THE PAPER TRAIL

by Andrew Gumbel

It’s been a less than magnanimous exit from public life for Mischelle Townsend, the controversial Riverside County registrar of voters. In the month since she announced her resignation, amid mounting allegations of electoral mismanagement and overzealous defense of Riverside’s Sequoia computer voting machines, she has lost a key case in federal court, had her ethics questioned, and dodged all but the most softball questions from reporters.

Last week, she even suffered the indignity of having her goodbye party interrupted by a Santa Monica public interest lawyer, who came not to wish her well but to serve her with a separate suit concerning her handling of a contested local supervisor’s election and subsequent recount.

According to those present, Townsend refused to show her face so the papers in the new suit could be served. “She’s off the clock, and she won’t come down,” an employee told the lawyer, Greg Luke of Strumwasser & Woocher, and promptly slammed the door. Luke and a couple of local activists hung around outside for about an hour and watched everyone from the party leave – except for Townsend.

“She was holed up like a drug dealer trying to dodge the cops. Why? It doesn’t make any difference – it’s a county lawsuit,” said Art Cassel, an activist who has been hounding Townsend about the supervisor’s race since election day in March. The party eventually gave up and returned the following Monday to serve Townsend’s successor, Barbara Dunmore, who accepted without a murmur.

Townsend, admittedly, had had a rough few weeks. As detailed in CityBeat [“Down for the Count,” June 24], public records and other official documents revealed that she had failed to declare her personal financial interests in four of the past six years, that she had received money from Sequoia for a promotional trip to Florida far exceeding Riverside County’s annual gift limit, and that some of her claims about the security of Sequoia’s software were bogus.

On top of all this, the contested election pitting incumbent county supervisor Bob Buster against challenger Linda Soubirous became a thorn in her side. Although recounts on electronic voting systems are less than ideal even at the best of times (short of an independent paper trail verifying each voter’s choices), Townsend refused to offer up even the most rudimentary cross-checking materials – redundant data, machine audit logs, chain-of-custody reports, and so on.

The lawsuit filed by Luke on Soubirous’s behalf would oblige the county to provide these materials not only for the recount but for all future elections. New evidence, meanwhile, suggests that one of the reasons Townsend’s office did not offer many of the materials Soubirous requested may be because she did not have them, in violation of the safety procedures touted on the registrar’s website.

A newly unearthed memorandum, written to the secretary of state’s office in 2001, has Townsend admitting that Riverside no longer uses printers to establish that the voting machines are empty at the beginning of election day, or to make a record of each machine’s tally when the polls close. “The cartridges are simply taken to the nearest counting center which saves both time and effort on the part of the pollworkers,” she wrote. No doubt – but she also eliminated a valuable cross-checking mechanism.

Officially, Townsend has left office to nurse her ailing father-in-law, but it’s not hard to see how her world was collapsing as she decided to quit. A federal court ruling upholding the secretary of state’s right to insist on security improvements in Riverside and other touchscreen counties was particularly stinging – not only because she lost the case she had brought, but because it also challenged many of the central arguments around which she had justified her enthusiasm for e-voting.

She had argued touchscreens were the only system in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. (The court sided with the state, which says disabled people should have their votes counted properly ahead of any considerations of access.) She said the new machinery was mandated by the 2002 Help America Vote Act (not so, said the court, since the deadline imposed by HAVA is January 2006).

And, she argued, just as the Los Angeles registrar-recorder Conny McCormack did a few weeks ago in these pages, that Secretary of State Kevin Shelley’s move toward a voter-verified paper trail was a security and logistics liability. Townsend and McCormack have both said that a reliable paper-trail system does not exist.
As an amicus brief by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out, however, one paper-trail system is already certified and in use in Sacramento County, and another has passed federal certification. Sequoia itself will be using paper-trail-capable machines in Nevada in November – a modified version of the very machine Riverside County has been using and defending for the past four years.