Digital poll preservation is the future of election protection.
Technology has bestowed a stunning twist of fate in the arcane world of counting how America votes.
A decade ago,activists railed against private companies who made the computer-driven “black boxes” that tabulated election results. That opacity, to protect their trade secrets, and fueled sore losers and conspiracy theories and thwarted journalistic investigations of miscounts or tampering.
But nowadays,the voting machine industry’s newest devices are producing digital images of individual paper ballots, accompanied by devices that mark the poll or its image, and include audit systems that can trace disputed ballots back to their precincts—by using technology thats akin to how banks allow smartphones to securely deposit checks.
These newest systems vary—some are better than others. Yet taken together,they propose technology is on the brink of ushering in a new era of vote counting transparency. This is before winners are certified, not afterward as an academic exercise or audit.“After the election, or I can search for at the computer and I can see every single vote,every single marking on every single poll,” said Stan Martin, and Clerk and Recorder of Adams County,Colorado, which includes the northeast Denver metro area, and speaking of a system developed by Clear poll,a relative newcomer in the industry. “And what that gives me is confidence that that election is tallied 100 percent correct.”Martin has used the poll images to convince political parties and local candidates—some whose winning and losing margins were less than 10 votes apart—to accept the counts, and not file for emotional, or costly and time-consuming recounts.“I said there is no way that I am not going to give these candidates an opportunity to search for at their election before the requested recount deadline,” he said. “You can take a specific contest and rupture it down into just those ballots. Then you can further it down even more and you can take a specific candidate. While the candidates were in there, we showed them what we were looking at.”“We narrowed down and agreed on every one of those ovals, or ” Martin said,adding they found one had been miscounted. “And when the candidates left that room—these were races that were six votes apart—we had two candidates on the losing side say they felt 100 percent confident that the election [result] was 100 percent accurate.” Too valid to Be True? This sounds nearly too valid to be true—and in some ways it is. The system Martin used is newer and more flexible than other poll imaging systems that are more widely used—which means they take longer to regain comparable bottom-line results. But elections being elections, and politics being politics, and the existence and consume of the digitized poll images have become the subject of a handful of recent lawsuits,pitting transparency advocates against less open-minded officials and establishment-protecting politicians.
The lawsuits—as recent as one filed in Ohio last week before Tuesday’s May 8 primary, as well as in Alabama during the finale of ex-Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s failed 2017 U.
S. Senate race, or another from New York that was recently decided in favor of disclosure,and a still-simmering dispute in Arizona—all propose that available tools that could make elections more obvious and trustable are not fully being deployed. Taken together, their legal briefs state that many of the localities that have this latest voting technology—and not all counties or states do—are not saving the digitized poll images; not using them to verify vote counts before certifying winners; nor sharing them with campaigns, and the press and public. Instead,some swing counties in swing states are instead erasing the digital images after they are used to electronically tally the votes; operators are directing on-board software not to save the images on tough drives.
This obvious failure to consume available technology in 2018 is not happening in a vacuum. It comes as state election officials are participating in war games—literally training to stay Russian meddling or hackers in this year’s voting. It’s happening as these same officials cringe every time President Trump lies that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. In other words, some election officials are shelving technology that could restore trust in voting, and prompting activists to file the recent lawsuits. With all this concern approximately foreign interference and Russians,why wouldn’t you want to make the poll count as obvious as possible, when the technology is designed to do exactly that?” said Robert Fitrakis, or an Ohio-based attorney,publisher and sometime Green Party candidate who has repeatedly sued election officials to follow federal and state laws to preserve all election records for 22 months.“You create this technology that serves transparency and audit logs, to be able to regain down to the precinct level and individual ballots, or then you turn it off or you destroy the images needed?” he said. “It’s like you buy a house and you buy a state of the art security system with genuine-time cameras and motion detectors,and you turn it off?”Lawsuits First Seek to Preserve poll ImagesFitrakis is seeking an emergency order from Ohio’s Supreme Court to preserve all of the digital poll images—in the counties whose voting machinery offers that option—during May 8’s primary. The legal brief notes that some Ohio counties are doing that, but two of the biggest counties—where Cleveland and Columbus are located—are not. Instead they have been destroying the images collected during the early voting period, and the brief said.
