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Re: Fwd: STUDY FINDS FATAL FLAWS IN POPULAR HR 550 ELECTION AUDIT PROPOSAL
I like this quote:
Voting systems should be classified as national security
systems. Successful undetected compromise of voting systems is the
functional equivalent of invasion and occupation by a foreign power;
But beyond that, there a lot of gaps in this analysis.
There are some nice things about the sampling method they propose, but
it is limited in many other ways. I'd start off underscoring the
point that it isn't an audit at all, the way we normally use the term.
They call it a "sampling algorithm", not an audit. It is sort of a
10% exit poll, but done by the election judges. You end up comparing
the overall results of this sample of the votes with the reported
election results and if they are close enough, you say they reported
the right answer.
In contrast, the Colorado or Holt audits require comparing actual vote
counts for precincts (or portions of precincts, in many cases) with
hand counts of the same precincts. When you see any discrepancy at
all in the audit results, you start getting suspicious, and, with some
extra effort you can often figure out exactly which ballot was
misintepreted by the system, and potentially track down who did what
wrong. Colorado's current 5% audit would give significantly better
results than what they quote in the paper.
In this new UPS sytem, you would never be able to say: "The problem is
here, in this precinct" since they would never be comparing actual
vote counts. They only compare their overall estimate with the actual
overall election results, and say the detect a problem if the results
aren't within +/- 1% of their estimate.
They are totally focussed on November congressional races. Their
method wouldn't work at all for primaries, small county races, small
school districts, etc. They say:
As a rule of thumb, regardless of the size of the jurisdiction,
sampling approximately 15,000 total ballots is sufficient to reach
99% confidence of +/- 1% accuracy.
They would need up to 100% audits (i.e. full recounts) to get
reasonable fraud detection percentages in elections with small
turnouts.
For small races, an audit of a bunch of individual vote counts would
be more powerful, unless you want to recount the whole election by
hand. (And yeah, I'd prefer that too, but that is a whole different
topic.)
As I've noted for years at
http://www.coloradovoter.net/moin.cgi/ManualCountAudit
a reasonable solution is to count the ballots in small batches, and
report results for those small batches, and thus be able to precisely
audit a much larger number of vote counts. Systems could pretty
easily be designed to give a much larger number of vote count
subtotals in the final auditable report, enabling much better
auditing.
Neal McBurnett http://mcburnett.org/neal/
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 07:49:53AM -0600, Joe Pezzillo wrote:
> FYI. Note that they call for a 10% hand count audit of 100% of precincts.
> -Joe
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> [1]http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/study_finds_fatal_flaws_in_popular_hr_550_election_audit_proposal
> STUDY FINDS FATAL FLAWS IN POPULAR HR 550 ELECTION AUDIT PROPOSAL
>
> PRESS RELEASE
> August 17, 2006
> For Immediate Release
> Attn: Political assignments
> Download a PDF of this press release [2]here
>
> Contacts: Jonathan Simon, Election Defense Alliance, 617.538.6012
> [3]jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Bruce O'Dell, Election Defense Alliance, 612.309.1330
> [4]bodell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> STUDY PROVES FLAWS IN HR 550 AUDIT LEAVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS FULLY
> EXPOSED
> TO OUTCOME-ALTERING FRAUD AND ERROR
> Statistical Analysts Propose Effective and Powerful Alternative
>
> Summary
>
> Today a group of computer security and statistical analysts released a
> study proving that the election audit procedure set forth in HR 550,
> popularly known as the Holt Bill, would in practice leave elections for
> the US House of Representatives completely exposed to undetected
> programming errors and deliberate fraud. (Download the full report at
> [5]http://electiondefensealliance.org/hr550auditflaws)
>
> The study demonstrates that the HR 550 audit is so ineffective that in
> 40% of races examined, the audit would completely fail to detect fraud
> or error affecting 10% of precincts in an average US House race. Fraud
> or error on this scale could easily alter the election outcome if left
> undetected.
>
> Statistical experts and mathematicians associated with Election Defense
> Alliance (EDA) ([6]www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org) propose an effective
> alternative approach in their report issued today. Their audit approach
> detects fraud or error affecting one percent (1%) of the electronic
> tally with a ninety-nine percent (99%) level of confidence.
>
> EDA urgently recommends replacing the audit proposed in HR 550 with this
> alternative approach. The EDA study first tested the HR 550 audit by
> applying its protocol in 10,000 simulated congressional elections. The
> simulation revealed serious flaws in the HR 550 audit design that cannot
> be remedied by typical means, such as by selecting larger samples.
>
> To avoid this intrinsic flaw, the report then presents and tests an
> alternate audit protocol that can immediately achieve 99% confidence of
> detection of manipulation of even 1% of the total vote. The alternative
> audit calls for a hand count of 10% of the paper ballot records in a
> U.S. Congressional District race in 100% of the precincts. EDA will
> present this Universal Precinct-based Sampling (UPS) in a full report
> soon to be released.
>
> Besides its extraordinary accuracy, UPS has the additional advantage of
> simplicity. It may be conducted "in-precinct" on election night, by
> public volunteers representing all concerned political parties. If
> conducted in-precinct, the UPS also avoids the difficult task of
> protecting the chain of custody of paper ballot records in 180,000 U.S.
> precincts.
>
> The HR 550 audit protocol demands this monumental task as currently
> written. Since a 10% hand-count sample could be drawn in 100% of
> precincts on election night, the UPS also eases the transition to
> decentralized, citizen-monitored hand-count verifications of elections,
> placing responsibility for the integrity of the vote count in the hands
> of the American people, where it rightfully belongs.
