Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today I want to show you some of the evidence.
The evidence is a "summary tape" printed by a Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine in Hillside, New Jersey when the polls closed at the end of the presidential primary election. The tape is timestamped 8:02 PM, February 5, 2008.
The summary tape is printed by poll workers as part of the ordinary procedure for closing the polls. It is signed by several poll workers and sent to the county clerk along with other records of the election.
Let me show you closeups of two sections of the tape. (Here's the full tape, in TIF format.)
Above you can see the vote totals on this machine for each candidate. On the Democratic side, the tally is Obama 182, Clinton 179. On the Republican side it's Giuliani 1, Romney 13, McCain 40, Paul 3, Huckabee 4.
Above is the "Option Switch Totals" section, which shows the number of times each party's ballot was activated: 362 Democratic and 60 Republican.
This doesn't add up. The machine says the Republican ballot was activated 60 times; but it shows a total of 61 votes cast for Republican candidates. It says the Democratic ballot was activated 362 times; but it shows a total of 361 votes for Democratic candidates. (New Jersey has a closed primary, so voters can cast ballots only in their own registered party.)
What's alarming here is not the size of the discrepancy but its nature. This is a single voting machine, disagreeing with itself about how many Republicans voted on it. Imagine your pocket calculator couldn't make up its mind whether 1+13+40+3+4 was 60 or 61. You'd be pretty alarmed, and you wouldn't trust your calculator until you were very sure it was fixed. Or you'd get a new calculator.
This wasn't an isolated instance, either. In Union County alone, at least eight other AVC Advantage machines exhibited similar problems, as did dozens more machines in other counties.
Sequoia, the vendor, is trying to prevent any independent investigation of what happened.
Tomorrow: Sequoia's story about how this happened, and why it's inadequate.
UPDATE (March 20): We now have copies of nine anomalous tapes, including the one shown above. They're on our New Jersey voting documents page.
Front page posts
[...] Sequoia just got turned up a notch or two. In what Sequoia must consider a PR nightmare Felton has released some photo’s taken of the paper tape summary from one of the voting machines used in New Jersey [...]
This may be nitpicky, but I read carefully, and I'm confused, what's the ! for Giuliani?
Adam,
That's a numeral 1 (i.e., one vote) for Giuliani.
[...] machines that were used in the New Jersey primary elections can’t even do simple addition. 1+13+40+3+4=61 as Ed Felten points out. This isn’t higher math, it’s simple addition my six-year-old can [...]
Let me hazard a guess: the vote for Giuliani accidentily got put in Obama's basket, leading to the results of the Option Switch Totals.
Now, where do I collect the bounty offered for spotting the cause of this bug ;D
Admittedly the Tiff is really crappy, but the vote total for Giuliani looks nothing like the other '1' s on the image. Could the ! be an indication that he dropped out of the race before this election was held (on Jan 29) ?
No, that is a “!†I have seen this before. You should see the reports! No "!" intended.
The "!" was a voter surprised that Guiliani actually had the gall to appear on a ballot anywhere near NYC.
But seriously, that's a bizarre error; no wonder Sequoia doesn't want their machines looked at. People were incensed when Pentium's calculations were wrong in a far more subtle way; they should be outraged that this simple an error can happen with their votes.
But we've had things that should make them outraged about their votes and machine voting, and so far where are the mass protests? Where's the outrage?
Ah, what's a lost vote here or there? It's not like you're talking a measurable percentage of the total.
Ermm... Nevermind. Sobering. From a political layman's perspective, I just don't understand how we've come this far. This kind of looseness does not advantage any one party, so it's not a partisan thing. Every politician should want the system to be as accurate and as safe as possible.
So who's pushing this stuff? Is it just lobbying and "hey, I paid for that brunch!" from the vendors? Can they really have that much pull?
I really hope there is some simple gear in this machine that I do not see, because the whole process just looks evil to me.
[...] Sequoia's e-voting machines malfunctioned during the primary in a way that should scare you: it gave two different vote counts. You would think that's a pretty good reason for allowing a qualified, well-respected researcher [...]
The Giuliani-exclamation-point theory doesn't match the other facts. For example, there are other tapes that show other numbers for Giuliani, with a similar mismatch in the vote totals.
Absolutely amazing. Sequoia's crack engineers must have developed some _really_ advanced trade secrets.
I think you left out something important. (Maybe it was intentional saving it for tomorrow?)
That is, not only did other machines in different counties exhibit this behavior, but in all cases they were off by one vote. (right?) Sequoia's explanation would at least seem feasible without that... but with each machine displaying only one vote off, that counsels us, to first order, to suspect something more systematic than simply "poll worker error" of the variety Sequoia describes.
It would seem to be me that the machine would record the ballot being opened but no votes records. I know for myself there been plenty of elections where I only voted for one or two offices and ignored the others. Of course the old style voting machine my county in PA used wouldn't record me in the booth only what switches were pulled down when I pulled the lever. wholesale lingerie Perhaps this is a case where we now have extra information. As long as the votes don't exceed the number of times the ballots opened I don't see this as a problem as long as there is no other glitches. (Like failing to record a cast vote)
Are other eight examples consistently off by one vote (i.e. + 1 for one side/-1 for the other) as Joe says above?
