iii.failures of the current system: case studiesPress reports from the last several years contain hundreds of reported cases of voting machinemalfunctions. A subset of these cases is summarized in Appendix B of this report (available in the onlineversion of this report). News items about voting system troubles tend not to include many details; thismakes it hard to identify from these reports the precise cause of a particular malfunction. Whatever thecauses of a particular problem, it is fair to assume that their occurrence in one jurisdiction will ofteneventually be repeated in another unless election officials throughout the country are made aware ofboth the causes of the problem and how to avoid them.Of the hundreds of reports of voting system malfunctions and vulnerabilities, we collected and closelystudied fourteen. They are summarized below. Most of the election officials we interviewed in connectionwith these summaries claimed to have had noprior warning of the problems we discuss. Bycontrast, in most cases, the vendors were (or“one of the more frustrating aspects should have been) aware of the problems – oftenbecause the same problem had been reported toof encountering [voting machine]them earlier by another election official.problems . . . is that the vendors1. Butler County, Ohio, March 2008themselves often know about the problemsIn March 2008, as they reconciled vote totalsand never disclose any details whatsoever from the State primary in their office’s DataDepartment, Ohio officials noticed that severalprior to the moment of crisis.”votes were dropped from memory cards evenjane platten, cuyahoga county board of though their final report stated that voteson these memory cards were counted. 35 Aelectionssubsequent investigation by Ohio electionofficials determined that at least 1,000 voteswere undercounted in nine of Ohio’s <strong>for</strong>ty-fourcounties using Premier touch screen or opticalscan voting systems. 36 In an editorial several months later, the New York Times noted that Premier(known as Diebold Election Systems prior to rebranding in 2007) had subsequently notified more thanthirty states using its systems “to be on the lookout <strong>for</strong> missing votes.” 37Less widely reported was the fact that this same problem was apparently discovered in DuPage County,Illinois in 2004. In a county election summary (obtained by the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project and therelevant portions of which are annexed to this report as Appendix C), a technician who serviced themachines noted what appears to be the very same problem:GEMS Upload Failure on York 58 – This memory card had a failed upload transmissionon election night that was not detected until the next day when reports were on theprecinct, and zero results were found <strong>for</strong> each race within the precinct. The status ofthe memory card upload within the GEMS was “successful” but the upload recordshowed the ballot count to be zero. It is rather discom<strong>for</strong>ting [sic] that this failedtransmission was not detected on election night.10 | Brennan Center <strong>for</strong> Justice
The publicity around the problems in Butler County, Ohio in March 2008 may have saved thousandsof votes on Election Day the following November. It is impossible to know how many votes were lostbe<strong>for</strong>e the problem was so widely publicized.Nor was the mere reporting of the problem to the vendor in 2008 enough to guarantee that the 29 otherStates using this system that year would have known how to protect themselves from similar problems.As the rest of this case study shows, it was the extreme vigilance of the Butler County Board of Electionsand the Ohio Secretary of State that resulted in the full scope of the problem being revealed.On April 4, 2008, the Butler County Board of Elections sent a letter to Premier and copied the Secretaryof State, Jennifer Brunner, notifying Premier of the problem. 38 The Board sent a follow up letter toPremier on April 9, 2008 notifying them of a recurrence of the problem. 39On May 16, 2008, in response to Butler County’s complaint, Premier issued a report that blamed theproblem on antivirus software the county had run on their system as well as human error. 40County Election Director Betty McGary reports that on May 23, she wrote to Dave Byrd, Presidentof Premier, calling their report “highly speculative,” and rejecting their assumptions. She states that sherequested Premier continue to research and diagnose the root source of the discrepancies. 41Had Butler County’s Board of Elections been less persistent, that might have been the end of the story. Otherelection officials using this system around the country might not have learned of the problems experienced inButler County, and almost certainly would not have discovered its true cause.Fortunately, the Butler County Board asked the Ohio Secretary of State’s office to assist it in its owninvestigation of the problem. On August 6-7, 2008, Butler County election officials and the OhioSecretary of State conducted a simulation of the vote counting process with Premier observers. Theyconducted eight of these simulations over two days – in some cases disabling the antivirus softwarePremier had blamed <strong>for</strong> the malfunction, in other cases enabling it. 42The testing revealed that the machines dropped votes during multiple memory card uploads fromindividual voting machines onto the county server regardless of whether the antivirus software wasenabled. 43After the testing, Premier conceded that the apparent root cause <strong>for</strong> the problem was an error with theirserver software, which the company determined “contains a logic error” that can sometimes result indropped votes from a sharing violation when multiple cards from individual machines were uploadedat the same time. 44Following its additional investigation, Premier sent a product advisory to all counties using its systemsdetailing procedures intended to “mitigate and reveal this issue should it occur.” 45Director McGary supports a mandatory requirement <strong>for</strong> “voting machine vendors to report allmalfunctions and complaints they receive from election officials to a central and searchable database,”noting that “such reporting should be mandatory.” 46Brennan Center <strong>for</strong> Justice | 11
- Page 5: IV.A BETTER WAY TO TRACK AND ADDRES
- Page 11: 4. Pressure Vendors to Voluntarily
- Page 14 and 15: its newly established Voting System
- Page 18 and 19: 2. Humboldt County, California, Nov
- Page 20 and 21: 4. Pulaski County, Arkansas, May 20
- Page 22 and 23: 7. Florida, June 2004According to t
- Page 24 and 25: Denise Lamb, who currently serves a
- Page 26 and 27: Ms. Poucher has stated that it “w
- Page 28 and 29: Sequoia identified four possible ca
- Page 30 and 31: Had advocates and researchers in Ne
- Page 32 and 33: elative to voting system vendors. A
- Page 34 and 35: or potential vulnerabilities by any
- Page 36 and 37: Finally, the Department of Justice
- Page 38 and 39: Provide Timely & Organized Access t
- Page 40 and 41: the CPSC may compel the manufacture
- Page 42 and 43: Civil Division of the Department of
- Page 44 and 45: C. Analogous RegimesCivil penalty p
- Page 46 and 47: Of course, adding these kinds of pr
- Page 49 and 50: v. conclusionVoting is the most imp
- Page 51 and 52: System Vulnerabilities: should incl
- Page 53 and 54: February2008September2004November20
- Page 55 and 56: November2006November2006ES&SiVotron
- Page 57 and 58: June 2008SequoiaOptech 400CCaliforn
- Page 59 and 60: March 2004March 2004DieboldAccuVote
- Page 61 and 62: February2008September2008PremierAcc
- Page 63 and 64: event of an overvote displayed a co
- Page 67 and 68:
January 2008January 2008PremierAccu
- Page 69 and 70:
November2004ES&SM650FloridaSupervis
- Page 71 and 72:
October 2008February2008PremierAccu
- Page 73 and 74:
February2008February2008October 200
- Page 75 and 76:
2004 AccuVote 2000ESNovember2008Nov
- Page 77 and 78:
November2008November2008Hart InterC
- Page 79 and 80:
February2008May 2006August 2004May2
- Page 81 and 82:
March 2008June 2009November2008Prem
- Page 83 and 84:
February2008November2006SequoiaAVC
- Page 85 and 86:
November2008SequoiaImageCastNew Yor
- Page 87 and 88:
November2004November2004UnilectPatr
- Page 89 and 90:
November2008November2008March 2008E
- Page 91 and 92:
May 2008April 2008November2006May 2
- Page 93 and 94:
2006 iVotronicThe Post & Courier re
- Page 95 and 96:
AccuVote TSR6; HartInterCiviceScan;
- Page 97 and 98:
November2006ES&S:iVotronicTexasHida
- Page 99 and 100:
November2003November2009November200
- Page 101 and 102:
October 2008October 2008May 2008ES&
- Page 103 and 104:
appendix c : dupage county election
- Page 105 and 106:
and resolve problems with certified
- Page 107 and 108:
49. E-mail from Carolyn Crnich, Cle
- Page 109 and 110:
95. Kleinberg, supra note 92.96. Ma
- Page 111 and 112:
143. Telephone Interview with Rokey
- Page 113 and 114:
187. Id. at 22.188. See Thomas, sup
- Page 115 and 116:
1801 (“[T]he Secretary shall init
- Page 117 and 118:
258. See United States Department o
- Page 119 and 120:
294. John Archibald & Brett J. Blac
- Page 121 and 122:
334. Jane Musgrave, Palm Beach Coun
- Page 123 and 124:
374. Glitch Keeps Fulton Voters Wai
- Page 125 and 126:
417. Joe Dejka & Chris Olson, A Lat
- Page 127 and 128:
457. Letter from Dave Byrd, Preside
- Page 129:
498. Lauren Glendenning, Voting Gli
- Page 132:
ennancenterfor justiceAt New York U