM, or a standardized test marked by an op scanner is analogous to an election. There are no secret ballots so there can be a real audit trail. Not so with elections.

What you are suggesting may be a reasonable substitute for a lever machine, but it's only necessary to go through all that because computers are being used to count the votes. Personally, I'd rather not have to mitigate that risk in the first place.

The latest thing that some activists are complaining about is not being able to verify the chain of custody of the paper ballots. So therefore, they say the audit is useless. How would you respond to that?

[eridani]

11. Chain of custody can be dealt with. I was an observer in 2005--

--and every time a truckload of ballots was moved, there was one Dem and one Repub on the truck. It worked pretty well as far as I could see.

And statisticians jolly well WOULD work for elections departments if that would be legally mandated.

And levers, besides being unauditable, aren't foolproof either. Cogs can be filed down a bit, and there is ordinary wear and tear to consider. The analogy is what happens to your derailleur shifting when your cogs and cranksets get a little wear on them and your chain stretches.

[Bill Bored]

12. Well, your bicycle analogy might be valid if the lever machines had that many miles on them.

But they are only used a few times a year. After 40+ years of elections, they're probably just getting broken in.

If levers are as bad as you suggest, they'd have much higher undervote rates. And I don't mean down-ticket where folks undervote intentionally. I mean at the top where levers are about as good as any other system, and better than HCPB because they don't allow overvotes.

[kster]

13. I want Random Audits and Hand Counted Paper Ballots, can they both be done with levers? nt

[EFerrari]

3. That happens at CSM every now and then. Write a rebuttal!

I wrote one on a different topic and they put it up at their site. :hi:

[Wilms]

4. The article may not be rigorous. But a given perspective might help.

I suspect Pfaffenberger is in a NY State of Mind.

NY is the last state using lever machines. It's threatened both by the Bush-DoJ to change them out, and by a soon to be filed lawsuit arguing to keep them.

DREs, while not outlawed, aren't effectively an option in the state, and many others. Perhaps the author got ahead of himself paying scant attention to DREs, mentioning them only as a "failure" in the article's opening.

Pfaffenberger does refer to Jacob Myer's, and other fairly well known arguments against HCPB in the days of old. Though done so without specific citation, you wouldn't need much time to become familiar with them.

Looking more deeply in the article, the author, in arguing against WIDESPREAD use HCPB says:

Put simply, the Australian system's defects were too severe.

Myers, who had traveled abroad to study the Australian system up close, found that there were unacceptably high numbers of voided ballots due to voter mistakes (voting for too many candidates, making an erasure, or making an extraneous mark on the ballot). In any close election conducted with Australian ballots, the number of invalidated ballots would probably exceed the margin of victory, calling the election's validity into question.

Emphasis mine. All will recall FL 2000 and realize this is only so different.

He continues;

After all, in the US, election officials are often openly partisan. The 2000 recount battle in Florida made that all too apparent. Did partisanship creep into their decisions about a given ballot's validity? Or if they didn't like the vote it contained, would they spoil it? Election officials have pulled off such tricks right under the noses of election observers, time and again.

The "Stuffer's Ballot Box" may be what he had in mind by "right under the noses of election observers".

http://americanhistory.si.edu/vote/paperballots.html

But Pfaffenberger doesn't condemn HCPB as much as the Harris Blackwells of the world. Reasonably, he observes;

To be sure, the HCPB system can work well, as it does in Canada, Switzerland, and some areas in the US, provided that elections are administered by professional, nonpartisan officials, but in the 1890s, the movement to professionalize and depoliticize election systems was still in its infancy.

Returning to HCPB might work well in areas with lots of oversight, but in contrast to other stable democracies, this movement has made little progress in the US. Throughout most of the country, today's election system has more in common with that of the 1890s: It's inadequately supervised, insufficiently professionalized, and all too often staffed with openly partisan officials.

Under these circumstances, what voting machine backers believed a century ago still holds true: It just isn't wise to let people count ballots.

My take on this includes the idea that expecting the fed to mandate HCPB nationally is merely entertaining. Posting endlessly on an internet forum, as some do, about abandoned national legislation for HCPB is a waste of everybody's time...time better spent as it is by the likes of Dave Berman attempting to turn California's rural Humboldt county into a HCPB jurisdiction.


Or join the lawsuit to retain NY's lever machines.
http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2008/03/ny-planned-lawsuit-challenges.html

[kster]

14. Come on Wilms, for christ sake DRE and Lever "vote counting machines" are

PAPERLESS, how long do you think that you can twist the truth.

Americans that want a Random Audit of these goofy ass "vote counting machines" should be allowed to do their audit, and the people who want a full Hand Count of ALL the optical scanned ballots AT THE POLLING PLACE should be allowed to do it.

This way all Americans get what they want.



Selling the truth is easy.


REAL EASY! :)

[kster]

10. delete

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