I've looked at two tapes so far. The one I reproduced here is off by one. The other one is off by two. We'll have more analysis of the tapes later.
Well this incident looks really interesting. It would be good if it was investigated little bit close. Let the truth show.
Mike from warm winter coats guide. I hope you will like it there.
Ed:
Do you happen to know if copies of these tapes are subject to freedom of information requests in NJ? IIRC, Jersey has one of the most byzantine open records laws, but if these could be obtained, it would be potentially very illuminating.
The "!" could be a wrong printer driver on some of the printers. Different firmware on different units? But I would bet the cost of a retainer that the reports too do not add up. The reports should be public record! Who is going to go after them? All Grad students who want an "A" go fir it!
Ed writes:
> That’s a numeral 1 (i.e., one vote) for Giuliani.
Is it? It sure doesn't look like any of the numeral ones on the same page. Perhaps the scanned image is the problem, and it's clear that it's a "1" when viewing the actual printout. But consider: an icon containing an exclamation point is commonly used by GUI apps when an error occurs; it's conceivable that the software prints an exclamation point to indicate an error condition of some sort.
For any programmers out there:
Any chance its using a 0 based array, then printing out the count wrong? Ie if you threw 61 votes into a 0 based array, the first vote would be in position 0, the last one in position 60, thus you'd have 61 votes.
Paul,
Another relevant fact is that the problem happened on some machines and not others. On at least one machine, the discrepancy was two votes rather than one.
Todd,
The same problem occurs on other tapes I've seen, without any ambiguous-looking 1/! characters. If this tape has a ! for Giuliani, that's another bug -- and the Democratic side still doesn't add up.
Hmm. I would initially suspect that the "personal choice" option is being mishandled. Another possibility might be mishandling of a "correction" option, where the total gets incremented when the user is presented again with the voting choices screen but the vote change itself gets correctly decremented from one candidate and incremented for another. I don't know what to make of the "!" for Giuliani though.
The optimist in me wants to know how many machines worked properly. The pessimist in me wants to know if the error was consistently on one side of the aisle.
There's a whole separate reason to distrust Sequoia: they have very obviously gamed the Federal certification authorities and test labs, withholding key pieces of their product line from certification that should have been tested.
As a result, only Sequoia knows exactly how the central tabulator and ballot layout processes work.
Appendix A of this document covers the issue in detail:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/sequoia/Maricopa-County-Elections-Report.pdf
Maybe the USA really needs vote fixing to be able to chose some sane person for a president?
All jokes aside, what trade secret is Sequoia claiming they are protecting?
The "Guiliani" 1 looks similar to the "Ballot Version" 1 higher up on the scan of the full tape.
[...] NJ: Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1266 [...]
Thanks Ed!
I'll note that our inability to read the "missing dot 1" could be a pre-cursor of our next hanging chad. Probably not as bad, but poor quality control undercuts a selling point for these machines.
First, that's terrifying.
Let's not make a tempet in a teapot about the "!"... they are using a low-quality printer that has a very small pixel matrix, and a lot of them often don't print. The "!" is a strict subset of the pixels in the "1". If you look for other letters missing a similar number of pixels, there are a half dozen or so, including the P that looks like a "D" in "President" of the United Stetes.
When viewing the tiff at high zoom, the Giuliani result contains all the pixels expected of a ! but is missing both the top and bottom serifs present on all other 1's on the document, and pixels near the bottom of a 1. This is too many to be a coincidence, it looks to me to be a clear !, not 1. This means there are no extra votes in the republican column.
As for the democrat's column, is it possible to abstain with this machine? Would an abstention go into Personal Choice or would it be unlisted? Ideally, abstentions should be allowed but reported in the tally.
Finally, in the other machines with errors, are the automatic summaries always larger than the manual sum, or are they sometimes smaller?
What would happen if the voters goes through the line, gets up in front of the machines and say "Ah the hell with any of them" and just walks out or closes the screen without voting.
It would seem to be me that the machine would record the ballot being opened but no votes records. I know for myself there been plenty of elections where I only voted for one or two offices and ignored the others. Of course the old style voting machine my county in PA used wouldn't record me in the booth only what switches were pulled down when I pulled the lever.
Perhaps this is a case where we now have extra information. As long as the votes don't exceed the number of times the ballots opened I don't see this as a problem as long as there is no other glitches. (Like failing to record a cast vote)
Perhaps it just a case where a person decided not to vote after walking in the booth. The low percentage makes this a plausible conclusion. I know there were times when I did not vote all categories on my county lever style voting machine in past elections. If you tried to match the number of votes to the sign in there would be undercounts in various elections.
I agree, that looks like a ! in the Guiliani column. If the part of the program that does per-party totals mistakenly has Guiliani down as a Democrat, then the totals would match. I'd suspect a data-entry error in the ballot configuration for Guiliani (e.g. if the candidate's party is represented in two different ways, and he's down as D in one and R in the other), but of course we'd need more information to debug what's really going wrong.
