From the Risks Digest Volume 25: Issue 41

[davidschroth]

Straight Party Voting Issues

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Straight Party Voting Issues
<Leonard Finegold <L@drexel.edu>>
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:34:47 -0400

[This is forwarded by Leonard from someone else, who says:] Lest any of
you think this is a hoax, i just checked and it is verified as TRUE on
Snopes-- <http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/straightticket.asp>
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/straightticket.asp Unbelievable! I
rarely like to pass on stuff but this one i encourage everyone to pass on
to EVERYONE so we don't have another 8 years of DISASTER. just got this
from a friend of mine, pass it on:

"Straight Party Voting" Trap. Here are the details and what to do about it:

THE PROBLEM: "Straight party voting" on voting machines is revealing a bad
pattern of miscounting and omitting your vote, especially if you are a
Democrat. Most recently (Oct. 2008), a firm called Automated Election
Services was found to have miscoded the system in heavily Democratic Santa
Fe County, New Mexico such that straight party voters would not have their
presidential votes counted.

STRAIGHT PARTY VOTING is allowed in 15 states. Basically, it means that you
can take a shortcut to actually looking at who you are voting for and
instead just select a party preference. Then the voting machine makes your
candidate choices, supposedly for the party you requested.

HOW TO PROTECT THE COUNT against the Straight Party Vote trap:

1) NEVER CHOOSE THE STRAIGHT PARTY VOTE OPTION, because it alerts the
computer as to your party preference and allows software code to trigger
whatever function the programmer has designed.

2) SEND THIS INFORMATION OUT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN, blog it, root n'
toot it out there to get the word out.

3) ESPECIALLY GET THE WORD OUT TO PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING STATES,
which have straight party voting options:
Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West
Virginia, Wisconsin

4) DEMAND COMPLETE AND CAREFUL TESTING OF THE STRAIGHT PARTY OPTION IN LOGIC
& ACCURACY TESTS

5) LOOK FOR UNDERVOTES (high profile races with lower-than-average number of
votes cast) and flag them, post them, bring them to the attention of others
for additional scrutiny.

Voting machine miscounts of straight party votes were proven by California
researcher Judy Alter in the 2004 New Mexico presidential election; in
Alabama Democrat straight party votes were caught going to a Republican, and
Wisconsin a whole slew of straight party votes disappeared altogether. Both
DRE and optical scan machines are vulnerable. Private contractors are
involved; private firms like LHS Associates, Automated Election Services,
Harp Enterprises, Casto & Harris and others will program almost all systems
in the USA this November. ES&S scanners were involved in examples cited, but
Diebold has also issued a cryptic Product Advisory Notice in 2006 about
unexpected results from certain Straight Party option programming practices.

[Incidentally, I wandered into a voting station in Vancouver, Canada, a
couple of weeks ago. They use paper ballots; I asked if they're counted
manually, reply "you bet ". They handled more people much more
expeditiously than in my PA, USA station, 'cos we have only a couple of
voting machines, and they had effectively lots more, and simpler
ones...aka ballot boxes. And results were available certainly by next
morning (and prob. earlier). LF]

Leonard X. Finegold, Physics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street
Phila. PA 19104 1-215.895.2740 L@drexel.edu


I don't think this is a problem in Minnesota, but it doesn't hurt to be alert...

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

As we learned in conversation elsewhere, Canada Elections has a ballot with ONE question on it. Pick your candidate, and you are done.

But warning people about this is still a meritorious idea.

K.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Huh. Go read the referenced snopes page.

K.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"Huh. Go read the referenced snopes page."

Good idea. Brief summary for folks who aren't going to bother looking for it (esp. since the link is broken in this post):

This is your basic urban legend with a grain of truth. In North Carolina, presidential choice is exempted from the list of "partisan offices" by state law, so it is true that you have to mark your presidential choice explicitly whether you choose "straight ticket" or not. This is not a glitch or a conspiracy - it is just the way they defined their terminology in that state.

There has also been one report of a temporary voting machine glitch in Santa Fe County, NM (discovered and corrected in preelection tests).

The hysterical conspiratorial tone is irritating, but the advice is good. If a glitch has been found in one voting machine it might well be there in others. Certainly you should review your ballot before submitting it. And if I were stuck with voting with an electronic voting machine, I would certainly not click any shortcut buttons.

As far as I know, there is no place in Minnesota that uses voting machines any more. The old-fashioned mechanical voting machine did have a rather cool straight ticket function - if you flipped the DFL lever at the top then all the little levers down below flipped to DFL as well. Then you could go down the list one by one and flip any of them back the other way manually.

I miss the old voting machines. They were really fun to use. Nowadays, we mark a paper ballot manually. There is no choice for straight party voting.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

New York still has those, at least the last time I voted there (2002).