Last month's race in California's 50th Congressional District in San Diego County between Republican Brian Bilbray and Democrat Francine Busby was characterized as a bellwether on whether the Democrats would recapture the House in November.
Instead we were treated with another round of accusations that the election was fraudulent as Bilbray was declared the winner with 49.5 percent of the vote to Busby's 45 percent.
In truth, this is a fairly significant size victory. Yet the outcry from San Diego citizens for a recount is overwhelming.
In fact, the response to the Bilbray/Busby election by local voters may be more of a bellwether of the level of confidence Americans will have in the November election results and the legitimacy of who controls the House in January.
The reasons voters are demanding a recount are not so surprising. The elections were run on Diebold's electronic voting machines. These machines have been shown to be vulnerable to hackers and have produced spurious results throughout the country.
Even more disturbing is the San Diego Registrars complete disregarded for state and federal security laws, as they blithely let poll workers store voting machines in their homes for several days prior to the election. In doing so, these machines were all technically decertified, and thus illegal for use in the election.
It turn's out this is a fairly commend practice in San Diego and calls into question the ability of the Secretary of State's office to oversee the election process here in California.
Ensuring our Votes are Fairly Counted
What the Bilbray/Busby election highlights (for the umpteenth time) is how imperative it is that the voting machines used in our state and local elections are secure and accurate. If the electoral process falls apart during the tabulation of the votes, because of pre-election tampering or post election fraud, then voting becomes meaningless.
Election integrity cannot be assured without openness and transparency.
Such a requirement eliminates the use of Touch Screen voting machines right off the bat. By definition these machines are not transparent - the voter never sees the legal ballot in the first place, nor do election officials. The magic numbers just pop out of the machine, leaving voters with little more than faith that the vote they cast is accurately counted.
Such a requirement also eliminates the use of all voting machines run on trade secret software. Such blackbox voting creates secret ballot counting that will never be trusted by the electorate. Running a clean election should be based on using voting systems everyone can understand. Free elections mean we vote in private but count in public.
If we are to maintain any kind of voter confidence in our democratic process, we need to ensure there are no questions regarding the integrity of our votes.
As Secretary of State I would take the following steps to ensure our votes are accurately counted:
- Insist that all voting at the polls is done using paper ballots and counted using optical scanners. This is the most reliable, user friendly and cost-effective voting technology available today.
- Increase oversight and accuracy by insisting that scanners run on open source code that is owned by the state not private companies. The code for these machines is simply to write and replacing the code on optical scanner machines with publicly owned software would save the state millions of dollars.
- Conduct random audits of paper ballots vs. machine tallies at the precinct level. Audits should be conducted by pulling machines at random and comparing hand counts of the paper ballots "produced by those machines" with the electronic tally of those machines. This is the only way to ensure the machines are working properly.
- Implement trigger audit protocols - in regions where the error rate between random hand counts and machine tallies exceeds official error rate standards, a complete hand count of the region should be triggered.
- Work with county registrars to develop a single uniform system of voting across the state. Having each county use a different type of machinery only makes oversight more difficult and increases the chance of fraud.
Optical scanners run on open source code by definition produce a voter verified paper ballot, which is the only real record of each citizen's vote. Optical scanners can also be easily modified to accommodate Rank Choice Voting and work well with ballot marking devices, such as the Vote-PAD, for people with disabilities.
The Privatization of our Election System
The myopic spread of electronic voting machines is perpetuated by government officials operating under the misconception that the 2002 Help America Vote Act requires the use of Touch Screen machines to ensure the visually impaired can vote independently. It does not! In fact, HAVA explicitly states voting systems that allow the disable to vote - such as electronic ballot-marking devices and ballot templates like those used in Europe and Rhode Island - meet the accessibility requirement.
Of course, the primary promoters of the misconception are the vendors themselves - who are competing for a slice of the multi-billion dollar HAVA pie. Today, nearly all states wait for the vendor to make the initial move and apply for state certification. This gives the vendors an enormous amount of control over the type of voting equipment used in each state.
The message is clear, unless we use voting equipment that safeguards against tampering, public confidence in our elections will be eroded and the results of any election will remain open to question.
Free and fair elections are the engine of democracy. Electronic voting machines with meager security, privately controlled testing, and significant technical flaws threaten to undermine our voting rights and thus the reliability of the election process.