Local elections office commended   (CA)

Thadeus Greenson/The Times-Standard    07 December 2008

Since 2004, Premier Elections Solutions has known about the programming error in its software that caused almost 200 ballots to be ped from Humboldt County's final November election tally, but that came as news to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office.

”Secretary Bowen is certainly concerned about Premier's carelessness with yet another elections product and thinks it's distressing that the company took virtually no action for years on this apparent defect,” Secretary of State Press Secretary Kate Folmar wrote in an e-mail to the Times-Standard. “Secretary Bowen is talking with the company, county elections officials and others about how to prevent this problem from ever happening again in California.”

Just days after the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors certified the November election results, the county election's first-of-its-kind Humboldt County Election Transparency Project uncovered the fact that 197 vote-by-mail ballots, which had been scanned through vote counting machines, were mysteriously d from the final ballot tally as tabulated by Premier Elections Solutions GEMS software.

The 197 missing ballots would not have changed any of the election's outcomes, according to Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich.

However, transparency project volunteer

Mitch Trachtenberg said, the unveiled problem in Premier's software underscores a major issue.

”Our votes are too important to be counted by secret code running on proprietary machines,” he said in a statement.

The problem was traced to a programming error with the specific version of the software used in Humboldt County a programming error that sometimes results in the first deck of ballots scanned through the vote counting machine vanishing without a trace from the final results.

Premier Elections Solutions spokesman Chris Riggall said the company became aware of the problem in October 2004, and sent out e-mails to its customers detailing how to “work around” the problem and schooled its customers on the procedure at a variety of events.

The two other counties in California that use the same version of the software Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo were aware of the problem and how to work around it, but Bowen's office was not, despite having conducted a top-to-bottom review of all the state's voting equipment in 2006 due to concerns about the reliability of the state's elections systems.

San Luis Obispo Assistant County Clerk Recorder Tommy Gong said his office received the advisory from Premier, quickly worked the work-around procedure into its election protocol, and hasn't had any problems. Gong also said his county has a method for double checking the results.

”Physically, we know how many ballots we've counted through the machines and the final report should reflect that number,” he said. “If not, there's an issue.”

Similarly, Santa Barbara County Chief Deputy Registrar of Voters Billie Alvarez said Premier notified her office of the problem some years back, and she simply included the work-around steps into the department's written procedures.

Apparently, nothing like that happened in Humboldt County.

Lindsey McWilliams was the elections manager for Humboldt County when the programming error was discovered by Premier. He has since moved on to become the assistant registrar of voters for Solano County.

He said he did receive the e-mail from Premier identifying the problem in its software and how to work around it. But he never included the work-around steps into the county's detailed written elections procedures nor apparently did he inform Crnich, then his boss, of the issue, even as he left the Election's Office last year to head to Solano County.

”There really wasn't any schooling anyone to take over (my position) because I had all of two and a half weeks of transition between (Solano County) and (Humboldt County), and there wasn't an election in process, so there was not a complete transfer of knowledge,” McWilliams said.

Back at Premier, Riggall said that part of his company's job is to communicate well with its customers, specifically surrounding the operations of its systems and potential problems.

Asked why when McWilliams left, the company didn't make sure to inform his replacement of the software problem, Riggall said he didn't know.

”I certainly would accept the fact that our job, as always, is to try to make sure we're communicating well,” he said.

Pressed as to why the company didn't do more to ensure the software problem didn't affect any elections either by recalling the software entirely and correcting the problem or, at least, issuing new operations manuals with the work-around procedure included Riggall said federal and state certification processes, which can take years, made that impractical.

”It's one of the real obstacles in our business that when we identify an issue, getting that enhancement into the field so that issue can be corrected is a very lengthy, laborious, expensive and time-consuming process,” Riggall said. “When you're not able to do that, you have to rely more on work-arounds and the guidance of your customers.”

Since 2004, Riggall said the company has also revised its “product advisory notice” process so that the Secretary of State's Office is made aware of any software or equipment issues as soon as counties are.

But all this just seems to beg the questions that some have been asking for years: Are our elections too important to be subject to the same cost-benefit analysis of other private businesses? Should there be fail-safe ways to ensure elections are conducted properly, regardless of the turnover in a given elections office? Should there be a level of transparency to the extent that everyone knows how vote-counting software works? And, should every election be audited to ensure that every vote is counted?

Crnich has answered the last question, at least locally, through the creation of the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project. On the surface, the project is pretty simple: Every ballot cast in an election is passed through an optical scanner after being officially counted and the images are then placed online and made available for download.

Open-source software, created by Trachtenberg, then allows viewers to sort the ballots by precinct and conduct recounts or scrutinize the vote as they see fit.

In this, the first election in which the project was fully up and running, it uncovered a software glitch that otherwise would have gone completely unnoticed and potentially could have changed the election's outcome.

The Secretary of State's Office certainly thinks Crnich deserves a proverbial pat on the back for catching the discrepancy, and consequently notifying Bowen's office of the problem in Premier's software.

”Carolyn Crnich deserves kudos for her dedication to election integrity and for alerting Secretary Bowen immediately when Crnich uncovered the problem,” Folmar said.