(This summary was posted to the Progressive Democrats of Hawai'i blog on 9/12 in response to this commentary on the quality of elections coverage.)

In brief, here is the current situation in Hawaii. In December 2005, the Office of Elections put out a request for proposals (RFP) for handicapped accessible electronic voting machines capable of producing a "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail" (VVPAT) in conformity with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and Act 200, Hawaii's recently enacted "paper trail" bill.

The RFP was clearly a biased document, with its specifications written to prejudice the selection process to the favor of one vendor's voting machines, Hart InterCivic. Attorneys for the other major vendor, ES&S, who already provides Hawaii's optical scan voting machines, threatened a lawsuit unless the state agreed to interpret the RFP to allow for fair consideration of the AutoMark, a machine that took a different approach to satisfying the requirements of both HAVA and Act 200. The state reluctantly agreed.

The state had set up a secret advisory board to evaluate and rate the competing proposals according to "objective" criteria. After establishing these criteria, the state decided to shift the relative weight alloted to different criteria, again to the benefit of their prefered vendor, Hart.

Although the state had agreed to move away from their narrowly written RFP, the evaluation team ignored that decision and penalized the AutoMark for not meeting the narrow criteria! We have reviewed the evaluation sheets and points were dramatically taken off explicitly for not being a "direct record electronic" voting machine (DRE) although neither HAVA nor Act 200 requires use of a DRE.

The state agencies involved in the purchasing decision, the State Procurement Office (SPO) and the Office of Election (OOE) made their decisions and conducted their evaluations in great secrecy without public oversight and resisting requests for information from our organization. This is not unique to Hawai'i. Many state and county election authorities behave in a similar fashion, which is a part of the problem nationwide. Underqualified elections officials are making sloppy decisions on voting systems with minimal input from public interest groups, disinterested IT professionals and the stake holders (representatives of the candidates and political parties). As a result, they are forced to rely upon the technical "expertise" of the vendors to make their decisions. As a result, all across the country they have adopted failure prone systems, many of which have failed and most (perhaps all) of which are vulnerable to security problems ("hacks").

The majority of Hawaii's voters will cast their votes on the optical scan ballots, using a pen to fill in oval bubbles adjacent to the names of their preferred candidates. All mail-in absentee voting will be handled this way. In the polling place, this is probably the safest technology currently available for secure, verifiable voting. It DOES have vulnerabilities, but these can be tested and safeguarded against IF there is a meaningful audit conducted of the physical ballots. Hawai'i DOES NOT have an adequate audit requirement and the law must be changed at the next session. A large percentage of the mail-in absentee voting will result in spoiled ballots this year, especially in the primary voting. A large number of voters will vote like the person quoted in the article wanted to vote and mark their ballot for candidates in more than one political party. No matter what technology is used, that is not allowed. It is a strength of the electronic voting systems that they do not allow this to happen! Voters who fill out the optical scan ballots in the polling place will have any such mistake caught when they insert their ballot into the scanner. The machine will reject the ballot and the voter will have a second chance to cast their ballot. Voters who make this mistake while filling out their ballot at home will have a spoiled ballot.

Because the Case campaign has been actively encouraging Republicans to "crossover" and vote in the Democratic primary, there is a greater likelihood than normal that some of these voters will vote in the Democratic primary for the Senate race and then return to the GOP ballot to vote for their own GOP candidates. This will increase the percentage of spoiled mail-in ballots beyond what is already likely to be a significant percentage.

The Hart DRE voting machines ARE an improvement over the version used in the last election due to the attached printer which makes a paper record of each voters choices and allows the voter to review the paper record before casting the vote. This requirement was resisted by the State Office of Elections as unnecessary or for providing a "false sense of security" because, as they admitted, the machine can print up an accurate record, while electronically recording a different vote. Writing the software to do this is relatively simple.

This was correct when the OOE said it a year and a half ago. It is also true now. The best safeguard against this and other errors due to "bugs" in the software or intentional hacks, is to subject the paper records generated by the DREs AND THE OPTICAL SCAN BALLOTS to a meaningful audit. (This means a physical recount of a "statistically significant" number of the ballots or paper records, but the word "recount" has specific legal meanings and should be avoided in this context.)

Unfortunately, Hawaii does NOT have a requirement for a meaningful audit. Safe Vote Hawaii, and I in particular, bear some responsibility for this omission. When we lobbied for HB1740 (which became Act 200), we did insert language to require that 10% of the paper records generated by electronic voting be subject to an audit. We thought that was more than adequate. It was only months after the session was over that we learned that the Office of Elections regards an "audit" as the review of a SINGLE contest per ballot! If errors occur in races other than the one race chosen, they would not be detected. And errors (or malicious hacks) do NOT necessarily occur in multiple races. It sometimes requires the confluence of unforeseen factors to cause a glitch to occur. And in the case of a deliberate hack, it might very well be aimed solely at one race.

Both the optical scan votes and the DRE votes are also vulnerable once they have been incorporated into the results database. Numerous studies have confirmed that it is possible for knowledgeable people to manipulate commonly used election software, change election results and exit without leaving any trace of their actions. The software that has been hacked in these demonstrations has met all the "safeguards" required by the "Independent Testing Agencies" that certify these voting systems as "secure." The local Office of Elections will reply to these studies by saying they are not using the same software as that in the study. But our vendor's software has been certified as "secure" by the same testing agencies that failed to catch the vulnerabilities of the other software. And our local OOE is both incapable and legally barred from testing the software themselves or having it tested by experts of the state's choosing.

Most voters would be surprised to learn that much of the actual conduct of the elections has been "outsourced" to the vendors and that critical functions are not subject to meaningful oversight by either the state or by official election observers. As the voting process has become more technically complicated, less transparent, and more proprietary, the ability of either the state or the official observers to vouch for the accuracy of the results has shrunk each cycle.

If you visualize a magic show where the magician takes naive volunteers out of the audience to vouch that his equipment is as it appears, you have a close approximation of the role of official election observers. Either we need to get other professional magicians to inspect the equipment, meaning neutral IT observers and public interest groups with an informed interest, or we need to move away from the complicated, unverifiable elections systems towards something that CAN be observed and tested by the "little old ladies" of the League of Women Voters.

For this election, we urge people to reject the use of the electronic voting machines and to take care in how they mark their primary ballots. People who have more motivation are urged to become election observers so we can develop a large pool of people familiar with the voting systems and with credibility useful for lobbying the next legislative session for meaningful reform. The TOP priority will be to establish a statistically meangful audit requirement for ALL voting systems used in Hawaii.