An important study on voting in Florida by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is underway.
GAO's report lays out the steps it is taking to study 18,000 undervotes reported in Sarasota County in the race for Florida’s 13th Congressional District in the November 2006 election. Here are excerpts from this preliminary report. They lay out the steps GAO is now taking to get the data it needs to conduct the study and preliminary observations.
This is an important stage, and those with expertise in this area should comment now.
On June 14, 2007, GAO met with the Task Force and agreed upon a plan with the following review objectives:
(1) What voting systems and equipment were used in Sarasota County and what processes governed their use?
(2) What was the scope of the undervote in Sarasota County in the general election?
(3) To what extent were tests conducted on the voting systems in Sarasota County prior to the general election and what were the results of those tests? and
(4) Considering the tests that were conducted on the voting systems from Sarasota County after the general election, are additional tests needed to determine whether the voting systems contributed to the undervote?
Here is the report on steps to meet those objectives so far:
To conduct our work, we visited Sarasota County twice, most recently 2 weeks ago, and we were in Tallahassee last week to meet with the Secretary of State and the Division of Elections. While in Tallahassee, we were able to execute a nondisclosure agreement that permitted us access to items that the State of Florida and the manufacturer of the voting system, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), considered proprietary, including the proprietary appendixes of the Florida State University source code review report; the technical data package, which includes items such as the software specification; and the source code for the firmware installed in the iVotronic touchscreen voting systems used in Sarasota County.
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[W]e have not yet noticed any apparent patterns, but we are continuing our analysis. From our analysis, we have been able to verify that 1,499 iVotronic voting systems recorded votes in the 2006 general election and the vote counts for the contestant, contestee, and undervotes match the vote totals for election day, early voting, and provisional ballots in the Florida-13 race. A total of 17,846 undervotes were recorded in the Florida-13 race out of the 119,919 ballots cast using the iVotronic voting systems—corresponding to a 14.88 percent undervote rate.
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[O]ur analysis has found at least 112 different ways a voter could make his or her selection and cast the ballot in the Florida-13 race, assuming that it was the only race on the ballot. Specifically, a voter could (1) initially select either candidate or neither candidate (i.e. undervote), (2) change the vote on the initial screen, and (3) use a combination of features to change or verify his or her selection by using the page back and review screen options. We found that the Florida certification tests and the Sarasota County logic and accuracy tests verified 3 ways to select a candidate; and the Florida parallel tests verified 10 ways to select a candidate—meaning that of the 112 ways, 13 have been tested. We have not yet assessed whether this is significant.A test to determine whether a system can handle the expected volume of activity is commonly referred to as load testing. We found that ballots used for load testing during the certification testing were machine-generated using a testing program built into the iVotronic system, i.e., users do not touch the screen to make a selection and cast a ballot. Neither the Florida audit nor Sarasota County’s logic and accuracy testing performed load testing. We have not yet assessed whether this is significant.
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We have also been reviewing the Florida State University source code review. As we mentioned, we obtained access to the source code last week and we were able to verify for ourselves some of the items discussed in its report. We have had prior discussions with the leader of the Florida State review team and will be continuing our discussions with the review team and the manufacturer to ensure our understanding of both the findings of their review and the operations of the iVotronic system. One of the items noted in the report was that the review team did not (1) convert the source code to object code, and (2) compare the resulting object code to the object code that was used to run the voting machines in Sarasota County. We are still assessing the significance of this item.As a part of our review of the state audit, we examined the selection of samples for the parallel testing and the review of the Sarasota County election practices. Our preliminary analysis has found that these sample sizes are too small to support generalization of the results to the overall population. For example, the generalization of the results from the use of 10 machines for parallel testing cannot be supported because the sample drawn was not random and the sample size was too small. Similarly, we have little assurance that the examination of 6 machines’ firmware is adequate to conclude that the firmware was not compromised on any of the machines. Our discussions with Florida officials indicate that such limitations resulted from court-imposed restrictions on machine access and resource considerations of performing the testing.
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[O]ne of the issues we identified in the source code review is that the source code was not converted to object code and compared to ensure that it represented the code used in Sarasota County. Further, our preliminary analysis has shown that we do not have reasonable assurance that the firmware was not compromised on any of the iVotronic systems used during the election. In order to determine whether these issues warrant further testing, we still need to determine the potential significance of these issues, as well as identify the test personnel and equipment, the voting systems and equipment to be tested, and the time required to conduct such tests. To identify these resources, it will also be important to determine how such tests should be structured and executed.The study report is Elections: Status of GAO's Review of Voting Equipment Used in Florida's 13th Congressional District GAO-07-1167T, August 3, 2007
Again, for those with expertise in this area, now is the time to be heard.
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