>
> The EDA study also exposes the compromising position in which the HR 550
> audit leaves candidates and concerned citizens. Even if fraud or error
> is detected by an HR 550 audit, candidates and citizens would still lack
> any means by which to determine how many votes were affected by the
> problem. Candidates and citizens would therefore lack a preliminary
> basis for challenging a potentially corrupted election in a timely
> manner. Regrettably, HR 550 is silent on when and how candidates or
> election officials should act when discrepancies are caught by the HR
> 550 procedure.
>
> The UPS, to be more fully described in EDA's next report, provides a
> simple, effective, and vastly more powerful alternative for election
> validation than does the proposed HR 550 audit. The UPS provides a
> decentralized hand count, reduces chain of custody concerns, and
> provides citizens a clear and timely alarm for fraud or error. Therefore
> Election Defense Alliance urgently recommends UPS as an alternative to
> the HR 550 audit.
>
> Background
>
> Despite credible reports of widespread error-prone programming and
> severe, inherent security vulnerabilities, electronic voting systems now
> tally more than 95% of votes in America.
> (For example, see
> [7]http://brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/SecurityFull7-3Reduced.pdf)
>
> The majority of elections conducted on these systems are unverified.
> Therefore there is no independent procedure to prove the machine vote
> tally is accurate. Even where such procedures do exist on the books,
> officials frequently do not conduct them properly, or at all. A
> well-known but by no means isolated example is the Ohio 2004 "recount."
> In that case, officials cherry-picked precincts to recount rather than
> choosing them at random, as required by law. Election system vendors
> provided `icheat sheetsi to help officials avoid triggering full hand
> recounts of the selected precincts. As a result, only one of Ohiois 88
> counties faced a full recount.
>
> In response to this unacceptable risk, Rep. Rush Holt(D-NJ) recently
> re-introduced HR 550, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility
> Act of 2005." HR 550 is a bill currently pending in Congress that
> mandates a paper record for each vote and also calls for an audit of a
> fraction of the paper records of all electronic votes cast in federal
> elections. According to Representative Holt, HR 550 has received
> `ibipartisan endorsement from one-third of the members of the House of
> Representatives, and has been endorsed by good-government groups as the
> "gold standard in [election] verifiability legislation."
> (See June 12 press release at
> [8]http://holt.house.gov/list/press/nj12_holt/061206.html)
>
> The authors of this new study of HR550 and of the UPS alternative
> believe otherwise.
>
> About the Authors,
>
> Bruce O'Dell, Coordinator of Data Analysis, Election Defense Alliance.
> O'Dell is an information technology consultant with 25 years' experience
> who applies his expertise to analysis of the technical security and
> integrity of voting systems. His current consulting practice centers on
> e-Commerce security and the performance and design of very large-scale
> computer systems for Fortune 100 clients, most recently as the chief
> technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top
> t20 public companies in America.
> [[9]http://www.digitalagility.com/Odell_home_page.htm].
>
> Jonathan Simon, JD, Co-founder of Election Defense Alliance. Simon is a
> graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and is
> a member of the Bar of Massachusetts. He applies his prior experience as
> a political survey research analyst for Peter D. Hart Research
> Associates to studies of the accuracy of exit polls and other election
> integrity mechanisms. He collaborated on several studies assessing the
> accuracy of the 2004 presidential exit polls.
> [[10]http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/jonathan_simon]
>
> Josh Mitteldorf, PhD, is affiliated with the Department of Ecology and
> Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, and is currently
> specializing in computer simulations that demonstrate how natural
> selection can act on groups and communities. He has taught physics,
> mathematics, astronomy, and evolution at Harvard, Berkeley, Temple, the
> University of Pennsylvania, LaSalle and Bryn Mawr. Since the 2004
> presidential election, he has been part of a coalition of statisticians
> who analyze voting patterns for evidence of errors or fraud.
> [11]http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jmitteld
>
> Steven Freeman holds a Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management and
> an M.S. in Social System Science from the University of Pennsylvaniais
> Wharton School. Since 2000, he has held several academic positions at
> the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently serves as Visiting
> Scholar and a member of the teaching faculty of the Graduate Program of
> Organizational Dynamics in the School of Arts and Sciences. His election
> research has won an award from Project Censored as one of the three most
> important `icensoredi stories of 2005. He is the author, with Joel
> Bleifuss, of Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls,
> Election Fraud, and the Official Count (New York: Seven Stories Press
> 2006).
> [12]http://www.phil.upenn.edu/faculty/freeman/CV.pdf
>
> About Election Defense Alliance
>
> Election Defense Alliance [13]http://www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org,
> founded July 4, 2006, is a coalition of election integrity activists
> working at the state and local levels across the nation to detect and
> counter covert, antidemocratic manipulation of voter registration
> databases and all electronic voting systems, and to promote honest,
> secure and transparent elections in which every vote is counted as cast
> so that our official election outcomes are truly worthy of the public
> trust.
>
> EDA Contacts:
>
> Jonathan Simon, 617-538-6012
> [14]jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Sally Castleman
> [15]sallyc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Dan Ashby, 510-740-0572 [voicemail and fax]
> [16]dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> References
>
> Visible links
> 1. http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/study_finds_fatal_flaws_in_popular_hr_550_election_audit_proposal
> 2. http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/EDAHR550PressRelease817.pdf
> 3. mailto:jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 4. mailto:bodell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 5. http://electiondefensealliance.org/hr550auditflaws
> 6. http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/
> 7. http://brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/SecurityFull7-3Reduced.pdf
> 8. http://holt.house.gov/list/press/nj12_holt/061206.html
> 9. http://www.digitalagility.com/Odell_home_page.htm]
> 10. http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/jonathan_simon]
> 11. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jmitteld
> 12. http://www.phil.upenn.edu/faculty/freeman/CV.pdf
> 13. http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/
> 14. mailto:jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 15. mailto:sallyc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 16. mailto:dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx