Ohio Board of Elections Loses and Mishandles Voter Data

Lax security and procedures open up the potential for identity theft

Imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong in an election—thousands of lost votes; Social Security numbers, drivers’ licenses and dates of birth possibly exposed to identity thieves, and sacks of uncounted votes stuffed into the back seats of taxicabs, unescorted by election officials.  Next, imagine all of these things happening at the same time, in the same county.  Finally, imagine that the people who ran the election were warned four months beforehand about many of the problems likely to come, but did nothing to change course. 

This is the scenario that unfolded in Cleveland in May. 

And independent observers expect that this November, problems at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections will be even worse.  The fundamental problem, they say, is that the elections board is incapable of securely handling such massive amounts of data. 

“It’s unbelievable how bad it is,” says Steven Hertzberg, the project manager at Election Science Institute who spent four months this year studying the elections board.  “You have folks who just don’t have the skills to manage this much data.  They just don’t understand electronic security.” 

As Hertzberg and other investigators describe it, chaos was plainly visible inside the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections before the first vote was cast in the May primary.  The county had purchased more than 5,000 computerized voting machines from Akron-based Diebold, Inc.  In January, four months before the election, Diebold sent an urgent e-mail to elections chief Michael Vu detailing 13 problems with the county’s new system that could possibly derail the election.  The e-mail was discovered by the Cuyahoga Elections Review Panel, which later published a 394-page report investigating the debacle.  Diebold warned that the county’s plans to train workers on the new machines were insufficient, and that absentee ballots designed by the board were unreadable by Diebold’s optical scanning machines. 

The e-mail filled with warnings “was not taken seriously” by elections chief Michael Vu and other board leaders, the panel found.  But during the May primary, 10 of Diebold’s 13 warnings came true. Workers complained to investigators that they barely knew how to turn the new voting machines on.  When some of the machines stopped functioning in the middle of Election Day, workers were left helpless. 

As Diebold predicted, incorrectly-written ballots could not be read by digital scanners.  But elections director Michael Vu didn’t inform the rest of the elections board about Diebold’s warnings until 2 a.m. on Election Day.  With no time to make backup plans, the final results were delayed for a week as the votes were counted by hand. 

“This is an across-the-board failure to plan and manage the first countywide endeavor in electronic voting,” the three-member review panel found. 

The week-long delay was covered by television stations across the country.  Behind the scenes, however, there was even more confusion.  Of the 487 voting machines tested by ESI after the election, 24 had no internal record of the election or ballots cast; 29 machines could not be found anywhere inside the county warehouse; and 87 machines were missing their paper records, which serve as the official vote in the event of a recount. 

Elections officials downplay the importance of all this missing equipment.  “Just because we couldn’t find a machine doesn’t mean it’s lost,” says Lou Irizarry, director of information services and ballot administration for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.  “All those machines were eventually found.” 

To outside computer experts, the fact that most of the equipment was later found provides little comfort.  “All it takes is just a few seconds of access to put in a memory card that can infect that computer like a virus,” says Vicki Lovegren, a mathematics lecturer and computer programmer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.  “The virus also can be programmed to hide itself, to leave completely when it’s done.  If someone isn’t watching these machines every second, it’s incredibly easy to hack them.” 

In addition, ten percent of all the paper rolls could not be read after the election, either because they were destroyed, blank, illegible, missing, taped together or otherwise compromised.  This means that in a close race, a recount would have been impossible.  “The problem is they have no baseline. Nothing matches anywhere,” Hertzberg says.  “What if I go and manipulate a vote?  How about an entire database of votes?  With no baseline, there’s no way to know which one is right.” 

In more than 75 percent of the machines examined, the number of votes recorded on the paper record did not match the number on the memory chips.  In over a third of those machines, that difference was greater than 25 votes.  So much data was lost that ESI could not determine whether or not the Diebold machines were accurate. 

