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My day at the polls - Maryland primary '06
http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-day-at-polls-maryland-
primary-06.html

I don't know where to start. This primary today is the third
election that I
have worked as an election judge. The last two elections
<http://avirubin.com/judge.html> were in 2004, and I was in a
small precinct
in Timonium, MD. This time, I was in my home precinct about 1/2
a mile from
my house. We had 12 machines, over 1,000 voters and 16 judges.
I woke up at
5:30 in the morning and was at the precinct before 6:00. It is
now 10:18 pm,
and I just got home a few minutes ago. As I have made it my
custom, I sat
down right away to write about my experience while everything
was still
fresh. In anticipation of this, I took some careful notes
throughout the
day.

The biggest change over the 2004 election was the introduction
of electronic
poll books that we used to check in voters. I was introduced to
these in
election judge training a few weeks ago. These are basically
little
touchscreen computers that are connected to an Ethernet hub.
They each
contain a full database of the registered voters in the county,
and
information about whether or not each voter has already voted,
in addition
to all of the voter registration information. The system is
designed so that
the machines constantly sync with each other so that if a voter
signs in on
one of them and then goes to another one, that voter will
already be flagged
as having voted. That was the theory anyway. These poll books
turned out to
be a disaster, but more on that later.

Around 7:15, when we had been open for business for 15 minutes
already, a
gentlemen shows up saying that he is a judge from another
precinct nearby
and that they did not receive any smartcards, so that they
could not operate
their election. We had 60 smartcards, and the chief judge
suggested that we
give them 20 so that they could at least get their election
started. As she
was handing them over, I suggested that we had to somehow
verify his
claim. After all, anyone could walk in off the street and claim
this guy's
story, and we would give them 20 access cards. The chief judge
agreed with
me. The guy pulled out his driver's license to prove who he
was, but I told
him that we were not doubting who he was, we just wanted to
verify that we
should give him the cards. He seemed to understand that. After
calling the
board of elections, we were told to give him the cards and we
did. A little
later, several voters who came in informed us that news reports
were saying
that in Montgomery county, there was a widespread problem of
missing
smartcards. I could only imagine what a nightmare that was for
those poll
workers because as it was, our precinct did not have this
problem, and as
you'll see, it was still tough going.

My precinct uses Diebold AccuVote TS, the same one that we
analyzed in our
study <http://avirubin.com/vote/analysis/index.html> 3 years
ago. The first
problem we encountered was that two of the voting machine's
security tag
numbers did not match our records. After a call to the board of
elections,
we were told to set those aside and not use them. So, we were
down to
10. We set up those machines in a daisy chain fashion, as
described in the
judge manual, and as we learned in our training. We plugged the
first one
into the wall and taped the wire to the floor with electric
tape so nobody
would trip over it. About two hours into the voting, I noticed
that the
little power readout on the machines was red, and I thought
that this meant
that the machines were on battery power. I pointed this out to
one of the
chief judges, but she said this was normal. An hour later, I
checked again,
and this time, the machines were on extremely low power. This
time, I took
the plug out to of the wall and tried another outlet nearby.
The power icon
turned green. I showed several of the judges, and we confirmed
that the
original outlet was indeed dead. Had I not checked this twice,
those
machines would have died in the middle of the election, most
likely in the
middle of people voting. I hate to think about how we would
have handled
that. A couple of hours later, the board of elections informed
us that we
should use the two voting machines with the mismatched tags, so
we added
them and used them the rest of the day (!).

When we were setting up the electronic poll books, I took over
because I was
more comfortable with the technology, and the others quickly
deferred to
me. So, a couple of hours into the election, when one of the
poll books
seemed to be out of sync with the others, the judges came and
brought me to
have a look. It appeared that this poll book was not getting
synced with the
others. I tested it by waiting for someone to sign in with a
different poll
book, and then a few minutes later trying to sign in that voter
on the one
in question. The voter was shown as having not voted yet. I
repeated this
test for about 20 minutes, but it never registered that voter
as having
voted, and the poll book was falling behind - about 30 by then
- the other
poll book machines. I suggested rebooting that machine, and we
tried that,
but it did not change anything. I pointed out to the chief
judges who were
huddled around me as I experimented, that as time went by, this
poll book
was going to fall further and further behind the others, and
that if someone
signed in on the others, they would be able sign in again on
this one and
vote again. After a call to the board of elections, we decided
to take this
one out of commission. This was very unfortunate, because our
waiting lines
were starting to get very long, and the check-in was the
bottleneck. The
last few hours of the day, we had a 45 minute to an hour wait,
and we had
enough machines in service to handle the load, but it was
taking people too
long to sign in.

The electronic poll books presented an even bigger problem,
however. Every
so often, about once every 15-25 minutes, after a voter signed
in, and while
that voter's smartcard was being programmed with the ballot,
the poll book
would suddenly crash and reboot. Unfortunately, the smartcard
would not be
programmed at the end of this, so the poll worker would have to
try
again. However, the second time, the machine said that the
voter had already
voted. The first few times this happened, we had some very
irate voters, and
we had to call over the chief judge. Soon, however, we realized
what was
happening, and as soon as the poll book crashed, we warned the
voter that it
would come up saying that they had already voted, but that we
knew they
hadn't. Then, the chief judge would have to come over, enter a
password, and
authorize that person to vote anyway. Then we had to make a log
entry of the
event and quarantine the offending smartcard. Unfortunately,
the poll books
take about 3 minutes to reboot, and the chief judges are very
scarce
resources, so this caused further delays and caused the long
line we had for
most of the afternoon and evening while many of the machines
were
idle. Another problem was that the poll book would not subtract
a voter from
its total count when this happened, so every time we had an
incident, the
poll book voter count was further off the mark. We had to keep
track of this
by hand, so we could reconcile it at the end of the day.