In these machines you don't have to vote for every office. It doesn't have to add up. As long as the switch count is equal or greater, there's no cause for alarm.
If you don't have to vote for every office, then to display consistency an 'abstained' line count should be shown for every section. That would prevent this sort of confusion.
As Robert says, what happens if a voter doesn't make a selection? That would explain the vote total being lower than the option switch total on the Dem side. And if Giuliani's "!" is not a 1, then there would be the correct number of votes on the Republican side.
If the person walked away then why is there an extra vote on the Republican side? If I open a Democrat ballot and walk away the vote gets counted as Republican?
Looks like a vote for Guiliani is a vote for the Democratic party!
It's rediculous. Last time Bush magically won Florida, now this...
Big lough for the rest of the world
I can't believe that so many morons can't understand the simple and exhaustive explanation that has already been given to them: the '!' in Gulliani line is '1' and has always been '1'. A clear, well defined 1. The illusion of '!' that you see in the above picture is nothing else than just a scanning/processing/[maybe compression] artifact. I don't know what kind of crap they used to "scan" it (maybe a cellphone), but the rest of the characters also don't look much better than this '1'.
Folks, look at the full tape image available via the link above the other two images. There's a line in the top section of the tape that reads, "Public Counter" followed by "422". In addition, underneath the Republican listing, it has a line that reads, "Total" followed again by 422. If we tally up all the votes, INCLUDING a 1 for Giuliani, we get this same total. So, for starters, that seems to lay to rest the ! vs 1 debate... it's a 1, and the Republican tally is therefore incorrect. Furthermore, this seems to indicate that the machine is tallying total votes for both sides correctly, but not within each party. In this case it has taken a vote away from the Republican total and added it to the Democrat side.
I'd very much like to know just what the heck is going on here. This may be a minor thing in this case, but what if during the general election, every machine switches a couple of votes from one party to another? Furthermore, it makes me start to doubt all the numbers... if it can't match up its own totals, why should we trust any of the numbers at all? Did it also swap a few votes around between, say, Hillary and Barack? Add a few arbitrarily? How can we know? Just looking at this tape, we can't. I agree with Ed's comparison to a calculator that can't add right... if it can't add two small numbers, you sure aren't going to trust it to do your taxes with. There's always going to be an issue of trust with large scale voting, but at least if everything added up you'd be somewhat confident that things were on the up and up. When they don't add up, there's no reason to be confident about anything.
Good grief, check out the full .tif file, where they've written in the date -
"do hereby certify that on the _FEB_ day of _5_ _2000_ this board...."
After looking at the TIFF, I am still not sure if the mark in Giuliani's column is a 1 or a !. However, the printout uses a fixed-width font, and the horizontal positioning of the mark is consistent with the other 1s in the printout (notice that the stroke of the 1s are all slightly left of center).
Meanwhile, other punctuation characters seem to be centered (e.g., the period, colon, and slashes at the very top and bottom; the commas in the text). But without seeing what a ! looks like in this font, one still can't say for sure - the printout is simply too poor quality.
[...] this is an odd story developing out of New Jersey. Ed Felton from Princeton has received a thinly veiled threat from the [...]
Perhaps there's an explanation. This is not to say it was fraud. But the result is whack.
Wild ass guess 0:
The Gnarly thing here is that this is exactly what fraud might look like. Some admin tried to enter a bunch of votes ahead of time. "stuffing the ballot". But he's not sharp enough to know how the diagnostice will trip him up.
WILD ASS GUESS 1:
This kind of error has the fingerprints of "unit testing". When you write code, a good coder will write a test routine that can directly call lower-level subroutines and bypass the upper level. This way they can rapidly detect if a mistake lies in the upper or lower routine. When the Code is done these unit tests are usually left in to also verify that any later changes to a lower level routine don't have side effects on the upper level.
Perhaps some unit test runs, stuffs some test votes in as a legitimate test, then mistakenly forgets to remove these later or some concurrency issue prevents their removal.
Wild Ass guess 2:
The numbers on the tape mean something different than claimed.
The thing that makes it look like WAG1 (i.e. fraud) is that this was not reported on all machines. The other two WAGS might show up systematically.
I just want to offer a little programmer insight here. With out more examples it's hard to say definatively, more print rolls would allow one to extroplate what the machine is doing with more confidence.
But this seems a bit beyond a math problem this is a vote shifting problem. 1 vote is missing from the Democrats and one vote is added to the the Republicans. This type of tracking is core to this machines operation, At first it looked like someone had mistakenly set an initial value to 1 instead of 0 or something but indeed this actually seems worse and needs serious attention.
Gee, isn't it possible for the machine to be activated 61 times and have one person decide that they didn't like any candidate and vote for no one so there are only 60 votes cast? This is the same sort of thing the Dems got so worked up about in Florida in 2000 - they seem to believe that every ballot must have a vote cast. Sorry, it doesn't.