You Can’t Count Ballots that Don’t Exist

By far the biggest e-voting disaster this election was in Florida:

Florida law requires a recount in all five counties in the district. But all eyes are on Sarasota County, where touch-screen voting machines recorded that 18,382 people – 13 percent of voters in the Nov. 7 election – did not cast a vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings. That rate was much higher than other counties in the district.

As the votes were being counted late Monday, Jennings took the first steps toward appealing the election with an emergency petition asking a judge to have Sarasota’s voting equipment and data secured as evidence due to “alarming aberrations” in the county’s vote tallies. The campaign wants an independent audit of the county’s voting system.

“Maybe we are going to have to do a do-over. It may be the only solution if we cannot do an adequate recount,” Jennings’ attorney Jeffrey Liggio said.

The stark reality is that they can’t recount the output of e-voting machines. A recount involves individually inspecting each ballot and determining the voter’s intent. With e-voting, there are no ballots to inspect. The contents of the computers’ memory are all you get. You can “recount” that all you want, but it doesn’t provide any kind of independent verification of the result.

State officials Monday acknowledged problems with the lack of a paper trail.

“I do see some interesting things that are happening in regards to votes that seemed to have disappeared or people didn’t vote,” said Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, a member of the state Election Canvassing Commission that ordered the recount. “You don’t know if they chose not to vote or whether they didn’t, and possibly a paper trail would show more clearly.”

Computer security experts like Avi Rubin have been saying this for years. Maybe their arguments will be more persuasive now that it’s no longer a hypothetical problem.

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