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Technical problems and poor training led to the second awful election night in a row for Cook County Clerk David Orr.
Cook County Clerk David Orr and Sequoia Voting Systems are both to blame for vote-tabulation delays that triggered confusion and distrust following the November election, a panel of experts has concluded.
Led by retired federal Judge Abner Mikva, the Orr-appointed panel found that a combination of “technology failures in multiple areas” and a lack of testing triggered a spiraling series of glitches that left some results unclear for days. […]
“Although technology problems occurring on Election Night constituted the primary cause of the reporting delays, operational shortcomings in the process leading up to Election Day also played a role in failing to understand and thus mitigate the risks,” the report said.
A separate report, prepared by Sequia found more problems.
A report prepared by Diamond and also obtained by the Tribune shows that more than a third of the precinct-tabulation machines did not even attempt to make a connection after the polls closed.
The panel also found that Sequoia, in a more than $50 million system sold to Chicago and Cook County, had stitched together components from its own shelves and that of its parent company in a way that failed to seamlessly work together.
What a mess.
posted by Rich Miller
Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 5:28 am
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Jefe Hugo sold Mayor Dave a seamless failure - whodah thunk?
Comment by Pat Hickey Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 7:49 am
Rich,
Wish you had linked the stories to your post, but anyway.
Machines are only as good as the auditable paper trail that does with them. There are so many causes of failure and fraud that have resulted in huge undercounts in certain precincts, for instance, in Ohio and in Florida. These machines are a national scandal waiting to be tied together.
Coupled with the overuse of absentee ballots, close elections can be directed to the party in power of the District. For instance, out of date voters lists in some cases reaching more than thirty percent of the supposed residents can be used by operatives to rewuest and then collect collect absentee ballots delivered to multi-family mailboxes. The master key can then be used and a complaisant super can deliver balots to the ward for marking.
But nobody care, except the politicians who got huge contirnutions from Sequoia and the others, but who had to upgrade the role of fixer from card feeder to technician.
Comment by Truthful James Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 8:22 am
SO it wasn’t the 85 year old election judges’ fault after all. I admire them for doing it, but the technology is not their strong suit. I’d prefer going back to the optical readers or a simple show of hands.
Comment by Wumpus Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 8:23 am
Is the source code for these machines open? Secret and proprietary code has no place in a public voting machine.
Comment by Squideshi Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 8:42 am
What a farce!
The whole idea that you can have a million people make dozens of choices in hard fought elections and not complain of long lines, the wrong guy winning, undisputed results, and happy faces is a fool’s dream.
As long as we continue to pretend that we will not stop until every elecion is fair and accurate means that every sore loser, every close election, and every hungry lawyer will further ruin voter’s perceptions with elections.
The time has come to start demanding that every person on the ballot accept the official results, regardless of whether or not they like them. In this age of weakened party loyalties, or loyalties of any type, we no longer have a mechanism in place to put disputed elections or sore losers in their places.
I’m sick of hearing losers wail over their losses and blaming the victors of some unscrupulous or illegal acts. If they didn’t want to risk losing, they should not have ran.
The answer to their wailing isn’t demanding the impossible. The answer is to tell them to stop their whining and bad-mouthing, to grow-up and stop crapping about how rotten our election system is.
We do the best we can. That is enough. Whether or not some loser loses won’t destroy our world. However, constant carping will erode and wreck it.
Comment by VanillaMan Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 9:04 am
Actually what needs to be done is more vigorous enforcement of anti-cheating laws, and punish the frauds with much stiffer penalities.
Comment by Crimefighter Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 9:08 am
“…proprietary code has no place in a public voting machine.”
Sorry, but that’s not realistic, unless the Open Source community can come together and create a viable alternative to the different commercially available systems. And then (as I understand it), you’ve still got to have the Systems reviewed and approved by both federal and state election authorities. If there was a viable open source alternative, who’s going to pick up the tab for all that testing and verification?
Look, it’s like anything else. If you are a big player and say there’s “No Deal” unless we get a copy of the Source, well, if you are ready to pay enough (and we are talking a whole lot of extra cash; proably in terms of multiples of the original contract), you are not going to get Source code.
From a software development standpoint, it’s just too risky. Accidential release, and you’ve just put your entire business segment at risk.
End Result: It’s just not going to happen unless the Open Source folks get it done.
Comment by Judgement Day Is On The Way... Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 9:10 am
Many Republicans remain convinced that Sequoia’s “failures” were planned and that votes were stolen. Mounds of anecdotal evidence are out there. Some said that Democratic contenders were way too smug the day before the election…what did they know?
