County should redirect energies

By: PAUL JACOBS - For The Californian

When public officials are sworn into office, they take an oath to defend the constitutions of the state of California and the United States of America. Why, then, would all five Riverside County supervisors defy an order from California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley by filing a lawsuit to defend an unverifiable voting system?Ý

Mischelle Townsend, the county registrar of voters, who is retiring amid a bunch of scrutiny, defends the Sequoia electronic voting machines, claiming that they have worked flawlessly in 29 consecutive elections. Unfortunately, there is no way to verify that the machines have in fact worked flawlessly. Ý

Supervisor challenger Linda Soubirous barely missed a runoff election with incumbent Supervisor Bob Buster by 0.1 percent of the total vote. While a runoff election for a candidate who lost handily by 15 percentage points seems pointless to me, Soubirous' campaign managers raise some intriguing questions regarding some startling irregularities that reportedly occurred during the March 2 vote count. Ý

During a delay in the vote tabulation on that election night, Soubirous' campaign officials allege they witnessed one of two Sequoia Voting Systems employees hunched over the vote tally terminal while votes were being counted. More scandalous is that one of the Sequoia workers was reportedly seen wearing a county employee's ID badge and allegedly used a county employee's password to enter the system. Perhaps their motives were as pure, but the sanctity of our touch-screen voting system is violated with such shenanigans. Ý

With these supposed improprieties underfoot, I wonder why defeated incumbent Supervisor Jim Venable feels so confident in the electronic voting system that booted him out of office with the surprise landslide victory of Temecula councilman challenger Jeff Stone, who officially unseats Venable in January.Ý

It is absurd that the technology of touch-screen voting provides a system that can be breached while leaving no paper trail of evidence. Virtually every other electronic system we use, from ATMs to home banking, provides a printout of our transactions, and we should demand no less from machines that decide the outcome of elections. Ý

I took the time and initiative to e-mail all five county supervisors to encourage them to their frivolous legal challenge against the secretary of state in favor of investing those dollars into printers for the November election. For their lack of response, the supervisors might as well have given me the same message Vice President Dick Cheney delivered to Sen. Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate.

At first, I was a big proponent of electronic voting, as it seemed to be the next logical, technological step in our democracy. After the fiasco of the 2000 presidential contest in Florida, it seemed punch cards and butterfly ballots proved far too primitive. But, even then, there was physical data that could have been recounted and verified, if only the courts had made a non-political ruling.

In discussing that embarrassment of democracy with a co-worker, she laughed and said she thought things like that only happened in her native Philippines. Her remark convinced me that we need verifiable safeguards to ensure the integrity of our elections.