Election corruption in Kentucky
There's been a number of reports of election corruption in Kentucky. The indictment is long, but it describes how local officials in Clay County Kentucky used a number of schemes, including paying voters for their votes and tricking voters into walking away from electronic voting machines (DREs) before their vote had been cast. Matt Blaze has a very nice writeup on what the indictment really means.
The critical things that have been missed by some of the hysterical discussions (e.g., Brad Friedman) are that:
The critical things that have been missed by some of the hysterical discussions (e.g., Brad Friedman) are that:
- Much of the corruption could have happened regardless of the technology in use. Vote buying far predates DREs.
- Auditing wouldn't really help - there were no software attacks, and about the only thing that could have helped is if a pattern were noticed in the audit logs (i.e., perhaps a higher-than-expected percentage of voters appeared to go back from the summary screen and change their votes, in the case where the election officials were telling voters to walk away too soon).
- Paper ballots wouldn't help - the same types of vote buying and stealing can happen with paper ballots. When I was a pollworker in November 2008, many voters handed me their optical scan ballots and walked away (I stopped them) instead of verifying that their ballot was read into the scanner. If I wanted, I could have replaced their ballots with ballots I marked, in just the same way as the Kentucky officials changed voters votes.
posted by Jeremy at
9:48 AM
2 Comments:
"Paper ballots wouldn't help - the same types of vote buying and stealing can happen with paper ballots. When I was a pollworker in November 2008, many voters handed me their optical scan ballots and walked away (I stopped them) instead of verifying that their ballot was read into the scanner. If I wanted, I could have replaced their ballots with ballots I marked, in just the same way as the Kentucky officials changed voters votes."
Your suggestion that the scheme could have happened as easily with paper ballots is unsubstantiated. Yes, the vote-buying part could, but not the part where they changed voters votes without their knowledge in election after election.
The paper ballot version of the scheme you suggest, would have been discovered with routine oversight of elections to ensure that the number of ballots issued to the polling place (including voted, unvoted and spoiled ballots) was reconciled at the end of the night.
If that appropriate post-election oversight had been done, your suggested scheme would have been discovered immediately. On the other hand, had it been done in Clay County, KY, it would have made no difference, and the scheme would not have been discovered. In fact, it wasn't discovered, and they were able to carry it out in election after election, year after year until someone finally blew the whistle.
If that's "hysterical", I don't know what to tell you. But I hope you'll also review my follow up at: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7008 detailing while this is such an important and landmark case (also, thanks for linking to Matt Blaze's excellent coverage as well).
Best,
The 'Hysterical' Brad Friedman
"the system rests on the honesty and/or corruptibility of the people working as part of the system."
That's a BAD system, if so (as KY, and many other similar cases prove). Thus, 100% transparency is needed to allow for full, public oversight in an election system.
Bad guys will always try to defraud the system, as you point out. Making it as difficult as possible for them, by making it as easy as possible to detect, is the key.
The more eyeballs which can oversee every step, decreases the possibility of it being corrupted. That's just one of the reasons why e-voting is a disaster for American democracy.
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