Electronic voting was a fiasco

By: Pamela Smith - Commentary

San Diego County's initiation of voting machines on March 2 dramatically increased the complexity of our election system. The Registrar of Voters must certify the results within 28 days of the election, but she will not have time to review all the pertinent information by then. Initial findings, published last week, show we won't receive technical information from the vendor for two weeks, nor the state's independent election review for several weeks possibly after the canvassing period.

No town meetings are scheduled, and a survey asking the more than 6,000 poll workers about security issues and count discrepancies could take weeks. The county seems dismissive of the complaints from the few voters who were able to report them, and is stating there were no security issues and no count discrepancies.

Yet security issues were widespread. In spite of the vulnerability of Diebold's electronic voting system, the registrar sent computerized voting machines, cards, keys and card encoders to be stored in poll workers' homes before the election, secured only by easily removed stickers and flimsy plastic zip-ties.
 

In one precinct observed by SAVE-Democracy's poll watchers, these security stickers had never even been placed over the memory card ports where votes are stored as they should have been.

Poll workers were given extra zip-ties to hold the machines and key-card pouches closed. These were not inventoried and apparently were not even inspected, so no one knows if machines were tampered with.

An Oceanside voter said that his precinct's machines had no paper in their printers, which means no "zero tapes" were run that morning upon the opening of the polls. When at least two poll workers called the registrar's hot line at the end of the day to ask what to do about tallies not printing or count discrepancies, they said the response seemed to be not to worry it didn't matter.

Poll workers trying to do their jobs and make a correct precinct count were brushed off.

But failing to acknowledge reports of discrepancies is hardly the same as discrepancies not existing.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley sought additional safety measures as we rolled out the new system with security vulnerabilities. These were largely ignored, even the old-fashioned mechanism of posting precinct totals at each polling place, as the law requires.

So voters are being asked to trust a private voting machine company with a record of security gaps and violations of state elections codes; to trust the county that bought it even though it knew of the company's tainted record; to trust that the vote count was accurate, though hand-picked observers for the central count excluded citizen groups such as ours; and to trust the report that states there were no security violations or count discrepancies, even though we saw them.

Worst of all, we're expected to trust that our votes were accurately recorded even though this voting system lacks any way for us to verify that.

Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify." This system hasn't earned our trust. We must verify that it works before November.

Pamela Smith of Carlsbad is coordinator of SAVE-Democracy (Safe, Accurate, Verified Elections), a voters' group.