Anyway, putting Party apparatchik Mikva in charge of the review renders it superficial and a whitewash. Why weren’t Republicans or Non-Cook County experts put on the review panel?
This remains a problem because Orr, a Democrat, controls the entire suburban election process. Even Chicago has an election commission that has one Republican(1/3 representation). Only when Cook County gets a non partisan election commission will these problems go away.
Is that enough “wailing” for you, Vanilla Man? Were you so disinterested during Bush-Gore in 2000?
Comment by Conservative Republican Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 9:15 am
Note to Conservative Republican:
Abner Mikva a Democratic Party “apparatchik”? The Nobody who Nobody Sent (I assume you read Rakove’s book, unless your reading inability matches that of the President)? The man who battled Machine Regulars as far back as the 1950s? The former lefilastor who tried to eliminate the straight party punch nearly 50 years ago, only to see it go down overwhelmingly, with only one other State Rep supporting his measure? Your statement is pure nonsense!
Your statement also distracts from the from theimportant issue, which is that David Orr has clearly disgraced his office. If Orr had any honor he would resign. Unfortunately, he has none.
Comment by fedup dem Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 9:44 am
I respect Abner Mikva’s reputation, but if an investigation was done in a Republican county supervised by someone as political as Mikva, I’d be skeptical that every stone was overturned.
These touch screen machines are too much hassle and leave the results open to question. Let’s go with a straight optical scan that can easily be recounted by hand.
Comment by Carl Nyberg Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 9:49 am
“These touch screen machines are too much hassle and leave the results open to question. Let’s go with a straight optical scan that can easily be recounted by hand.”
Ok, let’s look at this from a different viewpoint. Look at all this “high tech” voting as 1980’s era introduction of ATM’s. Anybody have problems (or know of anybody having problems) when they first used ATM’s back then?
Well, that’s a similar type of learning curve to what’s going on now with digital voting. No answers, except to keep working and making corrections as we go. A lot of this can (and will) be described as “We Learn, we learn, we learn…”.
Just as a btw, last time I was involved (back in 2004), we were pricing out the optical scan from a couple of different vendors, and our best pricing was around $5500 per base voting/scanning station, and this was going to get us to a workable product. As I understand it (from friends currently who work in election administration), it actually ended up being a higher cost than that. And they’ve not been particularly happy with their election support from their vendors - it’s just that their problems are flying under the radar compared to Cook (which btw, no slam to Cook, but which they are happy about - somebody else is hotter than they are).
Replacing all those Cook voting units - big time money, too much political face lost, and finding a vendor who could actually do a creditable job at support/fixing that mess, well, Good Luck!
Comment by Judgement Day Is On The Way... Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 10:20 am
I’ve always been partial to Orr in the past. I must have been so wrong. How could he not have a technical lead in the office responsible for this. Testing is a key part of any technology. This is an office like Recorder of Deeds, Assessor and County Court Clerk that should become non-elected, non-political.
Comment by Niles Township Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 10:35 am
I actually liked using the Sequoia machines. They are easy to use and have a paper trail (a fax paper like receipt that is kept in the machine behind a plastic screen) that can be recounted if necessary. I like that feature. I remember being happy that David Orr had made the decision to go with this comopany because of the paper trail.
Did everything go perfectly? No, obviously not. However, I would like to see a breakdown on how many spoiled ballots came out of which wards. I remember 2000 in Cook County. There were wards (and they tended to be the poorest because they got the worst equipment) that had as high as 10% spoilage rate. That has always been, to me, the point of changing out the equipment so that the spoilage rate is not predicated on how wealthy the voting district is. The fact that we had to wait (and watch Tony’s consequent meltdown) was unfortunate but not tragic. They can and will improve it with each election but sometimes the only test is a live demonstration.
Comment by cermak_rd Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 11:03 am
“Sorry, but that’s not realistic, unless the Open Source community can come together and create a viable alternative to the different commercially available systems.”
Not only can the Open Source community come together for such a purpose, but it already has.
“And then (as I understand it), you’ve still got to have the Systems reviewed and approved by both federal and state election authorities. If there was a viable open source alternative, who’s going to pick up the tab for all that testing and verification?”
Considering that an open source election system would be free to election administrators, they would have plenty of extra money to do the testing. Besides, open source software is inherently more secure–backdoors can not be hidden and because a larger number of people can examine the code, bugs and security flaws are usually found more quickly.
