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.