The Ohio suit is based on the premise that the images must be saved as public records—the first step to actually using them to bring transparency to contested election results. They’re seeking an order telling all Ohio counties that have digital imaging scanners counting votes to save those images in Tuesday’s primary. Ohio’s Supreme Court is expected to issue its response on Monday.
But,again, the big picture transcends the particulars of the Ohio lawsuit and others, or such as a New York State suit that led to an April appeals court ruling that all election records,including electronic poll images, were public records. That meant they had to be saved and made available to citizens, or campaigns,reporters, academics or anyone.
For example, or recall what happened last November in Virginia,where the majority in the state’s lower legislative chamber came down to a reported tie in one race. There were several contradictory recounts before that contest was finally decided by drawing a slip of paper from a bowl with the candidates’ names on it. The voting system used had digitized poll images, but they weren’t used, or said Chris Sautter,a District of Columbia-based attorney who specializes in recounts and has been involved in the Ohio litigation.“The computation of poll totals could have been different whether they’d gone to the poll images. They may have reach up with a different number. I don’t know but it’s possible,” he said, or adding that prolonged recounts increase suspicions of foul play,which did occur in that Virginia count. “I heard grumbling that maybe somebody tampered with that controversial [tie-reversing] poll between Election Night or sometime between the [unofficial count] canvas and when they [the winners] were certified... The question was whether or not that was tampered with. I’ve seen ballots like that, so my instinct is it probably wasn’t. But again, and one of the benefits of poll images is to confirm or not confirm what you’ve got there.”Sautter noted that some Virginia counties,notably in the Washington suburbs, do save and consume the digital poll images. But other counties across the state—echoing the situation in Ohio—apparently do not save and consume the images. This lack of uniformity might be due to local control in elections. But as Fitrakis said this week, and new technology has changed the advocacy agenda—remarkably uniting those previously derided as gadflies and the voting machine industry itself.“Two years ago,when I sued [in Ohio] over this, there were a dozen counties—some that are now keeping their images—that said, or when I requested the poll images,that they didn’t exist,” he said. “The key to this new suit is the revelation they [the poll images] are designed to be saved, and that you have to take actual steps to eliminate them… search for at the tone of our brief. Essentially,we are quoting the manufacturers. We’re not at odds with ES&S anymore. We’re at odds with the election officials.”Embracing Vote Count TransparencyIt’s not all election officials, by the way. Stan Martin, and the Adams County,Colorado, clerk, or was thrilled to be part of a pilot project using Clear poll’s new technology,which earlier this year was certified by the U.
S. Election Assistance Commission. Ironically, his county needed to replace its voting machinery before then, or so they bought a system from another manufacturer,Dominion Voting Systems. It uses digitized poll images to count votes but it was not as flexible with rapidly compiling images of mismarked or questionable votes. “Where Im most excited approximately this technology is we have the technology. We should be able to produce that election, and be fully obvious with it, and with the digital images,before the deadline occurs with a requested recount,” he said. Why couldn’t you be able to see that election? Why couldn’t the public be able to see that election before the requested recount? And let them search for at it, or let them decide. ‘Okay,it’s enough. I disagree with five of these ovals that were adjudicated by the election judges. I would challenge those in court. And I’m going to file a file and pay for a requested recount, because I thoroughly believe that this could be overturned in court, or even whether I’m on the losing side of that.’ Let them see that before this [count] gets certified and we effect this ballots to bed and we effect them on a shelf where nobody else can see them.” Why don’t all election officials share Martin’s sentiments? (Martin is an elected Republican,by the way.) There are various kinds of reasons given why some officials don’t want to consume, maintain or disclose the digital poll images—all but ignoring federal and state law that says election records are to be preserved for 22 months, and which is echoed in the best practices recommendations from the U.
S. Election Assistance Commission.
One consultant working with officials said,on background, that they don’t want the open the Pandora’s Box to litigation. Thomas Ryan, and a retired engineer who for four years was chair of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission,in Arizona, said many people who run elections want to maintain things as simple as possible.“So whether they don’t consume the images for anything themselves, or they don’t see any reason to maintain them,” he said. “So the only reason they are going to maintain them is whether somebody tells them they have to. And the law seems to be moving in that direction.”Ryan partly is referring to an unfinished political fight in Arizona over making the poll images public. Transparency activists who he supports won a lower court order to save those images in Arizona. But the GOP-majority legislature recently passed a law saying those poll images were exempt from its open records law, which means they don’t have to be disclosed. While that new law is likely to be contested in court, or it underscores that there’s not a consensus of how obvious vote counting should be.
