So Guam had a close caucus vote this weekend, and they did a recount.
But a recount, or an audit of the vote tallies, will not be possible in Indiana, because a majority of votes in the Indiana primary will be cast on paperless electronic machines. And of course, I have to remind folks that the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security concluded that a statewide election run on paperless electronic machines can be manipulated by as few as one to four people (p. 50-59)
From the Verified Voting Foundation:
57 counties, with over 2.5 million registered voters, use only paperless DREs [direct-recording electronic machines]at the polls on election day. In at least some of the counties, paper ballots are an option in early voting.
See the rest of the above article for a rundown of the specific systems used.
Many voters in Indiana will vote on optically scanned paper ballots, but there will be no post-election audit of the computer scanner tallies. Paper ballots or paper trails are of little security value unless there is strong chain of custody and unless there is a random hand audit of the vote tallies. From page 4of the Brennan Center report:
The voter-verified paper record, by itself, is of questionable security value. The paper record has significant value only if an Automatic Routine Audit is performed (and a well-designed chain of custody and physical security procedures is followed)
By contrast, North Carolina requires at least a voter-verifiable paper trail. About two thirds of the votes will be cast on optically scanned paper ballots, and about one third on a touch screen that has a (crappy) paper-trail printer. And there will be an audit.
Toss it on the pile of paperless primaries this year: Pennsylvania, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana, New Jersey. The election results in those primaries were, in the horse-race sense, all over the map. But is this any way to choose a President?
Unfortunately, there is not a lot you can do between now and November. Tell your party that you won't take this again. They have to pass federal legislation to require paper ballots and audits in the next Congress.
And please, let's not leap to the conclusion that the vote has been hacked in state x in year y, or that the vote will be hacked this year. Such speculation does no good for anyone. You can't prove it, and when you can't prove something people stop listening.
That's all I got. Enjoy the returns tonight. In the next few years, we will be able to enjoy watching them with the same confidence we watched them until recently- if we demand verified elections.
