Vol. 4 No. 12 (April 2006)

Uncommon Denominator

The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
— Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress

Talking Points: On the manual recount
Wit and Wisdom: Fox News-White House merger
Quoted! Tony Snow on fiscal responsibility
Check It Out: R.I.P. S.U.V.s
Featured Article: "Facing Down Iran"
Happenings: Progressive Roundtable developments
Endorsements: Ted Lempert
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor

TALKING POINTS

With the 2006 elections just around the corner, there are persistent questions swirling around the reliability of electronic voting technologies, the disfranchisement of certain voter groups, and the ability of our country's electoral procedures to record the public will fairly and accurately. Evidence continues to accumulate that the three most recent elections were marred by irregularities that represent a disgraceful lapse in the world's oldest democracy. With the prospect of more problems, even fraud, this coming November, a key part of the debate centers on the manual recount and its potential to ensure the validity of election results. To restore credibility to the process, however, manual recounts need to be conducted according to well conceived and carefully regulated procedures.

A number of states provide for an audit or manual recount of a small sample of the ballots cast as a way to detect voting system errors. In California, although there is a requirement for a one percent manual recount, there are no rules on how this should be carried out. If not done carefully, however, the recount will not accomplish what it should. In particular, it might fail to detect election fraud committed by hackers inside or outside of the elections department.

The manual recount is intended to discover whether the equipment and procedures that are used to count the votes produce the same results as humans would produce by visually viewing the ballots to determine voter intent.

Optical scan voting machines are the type most commonly used, with nearly 70 million voters expected to use this equipment in 2006, according to Election Data Services. But there are several sources of potential error when using an optical scan voting machine:

1. Hardware error — The ballot scanning equipment does not properly recognize the marks made by the voter.

2. Software error — The software in the ballot scanning equipment does not keep accurate count of the votes.

3. Voter error — The voter has not followed instructions when marking the ballot, including using an inappropriate ballot marking pen or pencil. This is most likely to occur when voters fill out their ballots away from staffed polling places.

4. Zeroing error — The ballot scanning equipment has not been properly initialized to set the accumulated vote counts at zero before ballots are scanned.

5. Setup error — The ballot scanning equipment has not been initialized properly so that the votes are associated with the proper candidates and measures.

6. Fraud — A hacker has somehow modified the equipment so as to cause the vote totals to be reported in error. The hacker may be either inside or outside of the elections department or may be an employee of the equipment vendor.

Hardware and software errors are not intentional. They usually result from poor design decisions. They can cause frequent errors which are easy to detect or they might affect votes only in unusual circumstances. The latter may be quite hard to detect because the recount may miss the ballots containing the errors.

Voter errors are usually the result of poor voter training and/or not supplying system-compatible marking pens or pencils. Since voters may choose to use whatever marking device they have at hand, it will probably be necessary to manually scan all such ballots and hand transfer votes to other ballots if needed.

Zeroing errors should be completely eliminated by good design. Unfortunately, they are usually the result of hacking or purposeful design to enable fraud.

Setup errors are typically discovered through the Logic and Accuracy testing performed by the elections department staff. However, it is not clear whether the tests performed are adequate to detecting all possible setup errors. This is particularly the case with ballot scanners that must accept any ballot style used in a county. Such non-precinct-specific scanners are used for early voting, absentee, mailed and provisional ballots.

Purposeful fraud

Purposeful fraud is much harder to detect. In this case the manual recount must be used very judiciously, as the fraudsters may know much more about the intimate details of the election equipment and procedures than those searching for the fraud.

A clever hacker can use numerous tricks to try to prevent detection. For this reason, the election laws typically prohibit having the machines connected into any networks and require a close watch by elections staff over anything which gets attached to the machines, such as memory cards.