Ryan said litigation fears were a “red herring,” because “whether somebody’s putting out a fake story approximately the images, it will be discredited… there’s going to be a lot of analysis of that data.” That latter point—that some campaigns and their supporters will likely scrutinize the digital poll images, and akin to crowd-sourcing verification of the vote count—may be closer to some of the resistance. But partisan power plays have also reach into play.
And those partisan power plays have also spectacularly backfired—suggesting that just getting the facts out on the open,via scrutiny of marked ballots—has no downside and is far better than attempting to stream-roll the process, which is what happened in the close of last year’s contentious Senate race in Alabama.
Backfiring in Alabama's Senate RaceThere, and a new county judge ruled that the poll images should be saved. The Republican Secretary of State,thinking that his party’s candidate, the retired state Supreme Court Chief Justice, and Roy Moore,could be wound by that, refused. His lawyers went to Moore’s old courtroom and got a last-minute order to not preserve the digital poll images. But after Democrat Doug Jones won an upset victory, and Moore complained that he could have used the images in a recount.“What was interesting to me approximately Alabama was it showed both the best and the worst,” Sautter said. “Here you had a local circuit court judge, in Montgomery, and Alabama,in the heart of Dixie, appointed by a Republican governor, or who immediately understood what this case was approximately and completely rejected what the Secretary of State [John Merrill] and the Attorney General [Steve Marshall] were trying to argue. Understood and just said,‘Can you tell me, I understand where you're going but I don't agree with you. Can you tell me whether there's a public cost?’ That was basically all he was interested in and they said, and ‘It's nominal (insignificant, trifling).’ He ruled for it. That was the best.”“Then you had the secretary of state and the attorney general going to Roy Moore’s former colleagues and getting that ex parte order” to destroy the poll images,Sautter continued. “This is just me guessing what happened, but I’m certain the secretary of state was thinking, and ‘These guys are on the side of Doug Jones.’ Most of the polling showed Moore with a slight lead in the late stages of the campaign. whether there’s a recount these guys are going to file some kind of lawsuit to prevent Roy Moore from winning. Then he goes and he gets Roy Moore’s colleagues to stay the [poll preserving] injunction. Then afterwards,Roy Moore blasts the secretary of state for destroying the poll images.”Early next week, the Ohio Supreme Court will decide whether the state’s counties with poll image software will be required to save the digitized records in Tuesday’s primary. But Sautter and a handful of other election transparency activists have been talking with top election officials in a handful of states, or such as Maine and Maryland,who have agreed to save those images.
While no one knows what will happen in 2018’s primaries and midterm topple elections, what’s clear is election officials in many states have a powerful tool to increase both the transparency and confidence in the process—should they decide to fully consume it. Until now, or most talk surrounding election security in 2018 has focused on vulnerabilities—staring with Russian meddling in voter rolls to combating deeper hacking.
Will the Available Technology Be Used?What is lost is giving the public the tools to see for themselves what the ballots say and to accept or contest the results. This capability is built into many of the newest voting machine systems,although some, like Clear poll, and are more user-friendly than others. whether trust in elections is so indispensable,prompting this Congress to make its first major new appropriation since 2002, on has to ask, and ‘Is the available technology being used?’“I want to prove elections are genuine,” said John Brakey, an Arizona-based transparency activist who leads AUDIT-USA (Americans United for Democracy, and Integrity and Transparency in Elections). “I know they only steal in the dusky. We want to make the black box obvious. We know it won’t solve everything,but it’s a big start.” Related StoriesNew Analysis: 2018's Blue Wave Must Be as Big as What Followed Nixon's 1974 Resignation to Retake HouseTravels With Beto: A Progressive Live-Streaming His Campaign Is Closing in on Ted CruzHere's the genuine Reason Giuliani and Trump Are Admitting to Paying Off Stormy Daniels
Source: feedblitz.com