Last week, Secretary of State Debra Bowen released a report on her "top-to-bottom review" of voting systems in use in California. No sooner had the report come out than Stephen Weir, President of the California Association of Clerks & Elections Officials (CACEO), other election officials, and voting system vendors all mounted a full-throated attack against the top-to-bottom report. What’s going on here?
Bowen’s review is the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of voting systems ever undertaken in the U.S. It included investigations of voting systems' hardware, software, documentation and accessibility for three manufacturers: Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) was too late to be included in the review.
“This is the most complete and thorough analysis of election auditing I have seen,” said Commonweal Institute Advisor Dennis Paull. “It clearly points out the problems with current procedures but shows the pros and cons of various proposed 'reforms'.”
“The authors make excellent use of statistical methods developed by professional statisticians and auditors working in the financial services industry, although there are some features of elections that don't translate easily.
“My main concern is the difference between random errors and those caused by a fraudster. For example, if a fraudster has knowledge, even for a short time, of which ballots (precincts) will be subject to the audit, he/she might choose to 'adjust' only ballots NOT subject to audit. This is not covered well [in the report], although they do make recommendations to keep the time between choosing the precincts subject to audit and the actual manual recount as short as possible.”
The election officials’ and equipment vendors’ main line of attack on Bowen’s report is that the equipment vulnerabilities were demonstrated in “a laboratory environment”. In a full-scale election, they claim, election officials would have procedures and protocols in place that would prevent the flaws demonstrated in all of the vendors’ equipment from actually affecting election outcomes.
What the press is not saying, and what Debra Bowen, who knows she will have to work with these election officials, cannot afford to say publicly either, is that the fundamental problem here is not CONFIDENCE. It is TRUST. The distinction I am making here is between confidence as a feeling based on external, situational signals, and trust, which connotes a deep, inner sense of a person’s integrity, the base of which one may not even be able to articulate.
Voters cannot and should not trust any voting system, or the results of any election, not fully open to public view and inspection, at all phases and in all aspects. The history of multiple incidents of equipment malfunction, flipped votes, vote count discrepancies, etc., in the past several national elections and in multiple states, has provided voters with ample reason to distrust election officials, equipment vendors, and those very procedures and protocols they claim will yield secure elections. And these are the same election officials who selected the voting equipment that the top-to-bottom review has revealed as flawed. Whom do they think they’re kidding?
As Dennis Paull suggested, the biggest threat to election integrity comes from insiders. Much of what goes on in elections is done by election staff—insiders—who work out of public sight. Are security checks done on staff? Are their bank accounts and spending patterns monitored for evidence of possible bribe-taking? Who knows? Election officials rely heavily on the voting equipment vendors to make the complex equipment work and solve problems that come up during elections. Election officials are treated lavishly by vendors and many end up working for vendors after they leave public office.
Just try, as an ordinary citizen, to observe ALL of the inside goings-on during an election, and you’ll likely run into obstacles as Dennis Paull and I did in November 2006.
Meanwhile, CACEO claims that it is “committed to promote public confidence in the administration of elections”.
Fine. But we’re back to confidence versus trust. The best way for election officials to gain the public’s TRUST would be for them to welcome Bowen’s investigation that has shown how flawed the present systems are, and to work with her to improve election integrity and openness.