As last week's
problematic voting machine roll-out dramatically increased complexity in San Diego's election system, the Registrar faces a 'catch-22' situation. By the time she must certify the election (28 days later), she won't yet have had a chance to review all pertinent information.
Initial findings, published yesterday, say we won't receive (a) technical information from the vendor for two weeks, nor (b) the State's independent election review for 'several weeks'--possibly after the canvassing period. Although our group (SAVE-Democracy) held a town meeting for voters two days ago, one week after the election, no
official voter town meetings are scheduled, and any adequate survey of 6000+ pollworkers about security issues and count discrepancies could take weeks (not that they're planning anything so comprehensive).
So the county tries to explain away reports from the few voters who were able to get through by phone, and to state there WERE no security issues and no count discrepancies. Yet in one precinct observed by SAVE-Democracy's pollwatchers, so-called "security" stickers never actually covered the memory card doors even while the machines were in the pollworker's home. Contrary to what the County Report says, unless you're using a microscope, the stickers show no signs of tampering--but no one checked anyway. One pollworker never had to remove the stickers from the port doors (that cover the PCMCIA memory cards), because she was able to open the port doors even with the stickers there. Pollworkers' extra zip-ties (flimsy plastic ties holding the machines and card pouches closed) were never inventoried and stickers never inspected, so no one actually knows if machines were tampered with.
One precinct's machines had no paper in their printers--which likely means no zero tapes were run that morning upon poll-opening. When pollworkers phoned the Registrar's hotline at close-of-day to ask what to do about tallies not printing or count discrepancies, they were told 'don't worry, it doesn't matter.'
Pollworkers trying hard to do their job and make a correct precinct count (a cornerstone of accurate election procedures) were thus brushed off. But failing to acknowledge reports of discrepancies is hardly the same as discrepancies not existing.
The Secretary of State sought additional safety measures because we were rolling out a brand-new system with known security vulnerabilities. These were largely ignored, even the old-fashioned mechanism of posting precinct totals at each polling place--as the law requires.
In sum: voters are expected to trust a private voting machine company with a record of actual security gaps and violations of state elections code; trust the county that bought it even though they knew of its tainted record; trust that the vote count was accurate, though hand-picked observers for the central count excluded citizen groups like ours; trust the report that says there were no security violations or count discrepancies--even though we observed them firsthand.
Worst of all, we're expected to trust, even though this voting system lacks any way for us to verify our vote was recorded as we intended. Hey, even Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify." This system certainly hasn't earned our trust; we must be able to "verify" before November.
NOW THE GOOD NEWS: it looks like the three senators (Graham, Boxer, Clinton) may have come up with a satisfactory merger of their three bills for voter-verification--if this is any indication. While waiting breathlessly for the text of the new "Restore Elector Confidence in Our Representative Democracy" (RECORD) bill, I'm working on a scathing rebuttal to the Ney/Dodd/Hoyer/McConnell salvo... they should be ashamed of themselves.
