WE.CONNECT.DOTS: A strange thing happened at the polls in Tuesday’s primary.
Wife, a lifelong registered Democrat, voted in the Republican primary at a polling place in Greenville, Mercer County. Here is how we discovered it and what happened, I think.
I had voted earlier and became part of the “gauntlet,” handing out cards for a write-in candidate. Wife completed her shift at Greenville Hospital and came to vote. After she completed her patriotic duty and came back outside, Wife asked me about the state judge candidates.
I reminded Wife “we are Western Pennsylvania voters.” In the primary, always vote for the judge candidates from Allegheny County, not for the ones from Philly.
“Well,” Wife replied, “there was only one state judge candidate on my screen and he is from Cumberland County.” Wife, of course, was referring to Victor Stabile, running unopposed on the Republican ballot.
We went back into the polling place and informed election officials that Wife had voted in the wrong party’s primary ballot. We were there – not to give them a hard time, but – to save them from a very late evening.
My presence could spell the difference between election board members at that poll going home before 9 p.m. or frustrating through to 11 o’clock. After the polls closed, they would have learned they had one more Republican ballot cast than signed the book and one less Democrat voting than had signed in. (County election officials later verified this did occur.)
Wife was certain she received a salmon colored (Democrat registered voter) card to hand to the machine operator. Somehow the electronic activator for Republican voters was inserted into the machine. Wife passed right by the opening reminder screen that tells her what party she is voting.
This article is not meant to be critical in any way.
Poll workers at my precinct are our neighbors. These veterans are experienced at their twice yearly duties.
Same for Mercer County Election Director Jeff Greenburg. Now in his seventh year and the best we have had in my 50 years of voting here, maybe one of the best in the state. He takes his job seriously and is extremely knowledgeable.
Mr. Greenburg said this type of incident happened once before during his reign. Two years ago a person voted on the wrong primary ballot in a township election. Margin between winner and loser in a supervisor contest was just two votes.
It is unknown if this type of incident ever occurred in a primary and tipped the outcome. Mr. Greenburg believes (and so do I) there is no such thing as a “perfect election” anywhere in the United States. He conducts training sessions for hundreds of election workers in Mercer County. The attendance could always be better. Mercer County has had electronic elections since 2001.
The turnout in Pennsylvania’s primary Tuesday and the expected little better showing this fall remains depressing. For decades I lectured business friends on the importance of odd-year elections. We can affect more of what happens locally than in the state or country.
They gripe about small school districts refusing to consolidate, potholed streets and high property taxes. Will they find and support candidates with similar reform views? Will they run for offices themselves?
Bottom Line – Mr. Greenburg is making the incident a “teachable” moment. To my friends, I continue preaching.
EDITOR: We don’t doubt that what occurred was due to human error. But purely electronic voting machines, as opposed to optically scanned paper ballots, can readily be pre-programmed and should be outlawed except for the hearing imparied. Please see see the below.
About black box voting systems
Both optical scan systems which interpret paper ballots and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems can be black box systems; in fact, mechanical voting machines can also be seen as black-box systems, since only the technicians who set up the machines have access to the linkages between the voting levers on the face of the machine and the vote recording counters inside. Rhode Island supreme court justice Horatio Rogers, in an 1897 dissenting opinion, wrote of one early mechanical voting machine that
… a voter on this voting machine has no knowledge, through his senses that he has accomplished a result. The most that can be said is, if the machine worked as intended, then he has made his holes and voted. It does not seem to me that this is enough. [2]
Rogers’ criterion for whether a voting machine is a black box is strict — you must be able to sense that it works correctly as you use it. A somewhat weaker criterion is sometimes accepted, based on whether the public is allowed to examine the mechanism, in a modern context, both the source code and hardware.[3] Though source code may be available to voting system testing authorities and state or county election officials it can still be considered “black box” if it is not available to the public. Even with some open source systems, which allow examination of the source code, access to firmware, which controls the hardware, is not available.
Even if the source code is made public, significant challenges remain in the areas of authenticating that the code running systems in the field matches the publicly released code, and it is still possible to find attack vectors for open source systems.
In the U.S. presidential election, 2004, 32% of the voting was done on optical scan machines and 29% on DRE voting machines[4] using trade secret proprietary software. As of February 2006, that figure had climbed to 49% for optical systems and 39% DRE.[5]
Legislation has been introduced in the United States Congress to require public access to source code, hardware and firmware information, including the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, introduced by Congressman Rush D. Holt, Jr..
