A Crisis of Confidence

A Crisis of Confidence

Doubt cast on security of local elections

By Charles Douglas
HUMBOLDT SENTINEL

EUREKA - A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Oct. 20 contains biting criticisms of electronic voting systems used by elections officials across the country -- and which both nationally prominent and homegrown activists say also applies to balloting in Humboldt County.

“While electronic voting systems hold promise for improving the election process, numerous entities have raised concerns about their security and reliability, citing instances of weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate system version control, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management, and vague or incomplete voting system standards,” the GAO report states.

Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris said point-blank that some of these concerns directly relate to the AccuVote machines manufactured by Diebold, Inc. and used in Humboldt County to count optically-scanned votes. In particular, Harris pointed to the central tabulator of votes known as GEMS and to the precinct-based ballot box cards used to program the machines for each election.

“[GEMS] has issues that still have not been resolved, they were originally exposed by Black Box Voting in 2003 and confirmed in a study by Dr. Johnson,” she said on Friday. Harris said these findings were confimed again by an independent report commissioned by the Ohio Secretary of State’s office and released on Aug. 18 of last year. “[The report] rated defects in GEMS as triple-high security risk, they indicated [the defects] had not been resolved…in California they’re looking at changing the way the windows program works in order to resolve this.”

Regarding the use of ballot box cards, Harris referred to a report she commissioned to Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, which he released on July 4. Hursti alleges the removable media contains “an executable program which acts on the vote data” which could potentially change the way vote-counting machines function and the way votes are reported.

“Whereas we would expect to see vote data in a sealed, passive environment, this system places votes into an open active environment,” he stated in his report. “With this architecture, every time an election is conducted it is necessary to reinstall part of the functionality into the Optical Scan system via memory card, making it possible to introduce program functions either authorized or unauthorized, either wholesale or in a targeted manner, with no way to verify that the certified or even standard functionality is maintained from one voting machine to the next.”

It was these concerns which prompted Voter Confidence Committee organizer and Eureka resident Dave Berman to raise the issue in his Guv Wurld blog (guvwurld.blogspot.com) and in discussions with local elections officials, criticizing the lack of any governmental or media attention in Humboldt County nearly six weeks after the GAO report was released.

“Who allowed Humboldt's voting machines to have uncertified software installed in them?” Berman stated in his blog. “Was someone in the Humboldt County elections department complicit in this crime or merely negligent? Is this person still employed by the elections department, and if so, why? Humboldt voters deserve answers and local media that will pursue accountability.”

Berman related on his blog excerpts from various comments made by Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams, who he claims accused him in an e-mail to VCC member Mark Konkler of “ignorant cowardice” due to Berman’s objection to the locking of a polling place during precinct-level counting, an incident which Berman construed to be a potential violation of state election law.

“Over the past many months, members of the Voter Confidence Committee have met several times with [County Clerk/Recorder Carolyn] Crnich,” he stated. “She has humbly admitted being unfamiliar with many of the concerns about our current election conditions. This is in contrast to County Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams who both stands in denial of these problems and becomes hostile and defensive when confronted with them.”

Berman confirmed in a Friday interview an earlier statement where he encouraged increased oversight by Supervisors and new blood for the seats of elected and appointed officials who oversee local voting.

“We can’t continue on this path and part of changing course is having a different attitude in the elections department, people who would be willing to resist federal mandates against the interests of the people of Humboldt County,” he said.

Berman later clarified that while he had no proof of tampering in recent elections, especially after the Voter Confidence Committee performed a ‘parallel election’ polling voters as they left the polling station located at Arcata City Hall during the Nov. 8 special election, there were nonetheless paperless ballots in use.

“If we can’t recount, we can’t know for sure how they were passed,” he said. “I’m not interested in contesting the outcome, but I do think understanding the conditions is important.”

While the County Clerk/Recorder officially responsible for local elections is elected every four years, the federal mandates chiefly in question are contained in the federal Help America Vote Act, passed in the wake of massive election irregularities in the 2000 presidential election.

“It mandates the deadline of buying new machines a year before it sets the standards for what the machines are supposed to do,” Harris said. “Only the government is capable of such a boondoggle.”