In order for the recount to detect fraud, it is necessary that the small sample of ballots used for the recount have a high likelihood of including the ballots for which the illegal hack has modified the vote. This means that the ballots selected for recount must not be known, or be predictable, before the close of the polls. Most importantly, it means that all ballots must have an equal chance of being chosen for the recount, because if it is unlikely that certain ballots will be chosen, those would be ideal ballots to falsify without fear of detection. Important requirements include:

1. The vote totals from all precincts must be made public before selecting the precincts to be recounted. This allows observers to see if the recounted vote totals match the machine totals.

2. Precincts chosen for the recount must be selected randomly, such that no one can know in advance which precincts will be chosen.

3. All precincts must be in the pool of potentially selected precincts. If any precincts are not in the pool, those are the ones that an insider will choose to hack into.

4. The ballots chosen must include not only the ballots cast at the polling place, but also the early, mail, absentee, and provisional ballots. The polling place ballots should be accounted for separately from the ballots counted in the elections department office.

Election officials have an interest in keeping the number of ballots recounted small, both to keep the cost low and the recount time short. So it is important that the recount not be biased toward small precincts. The more ballots that are recounted, the greater the chance of detecting any errors.

Finally, there must be election accountability. If the recount turns up differences between the machine count and the manual count, these differences must be fully accounted for. It is NOT enough to simply replace the machine count with the manual count for the precincts involved. If errors are found in one or more precincts, it must be assumed that there are errors in other precincts, too, and so additional randomly selected precincts must be manually recounted. If these show that there are even more errors, then ALL precincts must be manually recounted.

Laws and regulations regarding manual recounts should specify such procedures, the actions to be taken in case of discrepancies in counts, and the consequences should errors be found.

Reporting Errors The operation of our election systems must be as transparent as possible, and the public told when errors are found, even if the elections department manages to correct those errors. At present, Registrars of Voters usually tell the public that no errors occur, in order to enhance their reputations and to keep the public unaware of problems. This is unacceptable, as such lying ultimately further undermines public trust in our election system.

Proper manual recount procedures do not fire up the imagination. But they represent one of those technical, shredded-wheat issues that keep our democracy vital. They must not be overlooked as our society struggles to regain its reputation as a model of fair and honest governance.

— Dennis Paull

WIT AND WISDOM

FOX NEWS-WHITE HOUSE MERGER COMPLETED
Bill O'Reilly Named Secretary of Defense

One day after being named the new White House spokesman, former Fox News pundit Tony Snow announced that a deal merging Fox News and the Bush White House had been successfully completed.

"The merger between Fox News and the White House can be summed up in one word: synergy," Mr. Snow said. "The two entities have been working in lockstep for five years now and this merger is a formal acknowledgment of that fact."

While many Beltway observers had long assumed that a merger between the White House and Fox News was inevitable, not until reporters saw workmen hanging a "Fair and Balanced" sign from the White House portico this morning did they know a deal had finally been struck.

According to those familiar with the deal, the final sticking point in the negotiations was ironed out late last night when President George W. Bush agreed to report to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.

Moments after the merger was announced, Mr. Snow introduced the latest member of the Bush Cabinet, Secretary of Defense Bill O'Reilly.

In his first official act as Defense Secretary, Mr. O'Reilly called CNN "a gathering threat" and added the cable news network to the Axis of Evil.

Mr. O'Reilly's comments drew sharp criticism from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del), who told reporters, "I don't see how CNN can be considered a threat when their biggest weapon is Larry King."

—from The Borowitz Report

QUOTED!

"A Republican president and a Republican Congress have lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to raid the public fisc." — Tony Snow, newly appointed White House spokesman, in an article written while he worked as a commentator at Fox News

CHECK IT OUT

Does the persistent presence of S.U.V.s gall you? Do you resent not being able to see traffic in front of them when you're caught behind them? Are you concerned by the fact that their bumpers are at about the same height as your head? Perhaps you have more philosophically or politically informed objections: they contribute to global warming; they enthrall us to the Middle East; they symbolize gluttony....? Would you like to accelerate their demise? If so, you might want to check out the following:

Earth on Empty. A guerrilla team that "tickets" S.U.V.s. Their faux "violation" notices, which resemble parking infractions, are intended to open people's eyes to the destructiveness of these oversized vehicles. Many of those ticketed react with anger, but some have responded positively -- and the idea in either case is to stigmatize S.U.V. ownership as a morally questionable behavior. You can order tickets through their website, or write to Earth on Empty, P.O. Box 400561, N. Cambridge, MA, 02140.