The polls closed at 7 p.m. At one o’clock a.m., Hertzberg personally witnessed a line of taxis idling behind the board of elections.  In their back seats sat bags of memory cards, each containing thousands of votes.  The bags had been sent from polling places to elections headquarters, unescorted by anyone from the elections bureau. 

“You want to talk about a potential security breach?” Hertzberg says.  “How many hours were those cards sitting in the back of taxis?  Did the taxis make any stops along the way?  There’s no possible way to know.” 

If the board proved to be incapable of tracking and tallying votes, many others wonder whether it was able to keep voters’ personal information secure.  A total of 17,000 people chose to cast absentee ballots in the May primary in Cuyahoga County.  By state law, voters applying for absentee ballots must provide the board of elections with their date of birth and either their driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, a bank statement or a copy of a recent paycheck. 

The official application form is printed on an 8.5-by11-inch piece of paper, to be enclosed in an envelope.  But many political groups encourage people to vote absentee.  Some groups shorten the form and print it onto postcards.  This means that voters’ birthdates, parts of their Social Security numbers, and their full driver’s license numbers were floating freely through the U.S. mail, for anyone to read. 

What’s more, the board never asked job applicants if they had criminal histories until this fall, according to the board’s own admission this September.  As a result, the elections board broke state law for decades by hiring convicted felons to help run elections, Jane Platten, board administrator, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in September.  One worker even manned a polling site wearing a criminal offender ankle bracelet, the elections panel found. 

Did any of these former criminals use this as an opportunity to steal personal data and steal the identity of absentee voters?  At this point, no one knows. 

The elections board finally closed this loophole this fall by asking job applicants whether they had a criminal record (many responded yes, and publicly protested when they were denied jobs as a result).  But as Hertzberg, Lovegren and the Elections Review Panel have released their findings to the public in recent months, the board has been reluctant, and in some cases outright hostile, to change.  After ESI released its 234-page report in August, Board of Elections chair and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett berated Hertzberg during a half-hour of public testimony, saying that the report “contributes to the conspiracy theory, that somehow the machines don’t work and the election is going to be inaccurate, and every vote is not going to be counted.” 

This despite two independent investigations which found that some machines didn’t work, that the election was inaccurate, and that thousands of votes were never counted.  Bennett went on to say that Hertzberg’s decision to publicly release the report “borders on criminal negligence.” 

Hertzberg replied that the report was paid for with public money.  It was commissioned by the Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners, which required an August publication date. 

Election officials say that they’ve fixed all their data security problems and will run a tight ship on Nov. 7. The board has created a 30-page plan that it says will help workers maintain a tight chain of control over every piece of equipment, including thousands of voting machines, memory cards, memory chips, paper vote rolls, absentee ballots and security logs. 

“All of our procedures have been addressed,” says Irizarry.  “We should be able to track all of the voting equipment and memory cards.” 

Others aren’t so confident.  The ESI report was released in August, and Hertzberg says that elections officials have spent most of their time since then battling his findings instead of fixing their problems.  A 30-page security plan may appear impressive to outsiders, Hertzberg says, but it may be too complicated for poll workers to master in the three weeks remaining before the election. 

“Part of the problem is that the system is already so complicated and confusing,” Hertzberg says. “If things are not kept simple, problems happen.” 

The board already has made well-publicized mistakes preparing for the November election.  It announced in October that it will be forced to spend $17,500 to lease an additional 30 optical scan machines from Diebold to count the estimated 100,000 absentee ballots it expects to receive in the midterm election.  But even paired with the 20 machines it already owns, the board announced that it won’t be able to count all the votes by the 7:30 p.m. deadline, in violation of state law. 

The board also mailed mistake-ridden absentee ballots to 5,100 voters in October.  The ballots cannot be counted by optical scan machines.  Some of the ballots switched the party affiliations for State Representative Kenny Yuko and his Republican challenger Beverly Valencic.  A week after the mistake was discovered, Democrat Yuko still appeared as a Republican on the board’s website.  The representative is unforgiving in his assessment of the situation.  “The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is the absolute poster child of incompetence.”