“Look, it’s like anything else. If you are a big player and say there’s “No Deal†unless we get a copy of the Source, well, if you are ready to pay enough (and we are talking a whole lot of extra cash; proably in terms of multiples of the original contract), you are not going to get Source code.”
This should be one of the state’s requirments. Let the vendors compete for that business.
Comment by Squideshi Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 11:23 am
The bottom line is that computers and the data they do/not contain can be manipulated, so that even if there isn’t any hanky-panky going on, with that possibility there, people will remain skeptical. Same for anything involving blackening a dot with pencils; anyone ever heard of erasers?
For all its faults, the old punch card system was reliable, relatively quick to tabulate, and difficult for n’er-do-wells to manipulate. Bring ‘em back!
Comment by Snidely Whiplash Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 11:29 am
“(1) Considering that an open source election system would be free to election administrators, they would have plenty of extra money to do the testing. (2) Besides, open source software is inherently more secure–backdoors can not be hidden and because a larger number of people can examine the code, bugs and security flaws are usually found more quickly.”
Ok, there’s two seperate issues here. On Part (1), sorry to say, no even close. Following reasons:
1) Moey the election officals had (50% came from Fed’s, as I remember, it was allocated statewide based upon their precinct count as of their last prior (1998/2000?) federal election. 25% was supposed to come from the State, but no luck there. So the election agencies (Counties mostly, but a number of other election authorities) has to raise the extra cash. Money’s been spent.
2) Whatever ballot tabulation applications software the Open Source folks come up with, for practical purposes, it’s got to run on the same hardware platforms that the Elections agencies just acquired. There’s just no way fiscally they can afford to replace all the hardware.
3) Who’s going to be the “canary in the coal mine”? Most places don’t in actuality have sufficient gear for running an election, and have had to cut corners to get the job done. I don’t know of any election authority in IL that has sufficient spares on hand where they can just pull a couple spares out of line for extended testing.
SUMMARY: There’s no money on hand, there’s no more capital expenditure money in the pipeline (at least anytime soon), and any spare .05 & .10 they have go into maintenance and setup for the next election cycle.
Part (2): I’d say that’s legit. No problem there. In fact, the best truth of that is to look at Mozilla Firefox. Already Version 2.0+, about 11% market share, and version 3.0 is already being spec’ed out. And IMO, it’s better software.
/soapbox off.
Comment by Judgement Day Is On The Way... Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 11:49 am
I was in St Louis on election day along with several other attorneys from Chicago and we were all ready to go home to Chicago elections. Things were so beyond problematic there. Even the problems we had in the March primary weren’t as bad as what we saw in Nov. No one will hear me complain about Cook Cointy elections for a while.
Comment by traveling dem Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 12:48 pm
If you keep the touch screens we need to implement random audit to make sure elections aren’t being tampered with.
Comment by Carl Nyberg Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 1:49 pm
The Sequoia purchase was a greased inside deal, so why did the citizens expect anything but swampland in Florida?
Analyzing how this deal was made would be just as interesting as analyzing the abysmal performance of Sequoia and David Orr.
Comment by What did You Expect in Cook County? Tuesday, Jan 9, 07 @ 3:11 pm
I don’t trust the results
Comment by Mike Wednesday, Jan 10, 07 @ 10:59 pm
“1) Moey the election officals had (50% came from Fed’s, as I remember, it was allocated statewide based upon their precinct count as of their last prior (1998/2000?) federal election. 25% was supposed to come from the State, but no luck there. So the election agencies (Counties mostly, but a number of other election authorities) has to raise the extra cash. Money’s been spent.”
I don’t really see the point of making a vendor pay for the testing. In reality, that means that they just raise the purchase price.
“2) Whatever ballot tabulation applications software the Open Source folks come up with, for practical purposes, it’s got to run on the same hardware platforms that the Elections agencies just acquired. There’s just no way fiscally they can afford to replace all the hardware.”
This wouldn’t be a problem if government bodies didn’t buy proprietary solutions. Buying a proprietary solution locks you into a vendor; and if that cost the taxpayers additional money when they want an election accountability reform, that should be taken into consideration at the next election–bad decision by the elected official.
“3) Who’s going to be the “canary in the coal mineâ€? Most places don’t in actuality have sufficient gear for running an election, and have had to cut corners to get the job done. I don’t know of any election authority in IL that has sufficient spares on hand where they can just pull a couple spares out of line for extended testing.”
Regular controlled, double-blind, randomized testing of the equipment should suffice.
Comment by Squideshi Thursday, Jan 11, 07 @ 12:58 pm