Citizen Group Praises Kucinich for Seeking New Hampshire Recount

Hand Count Sampling Should be Standard Procedure After Elections

By IVI

A citizen group praised the decision of Representative Dennis Kucinich to seek a recount of the New Hampshire primary. Representative Kucinich announced his decision last evening in a press release, citing concerns about the surprising result and known vulnerabilities in the machines used in many New Hampshire towns.[1]

“A recount will either provide reassurance to voters, or find possible problems,” said Sean Flaherty, co-chair of Iowans for Voting Integrity. “The irony is, if New Hampshire conducted  routine hand-count audits, as 16 states will do this November, a recount would might not be necessary.”

Many computer scientists who study voting systems have called for random hand count samples after elections to check electronic vote tallies. Last year a report by the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, which included Microsoft's former security chief and Iowa's voting system expert Douglas Jones, wrote that without hand audits, the security value of paper ballots is “highly questionable.”[2]

The ballot scanners used to count most of the votes in New Hampshire are made by Premier Election Solutions, fomerly Diebold Election Systems. The scanners have been subject to a number of highly critical security analyses by computer scientists in recent years.  The most recent studies came last year from two different teams of computer scientists working for the states of Ohio and California. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will not allow the scanners to be used without expanded post-election audits.[3]

The Ohio report, published last month, wrote that the county-level server and scanners “lacks the technical protections necessary to guarantee a trustworthy election under operational conditions.” [4] 

“The tragedy is, we're coming up on a wave of primaries in which a recount won't be possible, because the states use paperless machines,” Flaherty said. This includes South Carolina, which uses a statewide touch screen system without a paper trail.  The Ohio report found South Carolina's touch screens so vulnerable that Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten wrote that the machines are “too risky to use in elections.”[5]

“If people have concerns about the primary results in South Carolina, New Jersey, Georgia, and many other states, they're just going to have to live with them. I think that as people begin to realize that you can't do recounts of these primaries, we will see intensified pressure for paper ballots and audits nationwide,” Flaherty said.