I wrote the email below to my local Supervisor of Elections and copied some local officials. I also emailed a local newspaper suggesting they do a story on the steps counties are taking to ensure the security of their elections. I think we need to start making a big deal about our concerns with election integrity until we encourage or shame officials to address it in transparent ways. I’d encourage everyone to take up this cause (and hopefully suggest more effective ways to do it)...
Sample letter:
I think we all need to be very concerned about the security of our elections. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats just testified in Congress yesterday that "There should be no doubt that Russia perceived that its past efforts [at influencing our elections] as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian midterm operations." Much of their efforts went towards influencing voters, but they absolutely did try to hack into election systems.
I am very appreciative of the fact that we in Broward county use a paper ballot and scanner, as this leaves a paper trail that can be verified, and I applaud the Board of Elections for selecting such a system. This was a highly responsible decision.
Unfortunately, everything in the chain from the scanning software through to the delivery of the official tally is still susceptible to attack. I fear that we may be overly confident because we have a paper system, but that isn’t of any value if the paper ballots are never verified against the electronic tally.
To inspire confidence in our election system, I really believe that we need a sample of the vote to be manually tallied. I don’t think the sample size has to be too large (perhaps just a few precincts), but which precincts to sample absolutely must be selected in a transparently random process. I would think volunteers representing both major parties might be willing to participate in this process and ensure its fairness, while minimizing the cost.
I strongly encourage the Supervisor of Elections to adopt a plan like this, and to publish her intention on the browardsoe website and issue press releases. It would demonstrate a dedication to the integrity of our elections and should hopefully shame other counties in Florida to adopt similar measures.
We could lose our democracy if we don’t take steps to ensure the integrity of the voting process.
Thank you for considering this proposal. And for those cc’d, I hope you will lending your support and encouragement for such a plan.