Election Training, Procedures, and Security
March 4, 2008 – 3:01 pmAs I mentioned last month, I took training near the end of January to be a Closing Judge for the Maryland Primary Election. This is a new position Maryland has instituted to assist the Chief Judges with shutting down the voting units at the end of an election day. This involves showing up fresh at 6:30 pm, to assist the other judges (who would have been there all day) until polls close at 8 pm, and then pairing up with a Chief Judge from another political party (not one’s own) to log information and collect memory cards from, and shut down, each voting unit one by one. In my county’s training (this differed by county, from what a friend working as an election judge in another county told me), we were also told the Closing Judges (two per precint, from different parties) would deliver the critical materials to the Board of Elections after they were collected.
The Maryland primary / election was held Feb. 12, and I was a Closing Judge for it.
I was already aware of some potential issues with electronic voting from previous reading (e.g., vendor systems being certified that should not have been, by the given states’ own standards). The training had reinforced my concern that human factors with all the complicated steps (inclluding paperwork) required by these so-called paperless machines would make it difficult to pass an audit at an average Maryland precinct, were anyone in Maryland auditing the election process at the precints (see previous entry linked above, regarding CM and audits). I was committed to do my best to follow the procedures as best I could, though. I was not expecting the problem of a Chief Judge not following procedure, but that is what happened at my precinct. Now, they’d already been at the polls since 6 am when we got word around 7:25 pm, that the elections were being extended until 9:30 (due to weather). So I understand the confusion and the desire to hurry. Unfortunately, one of the Chief Judges started closing up the voting units with an assistant judge from his own party. We got the other Chief Judge to have a discussion with him and got back on track, more or less, though we couldn’t roll the clock back on that one machine.
I sent email to the Board of Elections and got a positive response back for how we’d handled it, saying they would clarify the training. I’m still concerned with this mistake from one of the Chief Judges — they were supposed to be the most familiar with the procedural requirements, after all. I don’t see how the process can be simplified much, given the electronic voting technology we’re using. I want a voting system at least as secure as paper ballots, and we don’t have that now.
Here are links to a couple of write-ups by another Maryland election judge, Avi Rubin, who is a computer security expert. He links to concerns about the voting units themselves (and the software on them) , and others have documented concerns about the tabulation, but his entries below explain simpler concerns with physical security (without which, the electronic systems are even more vulnerable to accidental or deliberate tampering). Like him, I think all the people with whom I served were trying to do an honest job — but there are documented cases of election tampering in our country’s history, even by election officials, and it would be reckless to assume ”it can’t happen here”, or “it’ll never happen again”.
- 2006 primary: Tamper tape and other physical vulnerabilities
- 2008 training