I answered Sen. Debra Bowen's
call to ask the California Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, to rescind Diebold certification. However, his office responded by sending me a form letter.
I might have stopped there in disgust, but it occurred to me that Sen. Bowen's staff might be able to tell me where the form letter was incorrect, so I forwarded it to her address (info@debrabowen.com). Sure enough, her Chief of Staff, Evan Goldberg, was kind enough to send me a line-by-line description of the inaccuracies in the letter, and to give me permission to post his response here.
Evan's notes are in italics.
Hi, I'm Evan Goldberg, Senator Bowen's Chief of Staff, and I spotted your e-mail to my boss about Secretary of State McPherson's reply to you relative to his decision to certify the Diebold machines for use in the state. You asked if someone could point out the flaws in the letter, so I'd be happy to do so on behalf of Senator Bowen.
I'll try to insert my comments into the letter where relevant.
Thank you for your e-mail regarding Diebold's OS and TSX equipment and its certification with conditions for the 2006 elections.
Secretary McPherson shares your concern that we have only the most secure, reliable voting systems, and he is committed to ensuring the accuracy and integrity of every vote cast. That is why he has established the most stringent requirements for voting systems in the nation. [I don't know that the standards here are the most stringent because I don't know what the other 49 states do. I do know the standards he refers to were mainly established by the California Legislature and placed into law, they weren't established unilaterally by the Secretary. And more importantly, his decision to certify the Diebold machines ignores many of those standards].
The recent Diebold certification decision comes after the touch screen and optical scan systems have met the most rigorous federal and state standards. [Not correct. The decision to certify the Diebold machines runs contrary to several state standards. Most notably, the state requires the machine to provide an audio read-back of the accessible voter verified paper audit trail for the benefit of visually-impaired voters. The Diebold machines don't do this. The Elections Assistance Commission guidelines, which California is required to follow, ban the use of interpreted code. The Diebold machines rely on interpreted code to operate].
In addition, both the independent panel of experts from the University of California and the federally-approved Independent Testing Authorities have indicated that the Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan and the AccuVote TSX systems can safely be used for our elections, with the additional security and use procedures we have in place in California. [Not exactly true. The "independent panel" wasn't independent - it was a panel of experts appointed by the Secretary who were assisted by some researchers from the University of California. They found 16 security flaws and said if some manual security procedures were added, the machines would be safe to use].
These stringent use procedures and security measures include requirements that the elections official reset the encryption key prior to programming any units; that each memory card have a permanent serial number assigned to it and be programmed in a secured facility under the supervision of the registrar of voters/registrar of voter's staff; and that each unit be sealed with a serialized, tamper-evident seal. These security measures must be in place before the June 2006 election. For a more complete list of these enhanced security and use requirements, please visit our website at <http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs.htm> [This is true, but these manual security procedures rely on thousands of well-meaning but under trained volunteer poll workers to be effective].
Secretary McPherson has established clearly articulated expectations and standards required of voting systems and their vendors so that all who wish to be considered for use in California now know, for the first time, exactly what will be expected of them. [This is true - however the Secretary then ignored many of those standards when he certified the Diebold machines].
The Secretary remains committed to ensuring the reliability and accuracy of every vote, and that is precisely why he has set such high performance criteria to ensure that the integrity of the vote has been protected. With these qualifications for our voting systems, we believe voters can have confidence in the electoral process and the equipment used to capture their votes. [Same note as above].
Thank you again for your feedback and for taking the time to share your thoughts.
So is this where I tell you to get boiling mad and fire off a nasty letter to the Secretary's office? Not exactly. Don't get mad -- anger just burns you out. And don't fire off a nasty letter. But do write a polite letter (as I did). Whether you write a short letter simply asking him to rescind the certification, or a slightly longer one that calls attention to the standards that he violated is up to you.
By the way, you can find more information on the issue and on Debra Bowen (who is running for Secretary of State herself) here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
How did I choose that link? By going to the Search page, typing "Debra Bowen" in the "Search:" field, and choosing the entry with the highest "impact index" (calculation based on the number of recommendations and comments).
Update: I've cut and pasted the contact info from that link here:
Senator Don Perata (Chair) D
(916) 651-4009
District office (510) 286-1333
Senator.Perata@sen.ca.gov
Senator Jim Battin (Vice-Chair) R
(916) 651-4037
Jim.Battin@sen.ca.gov
Senator Roy Ashburn R
(916) 651-4018
senator.ashburn@sen.ca.gov
Senator Debra Bowen D
EMAIL ONLY Debra@debrabowen.com
Senator Gilbert Cedillo D
(916) 651-4022
and here's the address from which I received the response:
Elections@ss.ca.gov