While election security is an important issue, I don't see why those of us who know our own county clerk should assume that OVRC cares more about election security than an elected county clerk.

If a stranger tells me to trust them over someone I have known for many years, tough luck. I trust the person I know.

Is the hand count to be added to the workload of current elections dept. staff or would more people be hired for the job as temporary employees? If added workload, where does the funding come from for overtime? Or do you believe they don't have enough workload as it is and would be able to do it during regular shifts? If more people would be hired, why should we believe that temp employees are more accurate and honorable than machines? Does OVRC know the hiring process would weed out partisans? Proposals like this that are long on rhetoric like "Post market quality assurance testing is also used to identify opportunities for improvements " don't answer logistical questions.

Does OVRC know that in every elections office in Oregon there is "secret software" which can only be touched by private company employees and not elections employees? I know all the stories about other states, but that doesn't convince me that all Oregon elections offices have "secret software" and were forced to buy something like that against their better judgement. And the tone of this piece almost implies that not all elections officials have good judgement--or else is saying that the definition of good judgement is to support the OVRC bill.

Which legislators suggested you were paranoid? Either they should have to publicly live by that assertion, or they should have a chance to explain that they made no such charge.

You can never be too paranoid when it comes to election results.

The hardest person to trust is the one who trusts no one. When you talk election law with elected officials, they justifiy everything in the status quo by references to the need for election security and preventing people from hanky-panky ... apparently trust is a one-way street in their minds. We are supposed to trust that no elected official would ever be involved in queering an election (Hello Senator Lyndon Johnson! Hello Mayor Daley!) but that we can never let down our guard against the masses.

As wise people have noted through the years, our laws are mainly about preventing the nickel-dime retail-scale election fraud that voters can get up to if not watched closely ... meanwhile, the opportunities for wholesale fraud are simply ignored and citizens who inquire are called paranoic conspiracy theorists.

Steven doesn't think Illegal Aliens are Voting? Robleto criminal case in Hillsboro ring a bell Steve? 80,000 Illegals from all over the U.S. get a License while using a VOTER REGISTRATION CARD? This is after mailing themselves an empty envelope written with pencil to their Motel, as proof of residency-Hello? or..."Today we March, Tomorrow we Vote" Remember that one? How about that we still sell a License to an Illegal and the Voter Register froms are in the same place? Speak English? Not required, they just know what a "D" next to a name means=More Tax payer hand outs for them-see "Free" health care for all OR. Children as one example.

If I am Paranoid, why not "Trust but verify" and make sure only U.S. Citizens are Voting? Because Democrats would lose elections? No? Then why make lame excuses not to check? ARIZONA DOES and is throwing out 1/3 of all Registrations.

Betsy,

Thanks for the work you're doing on this important issue here in Oregon.

Since the federal elections in 2000, I really jumped onto the "vote by mail" bandwagon. I'd email friends who lived in states with voting problems, and tell them how lucky I felt to live in a "vote by mail state", how easy it was, yada yada. Still, something about it all didn't sit right with me. What did happen to my ballot when I handed it off on election night (so much for actually "mailing" it in) to a stranger wearing a safety vest in front of the elections office? Did it actually make it inside to be counted? "Of course it did," I'd tell myself as I was driving away.

Most elections in NW Oregon always seemed to turn out the way I voted, so I suppose I'd been lulled into a "That just doesn't happen here" state of mind. However, after six years of federal voting hanky-panky, I was pretty nervous last November. "What if...?" I knew the first round of counting mail-in ballots was done electronically because of how we fill them out (who can ever forget being taught, "If you want your answer to count, you must fill in the oval completely with your #2 pencil!") So that was a no-brainer. What type of machine was used, though? Was it like a Scantron machine that scores college tests by running the answer sheets through it? Dang, those are notoriously faulty; we could be in deep doo-doo here! However, the 2006 elections turned out better than I could have ever expected, so all my concerns were pushed to the back of my brain again.

Justice may be "blind", but so are those who stick their heads in the sand and ignore what is going on around them because they don't want to be bothered. Or because it's a hassle to change, or you should just trust me because it costs too much, etc.

Thanks for taking a stand and putting into action what was only just beginning to form a coherent thought in my frontal lobe. Sheesh, and I recently graduated magna cum laude. Yeah, I'm prepared for the real world. (Although I'm very good at taking computerized tests!)

Ohio proved it's not wise to trust county elections officials. Two Cuyahoga elections workers were recently CONVICTED for rigging the 2004 presidential recount for another criminal investigation. There were also issues surrounding ballot security and absentee ballots.

In Lane County, I believe there are over 80 different configurations of the ballot, depending on jurisdiction, school district, and legislative boundaries. The software that compiles these results always gets the right parameters for distinguishing between ballots? Yeah, right. If you believe that, you've never worked with software. You probably think that PGE doesn't need to have independent auditors, either.

The propose post-election audit will do nothing more than determine if there are problems. It takes place too late to affect the outcome. But only if problems are identified, can future legislation mandate election night auditing, which is what is really needed.

For those folks that haven't done their homework.........

Question: Does OVRC know that in every elections office in Oregon there is "secret software" which can only be touched by private company employees and not elections employees? I know all the stories about other states, but that doesn't convince me that all Oregon elections offices have "secret software" and were forced to buy something like that against their better judgement. Answer: Yes, the optical-scan machines that count our votes in Oregon all contain proprietary (thus secret) software. The code cannot be read, or examined, by anyone in the elections office. I don't know if Oregon elections officials felt they were "forced to buy something like that against their better judgement". At the time, it may well have seemed like a reasonable decision.

Question(able statement): Until I see some evidence that people complaining about election security in Oregon have actually gone in to examine the system they're so afraid of (it's open to the public, people!) I think the description (paranoia) fits perfectly. Answer: The aspects of Oregon's election system that are open to the public do, in fact, get high praise from election reform advocates. The vote-counting software, however, is NOT open to the public (back to proprietary software here), so cannot be examined.

Assignment: Contact your county elections office. Try a Freedom of Information Act request and ask for a copy of the code that counts the ballots.

Here are some facts related to Betsy's statement:

-Almost all counties in Oregon tally their votes using either Sequoia or ES&E software. (Check yourself on www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/) Both of these companies use proprietary software and have refused to allow their source code to be examined by anyone outside of the companies. Yes, the county clerks are using software code for adding our votes that they cannot examine or have experts examine.

-ES&S and Sequoia software are tested at the federal and state levels, but the tests are not designed to uncover flaws (or mischief) in the software code; it would be necessary to actually examine the code to determine if such problems are present and, as I said, both companies refuse to allow the software code to be examined. Why?

-For security? No. Diebold, the third company that is a major player nationally, allows its software code to be examined--for counting money at ATMs but not for counting our votes. We have heard no legitimate reason for ES&S and Sequoia to refuse to allow election officials to examine their software code.

-Does this mean our county clerks are foolish? No. County clerks must use the software that has been approved as part of the federal HAVA program or find an approvable alternative. Right now, the alternative is not available.

-Betsy is asking for the citizens of Oregon to be prudent by supporting independent verification to see whether the ES&S and Sequoia software are counting correctly.

-Members of the Oregon VRC have cumulatively spent thousands of hours over the past two years trying to come up with a cost-effective, yet valid solution that would be acceptable to the county clerks, legislators, and the SOS. Members of the Oregon VRC spent the time observing elections, speaking with clerks about solutions, exploring cost options, speaking with the Secretary of State's Office, working with experts in statistics and election auditing, collaborating with election integrity experts in other states, and reviewing other systems nationally.

-Betsy did not say that she or members of the Oregon VRC care more about valid elections than the clerks.

About that "Verifier" website.............. There is no street address, it appears to be a lobbying group whose Board is named but no contact information which even tells us what state they are located in, no physical address of an office or anything.

The results page for my county has a lot of "unknown" answers, and the source of the information on the vote counting machines is someone from the Sec. of State office.

So I will second Steven M.

