Oregon Citizens Want to Know: SOS Candidates Questioned on Election Integrity

Question: Do you feel any urgency that Oregon’s election system is not as secure as it should be? Do you believe that Oregon’s election results could be compromised (and potentially changed) by faulty, or hackable, software provided by private, for-profit vendors?

2. The entry of corporate, trade-secret software into elections increased the speed with which election results could be tallied. It also ended the era when citizens and election officials could actually observe the counting of the vote. The source code of the software that actually counts our votes in Oregon may not be viewed by any official, including the Secretary of State.

Question: How would you, as Secretary of State, propose to oversee and verify the accuracy of the machine vote counting given the secrecy that prevents citizens and officials from actually observing the vote count?

3. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School and the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law convened a “blue ribbon panel of statisticians, voting experts, computer scientists and several of the nation’s leading election officials” to review and evaluate existing and proposed post-election audit laws and procedures. Their recent analysis of post-election audits across the nation, “Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections” states that:

Of the few states that currently require and conduct post-election audits, none has adopted audit models that will maximize the likelihood of finding clever and targeted software-based attacks, non-systemic programming errors, and software bugs that could change the outcome of an election.

The Oregon Legislature passed an election audit bill (HB3270) in the last session that requires a hand-counted sample of ballots. According to the Brennan Center report, the type of audit now required by Oregon law will provide only a 61% confidence level that “a complete manual recount would not change the outcome of the race” if the margin of victory between two candidates is between 1% and 2% (and only a 58% confidence level if the margin of victory is less than 1%).

Question: Do you find it acceptable that Oregon election outcomes can have a 39% chance of being incorrect and placing the wrong person in office? If not, would you support election verification protocols that provide a 99% level of confidence that the votes cast by Oregonians are accurately reflected in the outcome?

4. Open-source software for elections has been proposed as a needed replacement for the current proprietary software provided by private, for-profit vendors. A hand-counted ballot sample would always be required for verification, but use of open source, transparent vote-counting technology could be a giant step forward for Oregon. As it happens, Oregon has a vibrant open-source community, with respected institutions like the Open Source Development Labs in Beaverton and the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Question: Could development of an open-source election system be a Win-Win situation for Oregon, providing transparency to and producing greater confidence in Oregon’s elections while also contributing to the burgeoning local open-source industry, and lowering costs by removing for-profit corporations from our elections? As SOS, would you pursue open-source options for counting our votes?

5. California’s SOS, Debra Bowen, recently ordered a “top to bottom” review of the election systems used in all California counties. This resulted in the decertification of systems provided by all vendors and conditional re-certification of some for the 2008 elections. Most of Oregon’s votes are counted on optical scan machines and tabulation software manufactured by ES&S. ES&S optical scan voting systems were recently de-certified in Colorado after extensive testing conducted by the SOS’ office deemed them untrustworthy. Recent testing in Ohio also revealed extensive security flaws with the ES&S systems.

What is Oregon’s current process for testing the election systems provided by corporate vendors? Do you feel it is sufficient? Would you conduct a “top to bottom” review of Oregon’s voting technology (including voter databases and tabulating software) if you become SOS?