I’ve heard it said on multiple occasions that good old-fashioned hand counting is the safest way to ensure election integrity. In fact, many awards shows tout the fact that their votes are hand counted and verified by real humans.  The wisdom behind it stems from the belief that manual attention to the process by “real” people is the only way to ensure votes are properly verified and tallied. Electronic systems can, after all, experience glitches, programming errors or hack attacks by would-be election throwers.

And while that theory may sound reasonable,  if I had to make a choice based on years of running elections both ways, I would pick electronic voting any day of the week. I don’t disagree that technology can sometimes function less than perfectly, but human error happens exponentially more often and almost always requires one or more re-counts to ensure the results are truly accurate. Add on the hundreds of hours it takes to administer a hand-counted election, and hand counting becomes even less appealing. Read the rest of this entry →

Note: This is Part 3 of a series on avoiding claims of election fraud by Andrew Cader, Votenet Senior Election Consultant. See Part 1: Password Concerns, and Part 2: Double Voting.

Fraud accusations can come in the form of the information the administrator has access to during the election.  It is up to those running the election to know their own rules and laws. If no member of the staff is supposed to be able to access the vote during the election, the administrators need to alert their online voting service provider to lock them out of the system.

At Votenet, if your voting is supposed to be completely anonymous, there is a setting on the ballot set up that you can choose to make the voting anonymous. This means the only information an administrator would have is results and who voted, but would not have access to “who voted how.”  If an administrator should not see results until the election is complete, there is a date and time setting in the set up that allows them to choose when the results can be viewed by an administrator. Read the rest of this entry →

Note: This is Part 2 of a series on avoiding claims of election fraud by Andrew Cader, Votenet Senior Elections Consultant. See Part 1: Password Concerns.

Besides concerns about voters sharing their passwords, an election event can be tainted if voters claim they were able to vote multiple times, or “double voting.” This can come up in a number of ways. Often times, administrators set up multiple election events that either run at the same time or will overlap. Voters may have access to multiple ballots in different elections. For universities, spring elections often consist of an SGA Election that the entire student body is eligible to vote on, but also a class officers’ election running simultaneously. Students would vote in the SGA election and their class election.  These are two separate elections. The confusion arises when the election administrator either combines ballots or duplicates similar questions on multiple ballots. Read the rest of this entry →

Andrew Cader is a Senior Elections Consultant for Votenet Solutions, Inc. His guest posts focus on Avoiding Claims of Election Fraud.

An accusation of fraud during an online voting event can be disastrous for the integrity of your election. As a Senior Election Consultant for Votenet, I’ve witnessed the fallout from fraud accusations, valid or not. A challenged election can cost organizations time to research and defend the claims as well as money in perhaps having to hold additional elections. Even if the accusations are just a grumble in a small group of stakeholders, the appearance of fraud can cause a decrease in voter turnout as voters start to distrust the system.

The best defense against an accusation of fraud is, as they say, a good offense. This is the first of three blog posts that address three sources of allegations of fraud.

Hacking vs. Sharing Passwords: One of the main issues that comes up when a group claims hacking occurred is the security of their passwords. Often times, in talking to the members, it becomes apparent that voters will openly share their passwords with other voters. The recipient will then log on with the other voter’s info and vote.  This is not hacking.  This is voters sharing their usernames and passwords by choice. Would you share your ATM pin code? Would you share your computer passwords?  The answer is no, and this should also apply to your election codes. Read the rest of this entry →

As a part of  the planning process for setting up an online election, the election consultants at Votenet try to help organizations think through every possible scenario for voting to ensure all eligible voters can participate.

The University of Dayton’s recent student government election is a perfect example of why this research is so important. The school has more than 6,900 undergraduates, and they based voting rights on the number of credits. Upperclassmen with more than 60 credits could vote for senior class senator, but seniors returning for a fifth year of school were blocked from voting. Read the rest of this entry →

Last night the Dallas Independent School District approved a controversial Spanish reading book for elementary school students. District staff reported that the book the board chose was full of errors. In addition, the board’s decision went against the overwhelming choice of the teachers, who had voted online with a ballot that was inexplicably missing two publishers whose books were to be considered. The district’s textbook committee had also recommended a different book.

This was the first attempt at online voting for the district, and it is an example of what can happen when the integrity of an entire election is thrown into doubt. Read the rest of this entry →

According to an article called “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Elections” in the November 2008 issue of Discover Magazine,

“Computer modeling has indicated that if it had rained in Illinois in 1960, Nixon would have beaten Kennedy – and if it had been sunny in Florida in 2000, Gore would have beaten Bush.”

The article also said, “Rain can tilt elections. Between 1948 and 2000, for every inch of rain on Election Day in a given county, there was an average 0.8 percent decline in turnout.”

It’s not often that Mother Nature proves a point about the ease of online voting. February storms on the East Coast prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to have to cancel all votes for a week, and in Midland, Texas, the only government service that stayed open during a rare snowstorm was the early voting station, which welcomed a modest 200 voters.
Read the rest of this entry →