How many of you "trust but verify" folks have actually visited your local county clerk's office?

If you are in favor of open source software, by all means state that affirmative position.

The "don't trust your county clerk because of what the Verify site says" attitude isn't winning you any points.

I never met the Verify site people. I have known my county clerk for many years. Telling me that all elections officials who are truly honest will support your House bill and not question the cost or any other aspect of it or they don't really care about election security is NOT going to get my support!

I just wanted to let readers of this post know that members of the Oregon VRC (including me) have met with several Oregon county clerks and elections supervisors over the past 2+ years to gain an in depth understanding of how Oregon’s election system is currently conducted. We have also coordinated and participated in election night observation teams across the state for the past several elections. Further, we have had several meetings with the State Elections Director and the Secretary of State to discuss the findings of our research and present our proposed verification methodology.

As mentioned in my original post, according to the testimony presented by the County and State elections officials at the HB 3270 hearing, they do not object to taking steps to improve the integrity and security of Oregon’s election system. However, before they commit to taking additional steps they want to know the actual steps involved and the associated cost. Oregon VRC does not fault our election officials for taking this position.

The proposed methodology Oregon VRC has developed has been peer reviewed by professional statisticians who have served as consultants to the State Elections Office and the Secretary of State as well as nationally recognized election reform advocates. We have submitted our election verification proposal to the Elections, Ethics and Rules committee for their consideration as we believe it satisfactorily addresses the concerns raised by the county and state elections officials.

Most importantly, our verification methodology will assure all Oregonians that the certified election results for statewide races are accurate. Under this verification procedure, if the hand-counted sample of paper ballots indicates that the machine-tallied results may not be accurate, then a full hand recount will be conducted to ensure that the certified election results accurately reflect the will of the people. For more information on this method, see our website.

We also have a Q&A document that we prepared to respond to the main reasons we hear from the various county clerks about why they believe they should not have to verify election results.

Protecting our democracy requires the use of checks and balances – not “blind faith.”

P.S. All Oregon VRC members are Oregonians, although one steering committee member recently relocated to Texas to be closer to his son. We are all volunteers. The only contributions we receive are from individuals who attend an occasional speaker or conference that we may sponsor in Oregon or from someone who links to Powell's Bookstore from our website. We use the funds we raise to pay for reproduction costs of materials we produce for meetings with legislators or other government officials as well as to hand out at appropriate progressive oriented events. Funds are also used to sometimes cover the cost of the gas it takes to attend meetings across the state with Oregon county clerks or when we are requested to give a presentation to grassroots organizations interested in learning more about election reform issues in Oregon. However, due to limited funds, we usually cover such expenses out of our own pockets.

"The only concern that I would have, and it's a big one, is how would a truly random audit be performed? In my race, I had a solid lead in the early returns that were tabulated by 8 pm, which I lost as results from the last 5-6 days were counted. A sample that drew heavier from early or late returns would not have been an accurate reflection of the count."

Even before the days of electronic vote counting, there were recounts including the "recount from Hell" which happened to Charles McNary. Steve Neal (graduate of McNary High School) wrote an excellent McNary biography which included this story: In a statewide election, counties E. of the Cascades were recounting ballots when someone opened a closet in one of the county courthouses and found a bunch of ballots in a box in the closet weeks after the election.

My grandfather was a state AG back East when there were a couple of contested elections with evidence like more people voting (by double digits as I recall) than the number of registered voters, and some sort of clever scheme to deface the ballots with blue pencils. Someone went to jail over the latter story and manipulations which went on in the legislature.

My point is that even if all here agreed to advocate for open source software in all election machines, do a random hand recount of all ballots, not worry about the cost of the proposed House bill or the logistics of selecting the sample for the recount and hiring the staff to do it (or should we make election workers do double shifts and not expect them to be tired?), that still would not account for human nature.

I would like to know the physical address of the board of directors of the Verifier site. I would also like to know why someone on a blog thinks they can tell me not to believe a county clerk I have known for over a decade--because I should take the Verifier site on faith??

