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Election Integrity

This Page: https://https://copswiki.org/Common/ElectionIntegrity

ElectionIntegrity

Table of Contents 
Table of Contents

This project is working to improve the integrity of our elections, one of the most critical areas in a democracy. "Election Fraud" is not the same as "Voter Fraud" where voters who are ineligible are added to the roles, etc. Election Fraud is manipulation of the election process itself.

Latest News

  • CitizensOversight is developing a cloud-based ballot image auditing service called Audit Engine. Find out more here: AuditEngine
  • Substack is now one of the best ways to keep in touch. See all articles here: Substack Articles
  • How to get involved:
  • subscribe to the electionintegrity mailing list. This is an active list with several posts a day.
  • join the Facebook group, Election Scam Clearinghouse: https://www.facebook.com/groups/clearinghouse
  • Join weekly ZOOM web conference calls, 10AM PT on Thursdays. Subscribe to our email list for regular announcements: Send an email to signup@citizensoversight.org and let us know you want to be on the email list and attend our zoom meetings.

Sub-projects

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Background

Research

Various Strategies:

  • Corrupting an individual machine using malicious code in a PC memory Card.
  • Corrupting subsequent machines when that same card is used in other machines.
  • "Sleepovers" encourages possible malicious handling of the machines. Karen Otter reported a 12-day sleepover before this (2006) election.
  • Changing the results in the central tabulator. This can apply to any type of ballot counted.
  • Paper ballots can be mis-scanned, declaring many more "blank" ballots than there really are. In the 52nd Congressional District Primary, about 25% of the ballots were reported as "blank" for that race. These figures are not widely reported for each race.
  • Early Announcements. Since we have a substantial percentage of voters now voting as mail-in (permanent absentee), and these ballots can be delivered to the polling place on voting day, there are many ballots that are uncounted. In the June 2006 primary, 350,000 voters voted by mail and 65,000 were uncounted when the newspapers were reporting "100% precincts reporting". It took almost two weeks to finish the counting of those ballots.
  • "Denial of Service Attacks" -- Well known in the Internet security community, it means that you hit a site so hard that it crashes, and at least denies service to real visitors. In the Election world, it means creating long lines at the polling place by mis-allocating voting equipment, or causing the equipment to fail.
  • Loss due to failure - This a new strategy, and is only true for DRE - Direct Recording Equipment. If the equipment fails, the votes may be lost. Malicious code need not fiddle with vote counts, just cause the machines to die in areas where your opponent is strong, thereby losing their votes.
  • Voter Minimization - Reduction of viable voters by making it difficult to register and to vote. In this state, they still require registration far in advance of the election (some other states allow registration at the polling place on election day) and they have become very picky about how these are filled out. Drivers license number must match, paper must be a particular weight, etc. And of course, you have to fill out a paper form. What happened to electronic systems here?

Are paper ballots necessary?

Absolutely. This is one of the most changes that occurred in the 2020 election as at that time, most states were using machines that produced a paper record that could be easily audited.

All election systems have weaknesses that allow them to be manipulated by malicious handlers. This is probably one of the hardest specification problems, because you have to assume that anyone using the equipment may have fraudulent intentions. There may be ways to deal with this by having several systems working in parallel and monitoring each other, each one from a different party or interest group. However, for now, the best solution is to use paper ballots. It is essential that the voter be able to review the ballot before it is counted by any electronic equipment and that that record can be recounted itself. This is the same conclusion of the Princeton study, which is by far, the most respectable study I've seen to date.

References

Articles and Media:

Discussion List

See ListServe for all email discussion lists and to add more. %KEYWORDTOPICLISTSERVE%

Proponent Organizations

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Metadata
ProjectName Election Integrity
ProjectDescription Comprises all election integrity issues
ProjectFounder RaymondLutz
ProjectCurator RaymondLutz
ProjectType IssueOversight
ProjectStatus Hot
ThumbnailLink %PUBURL%/Common/ElectionIntegrity/BallotBoxImage73x100.jpg
Attachments
NameSizeDate
BallotBoxImage73x100.jpg 3515 26 Jun 2014