Wisc Election Security for Nov 2018

Wisconsin's voting machines are vulnerable. A national study gave us only a C for election security.  The good news is that the problems are fixable--and quickly, if we can get the word out.

Only one critical unprotected risk leaves Wisconsin election results vulnerable to electronic hacking: Our county clerks don't now verify Election-Night vote totals with the paper ballots before they declare the elections final.

If any hackers ever manage to alter Election-Day vote totals, our county clerks wouldn't notice. They would declare the hacked vote totals to be our final, official election results.

Our election clerks already have everything they need to verify accuracy: the paper ballots, enough time, the legal authority. National authorities and their counterparts in other states have developed efficient, economical methods to check voting-machine accuracy after every election.

The problem is our county clerks don't know this. They don't perceive the need for election auditing and they don't know about the solution. Wisconsin has very decentralized elections. It's not the job of the state agency (the Wisconsin Elections Commission) to dictate review practices to the local officials. The county clerks are locally elected, accountable only to the voters.

With only $4,500, we can educate local election officials about both the problem and the solution. We can also pressure on them to adopt modern election-management practices by educating other key local-government officials, key citizens, and local media .  If we get the word out this summer,  improvements can be before the November 2018 election.  Funds will pay for printing, postage, and promotion of the information on social and other media.

The story so far:

It's undeniable that Wisconsin's voting machines sometimes miscount, and that our county officials' review practices (call the 'county canvass') are insufficient to catch and correct these miscounts.

I (Liz Whitlock) knew, from my own observation of the official 2016 recount—in which my team of observers click-counted votes as they were run through the Optech Eagle vote scanning machines—that many valid votes were not being counted. 

My partner, Karen McKim, Coordinator of Wisconsin Election Integrity, knew that the Optech Eagle vote scanners were notoriously unreliable for counting all valid votes.  We decided we had to do our own hand count, and the video below shows why we had to do this.  If you haven't yet seen it, please watch, but be prepared to be outraged—it shows the attitude of election officials toward any sort of audit of their machine-counted results:


Last November's citizen hand count proved everything we set out to prove, and we used the audiovisual equipment obtained with our GoFundMe funds to spread the word.  This is one slide of our PowerPoint presentation:

 
The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted to decertify the Optech Eagle scanners—but not until after the November 2018 election!  (These very old machines would no longer have parts or service available after Descember 2018 anyway.)

Despite widespread concern about election security, most state and local elections officials are still showing no sense of urgency to implement even the simplest audit procedures, such as those we demonstrated in our hand count.

What we're planning now:

The only way to secure Wisconsin's elections is to manually audit the voting machines' totals, using our paper ballots. The only way to get those audits done is to pressure our local election clerks to do them. 

Wisconsin Election Integrity, a nonpartisan citizens group formed in 2012, is ready to launch a statewide publicity campaign to educate both voters and local election clerks about this practical safeguard.  We have a glossy, professional-quality, independently fact-checked brochure ready to mail and a social-media strategy to get the word out. 

We will be bringing pressure on the Wisconsin Elections Commission to support the local clerks in  adopting audit practices; on the county clerks to improve their procedures; and on voters to call their county clerks to insist on verified accuracy.

Your contribution will help to cover printing, postage, and paid promotions, plus a few administrative costs like rental of a post-office box.  We need your help to do this! 

Anyone who donates even $5 will be able to request either a paper copy  of our brochure via snail mail or a PDF emailed to you, with our permission to reproduce it yourself if you want to spread the word even further, once we achieve our goal.  Thanks for your concern about the integrity of our elections!

Here is the trifold brochure: