Recount New Hampshire: Just how accurate are optical scanners? A special recount

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Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:17:02 -0500

Recount New Hampshire

 

Recount New Hampshire

Just how accurate are optical scanners? A special recount may give an

answer.

 

by Russ Baker, The Nation

 

Thursday, November 18, 2004

 

This is truly the year of the amateur. It was mostly the unfamous and

unsung who organized the voter registration and get-out-the-vote

drives, started and ran the grassroots (if well-funded) 527 committees

like MoveOn.org, wrote the blogs and conceived the websites that did

what the traditional media seldom did--such as probing deeply into

Bush's personal history, including his military service. And it is

ordinary people who are now leading the way in scrutinizing

newfangled, secretive voting systems, seeking to insure that a handful

of corporations don't, accidentally or deliberately, undermine

electoral democracy.

 

Tomorrow the first recount begins--in New Hampshire, of all places, a

state George Bush didn't even win. But in those areas where he did

well, sometimes the numbers look decidedly odd. In this case, the

person who got the ball rolling was one Ida Briggs, a longtime

Michigan software designer and database developer who did a

statistical analysis of some election results, and found them

perplexing enough to trigger concerns in her mind about the efficacy

of the electronic vote tabulation system used.

 

What she found were striking anomalies--mostly in precincts using

paper ballots that were then input via the optical scanning machines

manufactured by the controversial vendor Diebold, of North Canton,

Ohio. In general, according to Briggs, the " Diebold precincts " showed

larger and more frequent deviations from expected voting trends than

precincts relying strictly on hand counts, and even than those using

an optical-scan counting system from another manufacturer. Creating

trend patterns by looking at the 2000 and 2004 elections, she found

rural, typically conservative precincts that hand-counted ballots as

voting more for Kerry than they did for Gore, while larger, urban

precincts using Diebold's AccuVote machines often did the opposite. Of

the precincts where Kerry did less well than expected, according to

Briggs, 73 percent used optical-scan technology and 62 percent used

Diebold machines. Fully 92 percent of all out-of-trend votes were

optically scanned. New Hampshire has 301 precincts; 126 of them use

Diebold's AccuVote technology.

 

Referring to the recount advocates, a Diebold spokesman told the

Associated Press, " I think they're rushing to judgment. "

 

Briggs became interested in the numbers when, shortly after the

election, she saw a study published on the web about statistical

anomalies in nonswing states. New Hampshire caught her attention

because of the sizable--15 percent--differential between early exit

polls and results. It was easy to study, because the state made its

data available online. And because New Hampshire was a state Kerry

won, no one could claim that the goal of a recount there was to change

the election results.

 

In the era of contracted-out services, companies like Diebold are

given unusual amounts of liberty to be self-policing. The problems

emerge later, if at all. Diebold has faced intense scrutiny and

criticism over malfunctions in its touch-screen voting machines, but

it steadfastly insists that its optical scanners have proven reliable

during years of use. Diebold continues to be one of several

corporations with vast power over the levers of democracy.

 

Respected analysts have found numerous bugs in Diebold's system codes,

and complain that the company has failed to release its most recent

revisions, preventing an independent verification of improvements. The

company drew particular concern after Walden O'Dell, the Ohio-based

company's chief executive officer, penned a fundraising letter for

Bush in which he declared himself " committed to helping Ohio deliver

its electoral votes to the president next year. " And Diebold recently

settled a civil suit brought by the State of California alleging that

the company sold the state and several counties shoddy voting

equipment. Diebold agreed to pay $2.6 million to the state.

Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Diebold intentionally tampered

with its software.

 

Briggs is the first to admit that mathematics is a tricky game. " New

Hampshire might just be odd--this trend could really be happening, "

she said. " It's unlikely, but it could be. " If, indeed, the numbers

are wrong, it doesn't mean deliberate tampering. It could be a

programming error, which would be consistent with the fact that the

unexpected results affected only the first race on the ballot. In any

case, that's what recounts are for.

 

Once Briggs's eyebrows were raised, she said, she tried contacting the

Kerry campaign to see if officials there would call for a recount.

With no affirmative response, on Friday, November 5, she called Ralph

Nader--with less than four hours remaining before New Hampshire's

deadline for recount requests. The Nader people didn't know Briggs,

and were wary, but Air America Radio host Randi Rhodes managed to

mobilize enough listeners that Nader soon had a twelve-inch stack of

imploring faxes. With one minute remaining to deadline, he faxed in a

request for a recount. (He also agreed to pay a $2,000 filing fee plus

actual costs.)

 

On Thursday, New Hampshire officials will begin a hand recount of

paper ballots in five of eleven large urban precincts--in Manchester

and Litchfield--where Bush did surprisingly well. The remaining

precincts will be counted soon. If the results prove interesting,

recounts could be requested elsewhere besides Ohio, where such a

request has already been made by Green Party presidential candidate

David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik.

 

Even a hand recount won't satisfy everyone--and shouldn't. The

efficacy of the American voting system is dependent on a lot of things

going right--and anecdotal evidence suggests many fruitful avenues of

inquiry into things that may have gone wrong. Among these: whether

ballots were improperly cast (fraud), and whether legitimate voters

were prevented or discouraged from voting. To say nothing of whether,

in a country where many people vote based on the most effective

television commercials, people really understand what they are voting

on and the stakes involved.

 

Kerry beat Bush in New Hampshire by 340,511 to 331,237 votes, a spread

of 50 percent to 49 percent, with Nader taking less than 1 percent. A

recount, even if it does establish problems, likely won't change the

winner in New Hampshire, and even if it does it will certainly not

alter the outcome of the presidential race.

 

However, if it does show significant inaccuracies generated by the

AccuVote equipment and software, it could trigger recounts

elsewhere--recounts that could, theoretically, reverse the election.

 

That's highly unlikely, given Bush's hefty wins in key states, and

given the prominent role of other voting technologies. But hand

recounts of optically scanned ballots will go a long way toward

addressing doubts about that technology and about the vendor. And it

will perhaps give others the confidence to request recounts when

results go against statistical trends, or common wisdom. At minimum,

it will be a start on the road to transparency and accountability.

 

If it turns out that anomalies are just that, so be it. Then we need

to spend more time understanding why people voted--really, truly

voted--the way they did.

 

Russ Baker, a longtime Nation contributor, may be contacted at

russbakernews.

 

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1118-03.htm