Strange things happened in Ohio and Florida, and strange things sometimes happen in local elections. But if anyone advocating a change wants me to take them seriously, they need to tell me when they visited their local elections office, what they saw, who they talked to.

LT stated:

"The 'don't trust your county clerk because of what the Verify site says'" attitude isn't winning you any points."

If you misquote, you lose points. You misquoted. Why not take the actual quote and respond to it? Instead, you invent your own statement, attribute it to someone else, then respond to your own statement as if you are making a point.

Maury stated:

"County Clerks, of necessity, run ballots through in batches. Several times during the vote count, they run a test batch whose results are known. For code in a compromised machine to cheat effectively, it would have to cheat on all the real batches, but process the test batch without error. Because if it cheated on a test batch, it would immediately expose itself as broken."

Maury: Where (which county) did you see ACTUAL ballots, not test ballots, run through in a batch to test accuracy? That is not the correct protocol. What is done is a set of ballots, such as 1,000, are marked by hand by election officials and then run through the machine to determine if the machine counted the same as the hand counted ballots. It is a machine calibration test, not a test of the outcomes of specific races. This test is generally done in "test mode" to avoid contaminating the actual results. So, you know for certain that the software counts the same way in "test mode" as in "real mode?" And you also must know that this test only tests a few votes per candidate? If malicious code is not set to trigger until say 1,000 votes have been cast for a particular candidate, then the above test would be worthless; you know this also, of course. To program such an effort, triggering a change in the vote count after many votes had been counted, would take the expertise of a typical high school student. We therefore know that can never happen.

You, on the other hand, have the expertise to crack into the ES&S election source code and determine whether it has mischievous code? Is that what you are saying? If you are saying that, then perhaps you can also crack into the source code and CHANGE it? Are you saying that too?

Are you saying that you are a genius who can do something almost no one else can do or are you saying any competent engineer can do this and therefore the software is not safe?

"Steven - OVRC is not suggesting a full hand count. They are suggesting an audit of a subset of the data. Also, there are plenty of binary file comparison tools, and best practise methods for ensuring that a piece of compiled code is the same as another. "

Sal, you may be right. But if you had won the election, you would still have needed to convince 30 other members of the House to vote for this bill and then 16 in the Senate. And I just don't think what you said to Steven would do that sort of convincing, esp. given the cost. It always raises red flags for me when people want to talk theory and not cost/logistics.

Doing a hand count is by definition labor intensive. Either the regular Elections Division staff would have to do it (and would current staffing levels allow that in the time period proposed?) or else temp staff would have to be hired. No one from OVRC seems to want to address that concern.

And you might want to tell your friends from OVRC that words like this,

"In fact, the county clerk who testified claimed that nobody cares about maintaining the public's trust in Oregon's election system more than the county clerks. We respectfully suggest that if this statement is true, the county clerks and the state elections director and the Secretary of State should support HB 3270 and help shape it so that it works for all Oregonians. "

are not going to win over people who say "OK, this bunch of strangers says all good people should support our bill--who are they, where do they come from, how long have they been involved in this issue, why should we believe strangers over people we know?".

This isn't just about whether OVRC are the greatest group to come along this century. This is about people who have been around politics sometimes for decades being told "trust this group because we say so", as if nothing else matters. There are old political veterans who would rather drop out of politics than be told who they should trust and who they should not trust.

Trust is EARNED. The idea sometimes expressed over a period of many years that "we're so great, you should trust us and not ask any questions" is not one I accept.

You know them. You should talk to them privately about addressing the specific concerns instead of making it sound like those who don't agree with them don't care about the issue.

I'm old enough to remember obnoxious people decades ago saying "if you don't agree with our proposal to end the Vietnam War, you are pro-war". All that did then was breed discord. People still argue about what really ended the Vietnam War. If it strikes a nerve with me that total strangers are saying "all good people support our bill and don't ask detailed questions", the way to earn my support is not to tell me good people support the bill. It is to answer the detailed questions.

As I understand it, some of the legislators are worried about cost and logistics. Seems to me the way to convince them is to address cost and logistics.