voting machines and elections

Computer scientists have been running around with their hair on fire about the US voting machines ever since they were first deployed. The charitable interpretation is that the voting machine companies have a touchingly naive faith in 'computers',

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
Donald Fagen

But the companies clearly don't understand, or do not wish to understand, the first thing about security, chains of custody, or auditability.

Time and attention conservation notice: a better summary is available at the NYRB, written by @jennycohn1.


From computer science Professor Alex Halderman testifying to the Senate intelligence committee - with footnotes, citations, eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles And arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one,

Ten years ago, I was part of the first academic team to conduct a comprehensive
security analysis of a DRE voting machine. We examined what was at that time the
most widely used touch-screen DRE in the country, and spent several months probing
it for vulnerabilities. What we found was disturbing: we could reprogram the machine to
invisibly cause any candidate to win. We also created malicious software—vote-stealing
code—that could spread from machine-to-machine like a computer virus, and silently
change the election outcome.

Vulnerabilities like these are endemic throughout our election system. Cybersecurity
experts have studied a wide range of U.S. voting machines—including both DREs and
optical scanners—and in every single case, they’ve found severe vulnerabilities that
would allow attackers to sabotage machines and to alter votes. That’s why there is
overwhelming consensus in the cybersecurity and election integrity research
communities that our elections are at risk.

Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel who can hack an election in seven minutes without breaking a sweat,

If this century has shifted our trust from away from our neighbors toward machines, it might be time to switch back again. Eight countries in Europe that once flirted with digital voting have seen six go back to paper; Britain counted its Brexit votes by hand. Even if the vote were never hacked—and it is an exceedingly implausible event—the remotest possibility is an albatross on democracy and a boon for mischief-makers, and not just the cyber attackers. Trump’s most recent jujitsu—pointing out that by virtue of the fact that the election is hackable, it could be rigged against him—illustrates this risk. Technology has amplified not only the threat of hacking, but the threat of a hack.

The Princeton alums can warn us—but they can’t protect us. “We are in a collision-course between the technology we use in election administration and the growing reality of politically motivated, statelevel cyberattacks,” Halderman tells me, arm propped on his red office chair, sunlight pouring through his westward window. “We sit around all day and write research papers. But these people are full-time exploiters. They’re the professionals. We’re the amateurs.”

A  recent article from the NYT covers much the same ground, though not as well.

There are Senate and House bills to fix this, with the remedies that are obvious,
- Replacing insecure paperless voting systems with new equipment that will generate a voter-verifiable paper ballot;
- Implementing post-election audits of paper ballots

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2261
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1907

However in this administration I think it unlikely either of these will pass.

Now, get your tin foil hat on. Responsible journalism would have covered these stories, but since we don't have that, they sound like conspiracy theories. The evidence is to my mind quite persuasive.

Voting machines in the 2016 election gave results that are not easily reconciled with polls and exit polls.

We use our data to explore the claim that counties with electronic voting exhibited different voting patterns than their paper peers. What we find is definitely troubling: in some of the swing states, and specifically in states that were projected to vote Democratic at the top of the ticket, those with electronic voting had a decrease in the percent of the total vote going for the Clinton-Kaine campaign, and an increase for the Trump-Pence campaign. We try to determine if this is spurious by checking for patterns in other places with electronic voting, as well as during the 2012 election. We only find this correlation for swing states during the 2016 election.

Craig Wright, a baseball statistician, found the election peculiar and came to a similar conclusion. 

Exit polls are no longer just polls of voters exiting polling places. Edison Research, which conducts the exit polling for the major news outlets, also polls voters by phone prior to election day, looking for feedback from the rising group of early voters to be added proportionally to their polling place data. 

The CNN exit polls — which were done by Edison Research — covered 28 states that accounted for 411 of the Electoral votes. Their exit polls correctly predicted the winner in the recorded vote in 24 of the 28 states. All four misses were swing states, and in all four cases the exit polls had indicated that [D] had won, but then the official vote count went to [R]. The four states were Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, a group that accounts for 74 Electoral votes. While the official vote count gave [R] a whopping 90 Electoral votes in the swing states, if the exit polls were translated into Electoral votes, that would have completely turned that result around with 93 Electoral votes of the swing states going to [D].
..
Among the seventeen states using voting machines with no audit trail so an effective paper audit cannot be done, only two are swing states. Unfortunately, they were the two swing states with the most Electoral votes, Florida and Pennsylvania.

This has a precedent, too - the Presidential Election of 2000 was the first time in 112 years that the result of the popular vote and the Electoral vote disagreed. The difference here was the votes in Florida were not counted, which was oddly enough a primary motivation for the voting machine debacle and its consequences.

In 2004 something very strange happened in Ohio,

Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory.

The Georgia special election last year was most likely hacked as well - but we can't know since the machine was wiped clean.

Georgia’s election system was sitting insecure on the internet for months and was easily accessible by hackers. The problem was discovered ahead of time and the state was taken to court in an effort to prevent them from using the unprotected system for the special election between Karen Handel and Jon Ossoff.  But the election was held anyway.
A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.

Update November 2018: Georgia is doing it again, wiping the servers before the election results are certified. Something is rotten in the state of Georgia.  Also see @jennycohn1 on Medium, with a short summary of recent election history.

Trump can make allegations but I have not seen anywhere any evidence for his allegations. There is evidence for my theories. Ha.

When there is no audit trail the only available check is the exit polls. There's no proof but the evidence is highly suggestive. I don't know of a single instance where exit polls predicted a substantial Republican win but the election went Democratic. Examples of exit polls predicting a Democratic win for an election won by Republicans are legion. That last example is a foreshadowing of this year's Georgia state - chairman of the voting machine company (R) went into the election with polls showing a dead heat, but won by 15 percentage points. There has been considerable fine-tuning of the election machinery since then, allowing for plausibly deniable narrow wins.

More generally, the elections are no longer representative of the people who vote.

Exit polls in the same election that produced this massive GOP triumph had this finding: 55% of the very same voters had an unfavorable opinion of the Republican party compared to 49% for the Democratic Party.   Conversely, 47% viewed the Democrats favorably vs. 40% for the Republicans.

In general through the last century, the party that has controlled the House also got the most votes. In the 2012 election, something unusual happened: Democrats won 50.59 percent of the two-party vote – but just 46% of the seats in the House of Representatives. The Republican candidate for President got 47% of the vote and his party controls at least 55% of the seats. The Democratic candidate got 48% of the vote, and yet the Democrats won 44.6% of the House seats.

The state of elections is well summarized in this letter to the London Review of Books,

Half of the American voting population doesn’t vote at all – namely, the poorer half. Some countries hold elections on weekends or ad hoc holidays; US elections are on a Tuesday, following a 19th-century farm schedule. Americans with no job security working multiple jobs with no breaks often have no time to vote. If Americans have been convicted of felonies, they are in many states disenfranchised for the rest of their lives.

Most of those who are entitled to vote in the US and who have the leisure to do so will take part in a primitive winner-takes-all system of electoral districts that the Republican Party has systematically manipulated. They will vote on electronic voting machines with minimal electronic security, purchased by Republican state governments from Republican-donor equipment suppliers, machines that routinely return Republican candidates to office even when polls show a wide lead for the other party – this may inform the Democrats’ ‘loss of nine hundred seats in state legislatures’.

This was the state of the system which nevertheless, as Bromwich says, ‘voted for Obama twice’. But then things got worse. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts effectively terminated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had made it easier for black people to vote. Many states introduced racist voter-ID requirements that had been blocked for fifty years, and even in states that did not pass new laws, election officials were emboldened to invent purported requirements and refuse minority voters their rights.

Benjamin Letzler
Oberursel, Germany

Water Valley ranch Encampment

Another retreat to the Water Valley ranch, for reflection and some fishing, late September. We got some colors on the drive, though in Wyoming and Colorado most of our colors are green with a bit yellow in the fall. Later arrivals had an inch of snow to get through on the slick muddy road, we were early enough to just have rain.

Greg and I headed out to the pond under pouring rain. The ranch hand said, 'true outdoorsmen' to which I replied, 'truly foolish'. When you are a city slicker with a chance at some WY fishing, weather don't matter, at least until your lips turn blue.


This brown hit a small olive streamer fly. He ran out to the backing and then flourished on the surface, way out in the dappled water.

Father Ted and Father Lou arrived a bit later on the road by the pond and didn't believe in my fish, doubting Thomases all.

