Wednesday, 19 November 2008
Early Voting In Kentucky
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As many may already know, I have been an opponent of bringing early voting to Kentucky. As such it has put me at odds with the Secretary of State's office on the issue. I was offered the opportunity to ask Les Fugate from the SOS's office questions about my concerns on early voting. I am still not convinced it is a good idea, but I wanted to share his responses so readers can make up their own mind. I want to thank Les for allowing me share his responses. Enjoy!
My concerns on early voting come from my background in computers. To be a good system administrator, one must understand system security and have a healthy dose of paranoia. One of the maxims in protecting a server is to allow as few of services as necessary to the general public as possible. The more services that are available (and the longer they are available), the more likely you are to be hacked. As you know, we have a plethora of counties (120) in this state. I see that as 120 potential failure points in the system when you open up early voting. All of which leads me to three questions.
1) In Ohio this year, groups like ACORN flooded the state with phony registration cards. So many in fact that the Secretary of State couldn't / wouldn't audit the registration cards. If phony registration cards made it through the process then it would be easier to vote multiple times. Add in multiple weeks of early voting and it would be even easier to cheat. What plan would be in place to handle a flooding of the registration system with phony registration cards?
Fugate: In Kentucky, you would not be allowed to register and then immediately vote early like you could in Ohio. In addition, our elections process is set up so that much of the verification occurs at the local level as the cards are processed. At the state level, we also remove felons, dead citizens, etc. from the rolls. We also have one major advantage over Ohio ... we use the full Social Security Number as the unique identifier. That allows us to catch duplicates very easily. Mistakes will occur (we just found a guy who was registered twice once with the SSN xxx-xxx-1xxx and once with xxx-xx-7xxx. Because he used dashes in the second registration, it looked like a seven instead of a one to the clerk's staff. However, those kinds of things will occur everywhere. In addition, the voter registration deadline would be several weeks before early voting begins which allows additional time to reconcile registration issues.
2) If early voting was centralized to a few regional locations I would feel better about the process. But again we have 120 counties that will be administering early voting. With many counties in this state having very lopsided political party representation in county governments and elected officials, what safe guards would be in place to handle potential attempts at voter fraud in all 120 counties?
Fugate: This is a great question. Currently, there is nothing to balance out political representation. That is one of the reasons why we would like to add early voting, because it would allow us to ensure a bi-partisan staff in the process. For instance, when you go to vote absentee today, there is only the local county clerk's staff present. Under our proposal for early voting, you would have to have at least
similar political balance as to what is required at the polls on election day (2 D's and 2 R's). Without that addition, we would agree with you that there would be too much possible control by one party.
3) In Minnesota, we are seeing all kinds of ballots that are "magically appearing" the day after the election. These were votes that were "accidentally" not included in the original counts. With early voting, there will be a much larger number of votes that would be cast before election day. Which means there is a greater opportunity for magic ballots to show up the day after the election. Ones that were mistakenly never added to the official total. What safe guards are going to be in place to make sure that magical votes don't appear after the election?
Fugate: I am not sure where these extra ballots are coming from. In Kentucky, you have to post the printout of election results from each voting site. So, you couldn't just "find" results. The only way that votes could be "found" would be in the mail-in absentee voting process. We recognize that there are vulnerabilities with mail-in absentee voting. That is precisely why we are not in favor of expanding mail-in absentee voting. In fact, we are hopeful that early voting would cut down on voters using that method.
My concerns on early voting come from my background in computers. To be a good system administrator, one must understand system security and have a healthy dose of paranoia. One of the maxims in protecting a server is to allow as few of services as necessary to the general public as possible. The more services that are available (and the longer they are available), the more likely you are to be hacked. As you know, we have a plethora of counties (120) in this state. I see that as 120 potential failure points in the system when you open up early voting. All of which leads me to three questions.
1) In Ohio this year, groups like ACORN flooded the state with phony registration cards. So many in fact that the Secretary of State couldn't / wouldn't audit the registration cards. If phony registration cards made it through the process then it would be easier to vote multiple times. Add in multiple weeks of early voting and it would be even easier to cheat. What plan would be in place to handle a flooding of the registration system with phony registration cards?
Fugate: In Kentucky, you would not be allowed to register and then immediately vote early like you could in Ohio. In addition, our elections process is set up so that much of the verification occurs at the local level as the cards are processed. At the state level, we also remove felons, dead citizens, etc. from the rolls. We also have one major advantage over Ohio ... we use the full Social Security Number as the unique identifier. That allows us to catch duplicates very easily. Mistakes will occur (we just found a guy who was registered twice once with the SSN xxx-xxx-1xxx and once with xxx-xx-7xxx. Because he used dashes in the second registration, it looked like a seven instead of a one to the clerk's staff. However, those kinds of things will occur everywhere. In addition, the voter registration deadline would be several weeks before early voting begins which allows additional time to reconcile registration issues.
2) If early voting was centralized to a few regional locations I would feel better about the process. But again we have 120 counties that will be administering early voting. With many counties in this state having very lopsided political party representation in county governments and elected officials, what safe guards would be in place to handle potential attempts at voter fraud in all 120 counties?
Fugate: This is a great question. Currently, there is nothing to balance out political representation. That is one of the reasons why we would like to add early voting, because it would allow us to ensure a bi-partisan staff in the process. For instance, when you go to vote absentee today, there is only the local county clerk's staff present. Under our proposal for early voting, you would have to have at least
similar political balance as to what is required at the polls on election day (2 D's and 2 R's). Without that addition, we would agree with you that there would be too much possible control by one party.
3) In Minnesota, we are seeing all kinds of ballots that are "magically appearing" the day after the election. These were votes that were "accidentally" not included in the original counts. With early voting, there will be a much larger number of votes that would be cast before election day. Which means there is a greater opportunity for magic ballots to show up the day after the election. Ones that were mistakenly never added to the official total. What safe guards are going to be in place to make sure that magical votes don't appear after the election?
Fugate: I am not sure where these extra ballots are coming from. In Kentucky, you have to post the printout of election results from each voting site. So, you couldn't just "find" results. The only way that votes could be "found" would be in the mail-in absentee voting process. We recognize that there are vulnerabilities with mail-in absentee voting. That is precisely why we are not in favor of expanding mail-in absentee voting. In fact, we are hopeful that early voting would cut down on voters using that method.
Posted by at 3:39 PM in Kentucky Politics
