Electronic vote critics await county’s reply
Activists fire off list of questions on reliability of touch screens

By Darrell Smith
The Desert Sun
August 17th, 2004
RIVERSIDE COUNTY Electronic voting critics came out with guns blazing. They charged Riverside County elections officials misled county leaders and stonewalled those seeking answers to questions about the county’s touch-screen voting systems.

They called for public observation of the county’s elections process and rolled out a long list of requests they said would restore confidence in electronic voting.

"No one can be trusted to conduct elections and vote-counting in secret, no matter how trustworthy they are," their letter read.

Then they gave Riverside County leaders two weeks to respond.

One month later, they are still waiting.

"These are five supervisors who are thumbing their noses," said Susan Marie Weber, a Palm Desert accountant and longtime e-voting critic who last year challenged the constitutionality of paperless touch-screen voting systems in federal court.

The six-page letter, dated July 9, addressed to Riverside County Executive Officer Larry Parrish and copied to the county supervisors, was signed primarily by county Democratic, Green, Libertarian, and Peace and Freedom Party leaders and representatives of the League of Women Voters.

"The county hasn’t responded at all. A lot of people are really not happy about this," said Jeremiah Akin, a voters’ rights activist from Riverside who gathered together other activists in Riverside last week to plan the next course of action. "Hopefully, they’ll start to understand they need to start answering questions about these systems."

Among the questions:

Is it possible to access and change information on an e-voting machine’s voting results cartridge?

How does the county’s elections department track who uses passwords and usernames to access elections software?

Are there any efforts to ensure one person does not use another person’s username and password to access voting systems?

Are subcontractors for the county’s Sequoia Voting Systems touch-screen voting machines put through security and background checks? Who performs the checks?

"(V)otes should be counted correctly, should be seen to be counted correctly," the letter read. "(T)his process should not be dependent on ‘trust’ or other intangibles."

Their concerns have been shared by touch-screen critics, voting rights activists and legislators in states from Maryland to Florida to Nevada to here in California concerns that stretch from the lack of a verifiable paper record of a vote to fears of hacking and vote tampering to errors in Spanish-language ballots.

Riverside County the cradle of electronic voting and home to 4,250 Sequoia Voting Systems touch screens has been at the center of the debate on e-voting.

In April, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley barred touch screens in Riverside and 14 other counties from the November general election until they met stringent security, accuracy and other tests.

Riverside County later joined three other counties and advocates for the disabled in challenging Shelley’s order before reaching a settlement last month allowing the touch screens to be used Nov. 2.

Through it all, county officials defended the touch screens’ performance, disputed the need for paper-verified accounts of votes as redundant and hailed cost savings that critics have since questioned.

Despite their frosty, sometimes combative relationship with critics and the Secretary of State’s office, county elections officials insisted they are not ignoring the critics’ concerns.

"I really had to balance priorities. This is among those priorities," said Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore, who took the post vacated when former registrar Mischelle Townsend retired last month.

Dunmore said she is getting her feet under her in her new role and hoping to answer the group’s questions without compromising the security of the voting systems.

Still, Dunmore said it was too early to discuss how she would respond to the queries and did not say when she would answer their letter.

Meanwhile, two of the letters’ signers Grace Slocum, secretary of the Northwest County League of Women Voters, and Russell E. Henson, a Riverside County United Communities board member are involved in litigation with the county, stalling the process even more, Dunmore said.

"I’m trying to extend to them I want to discuss their issues. It is something I will be responding to."