[EL] When is a finger not a pen? Article discussing on-line digital signatures.

Fri Mar 1 11:00:26 PST 2013

A technical concern from this program: how good is the 'signature capture'
system? I would be very curious to see how many of the people who register
in this manner have their vote-by-mail ballots accepted or rejected based on
the signature comparison. 

Note that the County receiving the form almost certainly accepts whatever
signature is on the voter registration card. But when the voter later signs
the envelope and submits the vote-by-mail ballot, then the County has to
match the voter's real signature to the signature on the card (which was
captured from the screen). If they don't match, then the vote's not counted.

As we discovered here in LA County a couple of years ago, "rejected ballot"
counts rarely get the attention they deserve. The issue raised by the
Allpoint system certainly cries out for a study of the resulting
accept/reject ballot counts.

-        Doug

Douglas Johnson, Fellow

Rose Institute of State and Local Government

at Claremont McKenna College 

douglas.johnson at cmc.edu

310-200-2058 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Jack
Cushman
Sent: Friday, March 1, 2013 10:35 AM
To: bzall at aol.com
Cc: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] When is a finger not a pen? Article discussing on-line
digital signatures.

Interesting! Here's the part of the article that describes the procedure
we're talking about:

The firm, Allpoint Voter Services, "uses remote-control pens to transmit
'signatures' over the Internet." After a voter enters information in an
online form, he "signs" it with a stylus or finger on his screen. Allpoint
transmits the "signature" to an autopen in California or Nevada, which
transcribes the signature on to a paper voter registration form. Allpoint
then mails the document to local election boards.

A complete description is available here
<http://www.nccivitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/05.pdf> , including the
fact that the online form they refer to is the standard National Voter
Registration Act form including state-specific instructions.

I'm more interested in whether that process works in general than whether
particular people are doing something shady (or outright breaking the law)
in North Carolina. But to begin with, this Civitas article is slanted to the
point of just being wrong. The core story they've put together is that a
contractor retained by the Obama campaign to run a voter registration
website contacted North Carolina's State Board of Elections to ask whether
the above procedure was lawful. The SBE's General Counsel prepared a legal
memo <http://www.nccivitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/05.pdf>
concluding that it was lawful under the NC Electronic Transactions Act and
stating that "Special Deputy Attorney General Susan Nichols has reviewed and
concurs in this opinion." Nichols later asked the General Counsel
<http://www.nccivitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/03.pdf>  not to use
that language in the future because the AG's office no longer allowed
attorneys to state they concurred in opinions they didn't write. She also
said "I know we talked about the issue of the remote signing and I agreed
with your analysis, although I don't specifically recall reviewing the final
opinion." So as far as we know the process is lawful in North Carolina
according to the lawyers who reviewed it in both the SBE and AG's office,
and it resulted in some mail-in registrations being sent and accepted.

There are a couple of anecdotes in there as well about individual incidents
that are possible in any sort of registration drive, and that might be worth
investigating if you enforce election law in North Carolina -- a signature
that didn't match, a person who was asked for unknown reasons to print and
mail her form, payments that might have been related to the number of
registrations obtained. But the core legal story is the above paragraph plus
a more than generous dose of innuendo.

So anyway, in terms of the general issues here --

-- Do people buy the argument that this remote-sign process is legal in
states that have adopted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act? Has that
been tested?

-- Should this be legal? Is there a good reason to differentiate between a
form filled out by computer and signed with a touchscreen-controlled robot,
as opposed to a form filled out and signed with a pen? I assume we already
make that accommodation for disabled people, and digital or scanned
signatures are routine for relatively high-stakes business transactions  --
is there a reason to be wary of it here?

Curious to hear what y'all think.

--Jack

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:09 AM, <bzall at aol.com> wrote:

Hasn't appeared in the blog, so I'll ask about this article,
http://www.philanthropydaily.com/nonprofits-behaving-badly/, about this
report: http://www.nccivitas.org/2013/elections-bureaucrats-ran-amok/

Excerpt: 

In a blatantly partisan move, the staff of the North Carolina State Board of
Elections (SBE) successfully subverted state law to facilitate online voter
registration in North Carolina by the 2012 Barack Obama campaign. In doing
so they coordinated with partisans behind closed doors, lied about the NC
Attorney General's Office concurring with the SBE staff on the issue, and
dodged oversight by their own board and the legislature. The end result was
to add thousands of people to the North Carolina voter rolls illegally.

The SBE staff's audacity is so breath-taking that it's hard to believe, so
let us emphasize:  The Civitas Institute has documented how SBE bureaucrats
conspired with a private company, working for the Obama campaign
<http://www.nccivitas.org/2013/elections-bureaucrats-ran-amok/#_edn1> [i],
to facilitate a form of online voter registration for the 2012 General
Election - in violation of state law. It's a classic example of how
bureaucrats ignore the democratic process and hijack an agency for partisan
purposes.

Leaving aside the criticism of Jane Mayer (which some people argue is
richly-deserved), I'm curious if there's another take on this actual voter
registration procedure, or if it's as portrayed, particularly on the
question of on-line signatures translated into a mailed document. 

And the finger-based system does lend another meaning to the discussion over
"digital democracy." 

Barnaby Zall 
Of Counsel 

Weinberg, Jacobs & Tolani, LLP 

10411 Motor City Drive, Suite 500

Bethesda, MD 20817

301-231-6943 (direct dial) 

bzall at aol.com 
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