Friends of the Earth. They operate a website where one can buy anti-S.U.V. bumper-stickers (e.g., "Support OPEC. Buy an S.U.V."), or send a ready-made postcard to automakers which reads: "Next time I shop for a vehicle, I would like to buy a car with the lowest emissions, highest fuel efficiency, and cleanest production processes technologically possible. Please provide affordable clean green cars for consumers like me as soon as possible."

Our New York readers might be interested in Stay Free Magazine, which issues tickets to S.U.V.s in the Big Apple. The various possible infractions on their tickets include everything from "endangering other drivers" and "polluting twice as much as regular cars" to "compensating for lack of manhood" and "holing self up in two-ton metal fortress." Order online.

For the more serious-minded, a useful resource is the Green Book, a publication of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy that provides information about the energy consumption and exhaust output of a variety of vehicles. Even if you're not in the market for a new car, pass it on to people who are.

FEATURED ARTICLE

The following is an excerpt from Mark Steyn's "Facing Down Iran," which appears in the Spring 2006 issue of City Journal:

"If we'd understood Iran back in 1979, we'd understand better the challenges we face today. Come to that, we might not even be facing them. But, with hindsight, what strikes you about the birth of the Islamic Republic is the near total lack of interest by analysts in that adjective: Islamic. Iran was only the second Islamist state, after Saudi Arabia-and, in selecting as their own qualifying adjective the family name, the House of Saud at least indicated a conventional sense of priorities, as the legions of Saudi princes whoring and gambling in the fleshpots of the West have demonstrated exhaustively. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue-though, as the Royal Family has belatedly discovered vis-à-vis the Islamists, they're somewhat overdrawn on that front. The difference in Iran is simple: with the mullahs, there are no London escort agencies on retainer to supply blondes only. When they say 'Islamic Republic,' they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades.

"Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn't fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it. We looked at the map like that Broadway marquee: West and East, the old double act. As with most of the down-page turf, Iran's significance lay in which half of the act she'd sign on with. To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he's-our-sonofabitch grounds: in those heady days SAVAK, his secret police, were a household name among Western progressives, and insofar as they took the stern-faced man in the turban seriously, they assured themselves he was a kind of novelty front for the urbane Paris émigré socialists who accompanied him back to Tehran. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he'd outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams-a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz. Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms-the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.

Click here to read the whole article.

HAPPENINGS

Progressive Roundtable report — The final report detailing the accomplishments of the March, 2006, Progressive Roundtable is now available online at www.progressiveroundtable.org. The report reviews the background leading up to the Roundtable, explains the goals and methodology of the conference, and describes the various progressive infrastructure needs that participants identified as high priorities.

Progress toward fundable proposals — Based on the collaborative work undertaken at the 2006 Roundtable, the Commonweal Institute has received 17 "Letters of Interest" from different organizations interested in building progressive infrastructure. These preliminary proposals are all aimed toward addressing high-priority needs in the areas of communications, marketing, coordination, and strategy. The Commonweal Institute is now taking the lead in coordinating the fund-seeking process, working with organizations on developing full proposals and helping to match proposals with appropriate funders.

"Talking Politics" workshop — On March 25, Katherine Forrest headed a two-and-1/2-hour plenary session, "How to Talk Politics with People Who Are Different from You," at the California Democratic Council's 54th Annual Convention in Santa Clara, California.

ENDORSEMENTS

"Commonweal will play three critical roles in helping all of us and our organizations in making the world a better place. They will frame the debate, provide research for existing organizations and expand the base." — Ted Lempert, Executive Director, Children Now; former California State Assembly member

GET INVOLVED

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Uncommon Denominator

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