Harris encouraged election reform activists to consider running for office as “democracy in action,” citing incidences of many county elections officials in California sending optical scan voting systems home with precinct workers, complete with memory cards inside of them, only an easily-circumvented seal preventing their removal from the back of machines.

Konkler claimed, however, that he had a good working relationship with officials, who he said had a “good band-aid going for the time being” to prevent tampering, although McWilliams admitted in testimony before Supervisors earlier this year that machines were not stored in a completely secure location.

“I understand by working with officials at the elections department, with all the other things they deal with, can’t always focus just on the machine issues,” Konkler said. “Those are more looked at by the state agencies and they mandate what they can work with on a local level.”

Harris agreed that many county elections officials across California had good intentions but were constrained by state and federal authorities and business interests alike.

“We definitely have to get rid of this secrecy business,” she said. “I have seen the contracts between the elections officials and the vendors and the contracts don’t even allow the elections official to check out the system.”

Harris’ primary focus remains squarely on election machine manufacturers, citing Hursti’s demonstration of three hacks on Diebold's optical scan memory cards in addition to Thompson's two successful hacks of the GEMS vote tabulator. Harris also cited videotaped evidence presented at her website (blackboxvoting.org) of Diebold officials admitting security breaches.

“First the vendors that lie to public officials are going to have to be taken out of business,” she said. “Diebold is guilty of that and that’s why they were decertified in California in 2004, they were repeatedly lying to the Secretary of State.”

Berman made clear his intent to keep Humboldt County from doing further business with Diebold regardless of the outcome of their struggle to gain certification for their systems from the new Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson.

“Ultimately what we do doesn’t just educate but motivate, people have to hear this message and be moved by it to go out in the community and make sure people don’t live under this delusion that this is a democracy with real elections,” Berman said. “That means talking to your neighbors, that means informing the media and that means showing up to community meetings like the Board of Supervisors.”

Supervisors, Crnich, McWilliams and Assistant Elections Manager Lou Leeper were all contacted for this story, but were unable to be reached by deadline, some of them out of town on official business. An item bounced around some of these channels for the last several months has been the creation of an Election Advisory Board to channel the concerns of citizens, with Mark Konkler expecting it to be made up of one representative of each of the organized political parties in the county, plus interested non-partisan groups such as the League of Women Voters.

Konkler also hoped an outcome of the process would be to nudge the county towards the use of open source software in election machines.

“What the county needs to do and what the state needs to do is provide funding to study voting software at the universities, and allow universities to do research,” he said. “California would have cutting-edge technology.”

A meeting on the creation of an Election Advisory Board is scheduled for Jan. 5 in Conference Room A of the county courthouse, although Berman isn’t holding his breath.

“We first asked for this task force in April, and it was met originally with a favorable response, and at several points between then and now we were shined on,” he said. “We can’t sit on our hands and wait for a meting that may or may not happen and may or may not cut to the heart of the matter…the development of our message and our materials from the [Voter Confidence] resolution, its all so much more developed and so much more detailed, we can’t sit around, we know what to do and we don’t need to wait to start doing it.

The Voter Confidence Resolution, drafted by Berman and the Voter Confidence Committee last year, was adopted on July 20 by the Arcata City Council, and has also been endorsed by the Green Party of Humboldt County, Velvet Revolution and most recently the Eureka Greens (eurekagreens.blogspot.com). It calls for public domain voting processes, clean money laws, voter-verified paper ballots, holidays on election days, public counting of votes, open presidential debates, proportional representation and equal time provisions for the media along with greater local, public control of the airwaves.

Harris, who supports the resolution along with Black Box Voting, said she found it to be taking very progressive directions, suggesting potential future involvement in the case of promoting instant runoff voting, which would guarantee majority winners for single-seat elections.

“It adds a lot of complexity to the process but its doable,” she said.

The Green Party of Humboldt County (greenhumboldt.org) is set to consider an endorsement of instant runoff voting for the Mayor of Eureka and choice voting for its City Council at a General Assembly of party members on Saturday, ideas presented to the community at a town hall meeting in April sponsored by Councilmembers Mike Jones and Chris Kerrigan and conducted by the Voter Confidence Committee.