Next day we did retreat things until mid-afternoon then headed upriver. Five of us, the other four at least are decent to good flyfishermen, accounted for just two fish, a 5" rainbow and a 10" brown. I nearly caught a small brown out of the white froth here. He rolled up to take the Crackleback but my strike was too late, too early, too sideways, who knows. 

The 70s vintage rod and reel, Browning Silaflex 322975 perfectly delightful, and Martin 67.

Next day we went downriver to work back up. I took the lowest beat which began with a half-mile of shallow water and no holding pools. Sometimes there will be smaller fish in the pockets but not today. I was almost resigned to another skunk when a 3' deep pool arrived. It had not much of anything for cover with two main currents plunging in. The skunk-buster, handsomely spotted 11" bow, took a #16 beadhead zebra midge. See below for its appearance at the end of the day.

A small brown came out of the slack water between the currents. Usually by now I'd expect to have spooked the pool and would move on, today the dearth of holding water kept me fishing carefully and patiently. In the end there were six takers in the pool, landed five, including a strong handsome 16" bow. Every fish today took the zebra midge and ignored everything on the surface.

The view from the pool, more discouragingly thin water. Jeff sits on a rock disentangling his line. I tried to guide Jeff to a fish but did not succeed, partly because I'm a lousy guide and partly for other reasons. He's a very driven guy, likes to move fast and fix things. 'Fast' doesn't translate well to fishing, as I observed to him. This gave his wife a good laugh later, when Jeff mentioned to her that I thought him not well suited to become Piscator.

Way up around the bend there was a bit deeper water in shadow which yielded two medium 'bows and a pretty little brown.

nothing to say here, but it is such a pretty speckled fish..

Lunched contentedly on a rock in the sun.  Still life with no fish. I love the industrial look of these Martin reels, solid functional US engineering.

The ranch owner is planning to start a restaurant in Cheyenne and had the chef working at the ranch in the meantime. Juan is a graduate of Johnson&Wales culinary school who produced spectacular meals three times a day. It was difficult to refrain from licking my plate. For lunch the sandwich was on a ciabatta roll with at least ten different flavors going on, I ruminated upon each mouthful.

After lunch I saw a big brown movement upriver, at first thought otter, but then realized it was a wader leg. Jeff was taking a restless little nap among the yellow leaves. He'd fished down some good water without moving anyone. We rested a bit and went back up. I sent Jeff up to the good-looking pool and fished a little riffle below it. After twenty casts or so the Crackleback stopped and this big 'bow came thrashing up to the surface, then bolted downstream.

Usually in these situations I apply side strain to persuade the fish into an eddy on my side of the river, then run around to get below while holding a light pressure. Often enough the fish will pause in the eddy and let me do this. The side water was so thin the fish didn't hold anywhere and ran back into the current each time, took me about fifty yards to finally wear him down.

We humped back up to the trail and walked back toward the ranch and a very Wyoming, very River Runs Through It kind of scene.

The pond above them is where the brown came from.

Here's the remnant of a well-chewed zebra midge, ready for its honorable retirement. Actually I'll probably keep fishing it until they stop taking it.

At one point in all our adventuring Fr. Lou wandered off and didn't show up for the evening service. Jeff the ex-backpacking guide and I the trail-runner, rambled off on the darkening hills to look for our lost sheep. Two young men in the company left behind, looked at each other worriedly, and came after us in case the old guys ran into trouble. We took this gratefully as we came out with Fr Lou, who had lost track of the time a bit.

pummeling rain

We started out by doing some work at Ken's farm on the eastern plains of WY. On the neighbor field, three guys stood around a tractor, one opening the toolbox that took up most of the back of his pickup, another with his cap off scratching his head, neither a good sign. The pinto beans could not be harvested since the moist clay soil was clogging the harvester feeders, with more rain coming in the evening. Such is a farmer's life. Grandfather was sad and sorry when he lost his farm in the Great Depression though I suspect the family was secretly pleased. He found a salaried job with the bakery in town, where life was a little less hard scrabble and a little further from starvation.

Still life with 3 apples on a hail-damaged hood, against a field of alfalfa.

