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.
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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. |