At times, the remaining two poll books were way out of synch,
but after a
while, they caught up with each other. When the lines got
really long, we
considered the idea of trying to use the third one that had
caused problems,
but we all agreed that we would feel very stupid if all of them
started
crashing more. I was worried that synching three of these on an
Ethernet hub
was more complex than 2, and in fact, they were crashing a bit
less often
when we had only 2. The whole time I was worried about what we
would do if
these thing really died or crashed so badly and so often that
we couldn't
really use them. We had no backup voter cards, so the best we
could have
done would have been to start letting everybody vote by
provisional
ballots. However, we had two small pads of those ballots, and
we would have
run out quickly. I can't imagine basing the success of an
election on
something so fragile as these terrible, buggy machines.

Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold
representative at
our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came
over to "help",
and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet
cables into
a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention
the fact
that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that
way). The
next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over,
and then he
called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he
had been
working for Diebold because he didn't seem to know anything
about the
equipment, and he said, "one day." I said, "You mean they hired
you
yesterday?" And he replied, "yes, I had 6 hours of training
yesterday. It
was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew
what was going
on." I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, "I
shouldn't be
telling you this, but it's all money. They are too cheap to do
this
right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct,
but that costs
too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the
day before the
election, and they think that they can train us, but it's too
compressed."
Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn't doing any good
there, and
that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We
didn't see him
again.

I haven't written at all about the AccuVote machines. I guess
I've made my
opinions about that known in the past, and my new book
<http://bravenewballot.org> deals primarily with them. Nothing
happened
today to change my opinion about the security of these systems,
but I did
have some eye opening experiences about the weaknesses of some
of the
physical security measures that are touted as providing the
missing
security. For example, I carefully studied the tamper tape that
is used to
guard the memory cards. In light of Hursti's report
<http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf>, the security
of the memory
cards is critical. Well, I am 100% convinced that if the tamper
tape had
been peeled off and put back on, nobody except a very well
trained
professional would notice it. The tamper tape has a tiny
version of the word
"void" appear inside it after it has been removed and replaced,
but it is
very subtle. In fact, a couple of times, due to issues we had
with the
machines, the chief judge removed the tamper tape and then put
it back. One
time, it was to reboot a machine that was hanging when a voter
was trying to
vote. I looked at the tamper tape that was replaced and
couldn't tell the
difference, and then it occurred to me that instead of
rebooting, someone
could mess with the memory card and replace the tape, and we
wouldn't have
noticed. I asked if I could play with the tamper tape a bit,
and they let me
handle it. I believe I can now, with great effort and
concentration, tell
the difference between one that has been peeled off and one
that has
not. But, I did not see the judges using that kind of care
every time they
opened and closed them. As far as I'm concerned, the tamper
tape does very
little in the way of actual security, and that will be the case
as long as
it is used by lay poll workers, as opposed to CIA agents.

As we were computing the final tallies towards the end of the
evening, one
of the Diebold machines froze. We had not yet printed the
report that is
used to post the results. One of the judges went to call the
board of
elections. She said she was transfered and then disconnected.
We decided to
do a hard reboot of it after we closed down the other machines.
When we
finished the other machines, we noticed that the problem one
had somehow
recovered, and we were able to finish. Strange because it was
frozen for
about 10 minutes.

So, this day at the polls was different from my two experiences
in 2004
<http://avirubin.com/judge.html>. I felt more like an
experienced veteran
than a wide eyed newbie. The novelty that I felt in 2002 was
gone, and I
felt seasoned. Even the chief judges often came to me asking
advice on how
to handle various crises that arose. Several other suggested
that I should
apply to be a chief judge in the next election cycle, and I
will probably do
that. The least pleasant part of the day was a nagging concern
that
something would go terribly wrong, and that we would have no
way to
recover. I believe that fully electronic systems, such as the
precinct we
had today, are too fragile. The smallest thing can lead to a
disaster. We
had a long line of "customers" who were mostly patient, but
somewhat
irritated, and I felt like we were not always in a position to
offer them
decent customer service. When our poll books crashed, and the
lines grew, I
had a sense of dread that we might end up finishing the day
without a
completed election. As an election judge I put aside my
personal beliefs
that these machines are easy to rig in an undetectable way, and
become more
worried that the election process would completely fail. I
don't think it
would have taken much for that to have happened.

One other thing struck me. In 2004, most voters seemed happy
with the
machines. This time around, many of them complained about a
lack of a paper
trail. Some of them clearly knew who I was and my position on
this, but
others clearly did not. I did not hear one voter say they were
happy with
the machines, and a dozen or so expressed strong feelings
against them.

I am way too tired now (it's past 11 pm) to write any kind of
philosophical
ending to this already too long blog entry. I hope that we got
it right in
my precinct, but I know that there is no way to know for sure.
We cannot do
recounts. Finally, I have to say a few words about my fellow
poll
workers. We all worked from 6 a.m. to past 10 p.m. These
volunteers were
cheerful, pleasant, and diligent. They were there to serve the
public, and
they acted like it. I greatly admire them, and while the
election technology
selection and testing processes in this country make me sick, I
take great
hope and inspiration from a day in the trenches with these
people.

--
The accident involved dark chocolate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5264566.stm?ls
.

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