Michigan's optical scan voting equipment is error prone and can be hacked in a few seconds, according to Michigan Election Reform Alliance. Reform Group Eyes Post-Election Audits, Citing Error-Prone Optical System
August 26, 2012
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As the nation wrangles over measures apparently designed to suppress the vote in November, thanks to Gov. Rick Snyder, Michigan has narrowly escaped some of the worst voter suppression measures.
Three bills passed the legislature in June that would have extended photo ID requirements for voting, harshly regulated third party voter registration drives, and required a check-box for citizenship in the application to vote at the polls.
On July 3rd, Governor Snyder vetoed all three bills, "giving a major victory to the people of Michigan and the non-partisan coalition that had fought hard against these bills for many months," according to a statement from the Michigan Election Reform Alliance (MERA).
According to officials of the group, MERA was in the thick of the fight this Spring, testifying at numerous hearings of the House Committee on Redistricting and Elections. The coalition included the League of Women Voters, Project Vote, A. Philip Randolph Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, MERA, and others.
Michigan's optical scan voting equipment is error prone and can be hacked in a few seconds, according to MERA.
"Michigan is relying on extremely vulnerable 1970s era devices to count our votes, and to count them in secret, says Bruce Fealk, media coordinator of MERA.
MERA is proposing election night audits as one possible solution to potential election fraud. A bill introduced in the Michigan Hosue providing for such audits has not advanced.
In addition, MERA has proposed beefing up law enforcement of Michigan's election laws, which currently are enforced by a single Michigan State police trooper for the entire state.
Jan BenDor, statewide coordinator for MERA says the group's main concern is the protection of Michigan's election integrity. "We have an election system that is riddled with problems and is very vulnerable to manipulation. We vote, but we aren't really sure our votes are being counted," Ben-Dor told the Rochester Citizen.
Ben-Dor said that Michigan has almost no rules or laws addressing security of election materials, such as unused ballots. There is no chain of custody for ballots. There is no tracking. "There are many bad things you can do with blank ballots if you have evil intentions. Right now we have very little in place to prevent ballot stuffing, ballot replacement, ballot chaining; these are all forms of election fraud," Ben-Dor said.
MERA has put forward a range of legislative solutions to Michigan's election problems, including same-day voter registration, no-reason absentee voting, legislation to eliminate problems for Michigan residents voting while overseas.
Ben Dor says the Michigan Constitution fails to guarantee or protect the right to vote, allowing bureaucrats to present Michigan citizens with arbitrary barriers to their access of the voting process. The present 30 day deadline for voter registration serves no useful or compelling government purpose, and it excludes large numbers of citizens?particularly those who are young, poor, travel for a living, rent their dwelling place, move frequently, or are homeless.
Another area of legislation is proposed to address the so-called Rogers law that requires voters to have the same address on a driver's license as on voter registration, which particularly puts students in jeopardy of not being able to vote in Michigan. The problem is when students have their residence at a university dorm or off campus housing and their driver's license address at home, possibly in another state, so that they are eligible for their parents' insurance. "If they change that, they lose their insurance. "We shouldn't be putting our citizens in that position," BenDor told us.
A University of Connecticut team of researchers released a report which exposes the Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan (AV-OS) Voting Terminal as vulnerable to hacking. It can be unlocked by a paper clip, or opened with an Allen wrench, bypassing the unbroken security seal on the program memory. The study also found that these vote tabulators can be easily reprogrammed in seconds, using a laptop and the tabulator's connection port, and that no trace of the action can be detected.
Michigan uses the Diebold AV-OS in 1,244 precincts and the model serves 1,727,131 registered voters. The ES&S M100, an optical scan tabulator using identical technology, is also vulnerable. The M100 serves 4,130,618 million people in 2,961 precincts in Michigan.
The University of Connecticut report's bottom line recommendation is that we must conduct manual audit counts. Fourteen states conducted hand count audits on Nov. 7, 2006. Unfortunately, Michigan wasn't one of them.
Conducting hand count audits of electronic vote tabulators is the single most powerful action that an election administrator can take to demonstrate commitment to accuracy and security.
"We also must establish detailed security protocols that include standards for storage of tabulators and documentation of the chain of custody of all election materials, including blank, un-voted ballots and AutoMark test ballots.
Central to the MERA proposal are statistical or "risk-based" based audits, which are the most efficient and effective way to confirm election night results.
The statistical audit would begin right after the election and if its findings showed a different winner of a contest, then the audit results would bind election officials to certify a corrected result.
In the proposed audits, precincts are selected randomly and the paper ballots are counted manually (hand to eye) and then compared to machine tallies. To insure independence, audit teams are selected for each county by a central audit board, under the authority of the Michigan State Treasurer.
A novel feature of the MERA proposal is an election night audit in each precinct. One contest is selected at random and hand counted to detect significant errors in the performance of the precinct's tabulator.
Following a Minnesota law, the proposal creates a strong market incentive for vendors of electronic voting equipment to make sure their equipment functions correctly and to eliminate security vulnerabilities. The vendor of any brand of electronic equipment that fails an audit would be penalized significantly.
Strong transparency provisions ensure public oversight of the entire audit process, from setting standards and designing the statistical methods to final reporting. Other provisions permit challenger groups to conduct hand count audits under the supervision of election officials, and encourage candidates, parties, issue committees and others to initiate selective and targeted audits.
There is a striking final provision in the proposal. A new election would be mandated for any audited contest if the State Vote Audit Board cannot determine an outcome of the contest with, in its judgment, a reasonably high level of probability.
Taken as a full package, the proposal would provide Michigan with the highest level of assurance of election accuracy of any state in the country.
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