(cross-posted at
surf putah)
While most of Yolo County uses optical scanned ballots, the cynically-named Help America Vote Act a couple years back required that Yolo County drop its old reliable punch card system and use electronic voting machines (
not Diebold, to be clear), ostensibly to provide better access for blind voters, but more likely to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars to voting machine manufacturers (who are then, unsurprisingly, big Republican donors) and, some argue, to leave backdoor flaws that enable election fraud.
Luckily for Yolo County (and notably unlike incumbant Schwarzeneggar appointee, Republican Secretary of State and Diebold pusher Bruce MacPherson), our county clerk Freddie Oakley is on top of things, an e-voting skeptic, a proponent of paper trails, and generally on top of things. No absentee ballot monkey business on this side of the causeway , thank you very much. So when Oakley was testing out the e-voting machines ahead of time, she discovered this weird glitch where the instructions to blind Yolo voters were inexplicably in Vietnamese:
The timing of the discovery -- about one month before the Nov. 7 elections -- lessened the shock. But the county's top elections official said the error shows just how sticky the move toward electronic voting can be.
"We thought it was extremely charming, but on account of the county not having many blind Vietnamese voters, we e-mailed the company and they sent us the right software," said Freddie Oakley, the Yolo County clerk recorder.
If not for her self-described "paranoia," Oakley and other Yolo County election officials might not have discovered the glitch until Election Day.
"It would have been a horrible surprise," she said, adding that Hart, the Austin, Texas-based company that provides the software, sent the correct program within 36 hours.
[...]
"These machines are, for the most part, not state-of-the art in terms of electronic-based appliances, and they are very expensive for what they are," Oakley said. "I think any of these machines is vulnerable to attack by hackers, so I think time will show that these have not been the wisest investment for the United States."
"We will never go to complete paperless voting in Yolo County as long as I'm clerk," Oakley said.
While our votes remain secure in Yolo County for the time being, and while Yolo's negligable blind Vietnamese population should be reassured, the fact remains that we are an outlier in California and the nation with regard to verified paper trails and a county clerk who is an advocate of the voters that elect them and not of voting machine manufacturers that bribe them. In the upcoming Secretary of State race between incumbant Republican Bruce Macpherson and State Senator and voting reform advocate Debra Bowen, we have a clear choice:
whether to elect a Schwarzeneggar appointee - Bruce MacPherson - who has certified disfunctional, expensive and hackable voting machines in the face of repeated demonstrations by voting reform activists and commissions that he himself called for that these things are lemons at best and trojan horses at worst, or whether to elect a real reformer - Debra Bowen - who will stand up for the fundamental democratic principle of one person, one vote, and a standard for voting methods that is worthy of Silicon Valley and our democracy itself.
The last day to register to vote is next Monday, October 23. We have Freddie Oakley, but the state of California needs Debra Bowen. Our democracy is too precious to sell off to corporations without oversight.