DOWN FOR THE RECOUNT

by Andrew Gumbel

Riverside court blocks efforts to recount electronic votes in county supes race

Bad news for the campaigners trying to force Riverside County to come clean about the inner workings of its controversial electronic voting machines. A local judge last week rejected a lawsuit brought by an aggrieved candidate, Linda Soubirous, who was trying to acquire backup data from a contentious local election held last March. The judge found no merit in her argument that the data was essential to the conduct of a meaningful recount.

Soubirous’s travails were detailed in CityBeat (“Down for the Count,” June 24): how she ran for county supervisor against a powerful incumbent, how she appeared to be on track to force him into a runoff when the vote count suddenly stopped without explanation, how two employees from the voting machine manufacturer, Sequoia Pacific, suddenly showed up in the tabulation area of the registrar’s office and were seen typing at a computer keyboard, and how the incumbent, Bob Buster, subsequently pulled just far enough ahead to clear the 50 percent threshold and be declared the winner on the first round.

Soubirous was granted a recount in April, but the county registrar, Mischelle Townsend, refused to produce any of the backup data from the individual voting machines to compare with the tabulated vote totals. This seemed odd, to say the least, since the registrar’s own website cites the backup data as the safeguard guaranteeing the integrity of the whole electronic system. Without the data, the recount was essentially a reprint of the previous results.

The judge hearing Soubirous’s suit, Judge James S. Hawkins of the Riverside Superior Court in Indio, chose not to see it that way, however, agreeing with the county that it is up to the registrar to decide what materials to produce for a recount. Soubirous’s lawyer, Greg Luke, characterized the very brief judgment as “pretty thin gruel” and said he would lodge an immediate appeal.

Soubirous’s interest in the case is not to continue the fight over the supervisor’s seat – she says she’ll never run for office again – but to defend the integrity of the voting process. Controversy over the Soubirous case almost certainly helped push Registrar Townsend into early retirement over the summer. Her successor, Barbara Dunmore, has shown no greater inclination to open the machines to greater scrutiny, however.

In fact, Dunmore presided over another travesty earlier this month when, in compliance with a court order, she had the backup data from the March election transferred to CD. The judge said the data transfer should be open to the public, but when observers showed up at Dunmore’s office, they were restricted to a small corner of a room and could see almost nothing, because most of the screens were facing away from them, and the few that were not were shielded by privacy screens.

Jeremiah Akin, a computer programmer and ardent local campaigner, said he saw enough – after considerable haggling with the registrar’s staff – to realize the data was being put on a network and transferred to a computer out of sight in another room. The CD burning did not take place until the following day, by which time the observers were long gone.

“If they aren’t hiding anything, they certainly are doing everything to make it seem like they are,” he said. “They are doing their damnedest to undermine their own credibility.”

The CD-burning was ordered because the Sequoia touchscreens need to be cleared in time for the presidential election in November. Soubirous said that, as far as she was concerned, the data from her election was now effectively destroyed because she could not trust the contents of the CDs. “What a joke. I almost feel like Riverside County is not in the United States of America,” she said. “It’s ridiculous what is going on here.”

Greg Luke, her lawyer, said the only answer was to keep working the legal system. The two-and-a-half page Riverside ruling, he said, was basically a rehash of the county’s brief and seemed designed to duck the issue more than confront it. “It’s not a reasoned opinion,” he said. “It’s quite plain that the elections code is not being observed here in a number of obvious ways.”
Riverside officials, meanwhile, were elated, accusing Soubirous of being a sore loser and insisting absolutely nothing was amiss with the Sequoia touchscreens.