The apples are from a 100-year old (estimated) tree growing atop a nearby hill. The original homestead is long gone but the tree soldiers on, producing a decent crop of pie apples every fall for the neighbours. No-one knows what varietal it is but some samples are going in for DNA analysis this year. The apples were tart and crisp with a mild flavor, purely delicious. I think of the homesteader who planted it - a young couple, or a hopeful young man, in the good wet years of the early 1900s.

This is the old tree, with a small sickly companion out of sight behind it. The companion is its pollination partner without which fruiting cannot happen. Ken's off to poison some weeds around the companion.

Here are the flies I went fishing with. The backstory is that one of my imaginary internet friends on the fiberglassflyrodders forum, offered to send out some flies to us all, the payment being a fishing report.

First fishing stop at the pond. I can't find this pond on a map, probably a good thing since Ken is a veteran and could hunt us all down if I spilt any beans about locations. It's a strange spot since it has a thriving and varied set of bugs, scuds, damsels, etcetera, but the best fly is always a #18 or #16 Adams.

I started with a little green softhackle (not pictured) from the selection, which got one 9" and a series of bumps. Switching to one of the red softhackles produced an immediate gratification who took the fly as it sank.

I am usually a primitive savage when out fishing, counting the fish as, 1,2,3,4,many. We got to 'many' quickly this day, and even to 'enough'. 'Enough' is oddly harder to get to when not killing fish, as a pile of dead fish does rather dim the catching fever: but the thrill of the new hit persists through many fish. It's like drug addictions, the next hit is the only one that matters.

The weather moved in and it grew dim. The 70F at the farm 4299ft was only a warm remembrance in the rain of 38F at 6600ft. We declared it cold enough to head for a hotel, funky, cheap and clean in Medicine Bow, site of the first Western novel.

 Medicine Bow always cues up the Waterboys song for me,
"There's a black wind blowing
A typhoon on the rise
Pummelin' rain
Murderous skies!"
We had all that and more on the drive over, including a narrow miss of a black cow and calf in the black night on the muddy road, fishtailing between them by the grace of ABS, Ken's decades of WY backroad driving experience, and perhaps God.

This song evoked the American West and its bitter high prairie winters for me as a young man in Africa. It turns out Mike Scott didn't know the town existed when he wrote the song.
"I invented the place name "Medicine Bow", and discovered several years later that a real Medicine Bow exists in Wyoming, USA."
It surely was not an invention but a recollection of a memory forgotten.

There were some old books in my room, one of them "Step Right Up !" by Dan Mannix. That's a name I hadn't thought of in forty years. He was a freelancer of no fixed profession with independent means, wrote inter alia articles for Life and National Geographic about training and collecting animals for zoos. My brother and I were both going to be wildlife biologists when we grew up and read everything we could find by him, though Gerald Durrell was our real hero. Even as boys we could tell that the floating world of Mr Mannix required inherited wealth or some similar good fortune that we did not expect.

Next morning cold on the lake we prepared to try a canoe trip.

Tied on the big gaudy streamer, a Spruce fly with added bling, at a hazard. I decided this was as close as you could get to fishing a Mepps spinner on a fly rod. That worked, fishing it over the big black holes between weed reaching up to the surface.

The wind rose and drove us off the water. Fish rising between us and the shore were also a strong persuasion. I hooked a good rainbow on the Mepps fly but an unseen windknot terminated our connection. The closest thing left in my box was a Platte River Special, though my tie looks nothing like the fly in that link which is closer to the Mepps fly. Lashed that on and walked up the shore a bit, made a cast on a whim and found a teeming horde of 12-13" brookies, presumably attempting to spawn in the shallows.

The green life of the lake persists, in fish and weed, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing.

Further up the shore Ken caught 16-17" rainbows steadily, as I caught everything steadily except the larger rainbows. It seems the Wyoming Game & Fish threw everything from the kitchen sink in here, rainbows, brookies, Colorado R cutts, and even a fine-spotted Snake R cutt. No pictures of these as my fingers were too cold to operate the camera. The coots are always a good sign for me, if there are coots feeding then I'll hie over there to fish. 

The clouds lifted briefly to show us the early snows over the wind farm.

More weather, we had reached 'enough' and packed out just ahead of a blast of sideways rain.

We kept a couple of fish each, the first time in years that I've knowingly killed a trout. Sauteed with a lemon butter sauvignon blanc sauce, they passed muster and the family ate them right up.