Clerk/Recorder will run for
re-election to redefined post
By Charles Douglas
HUMBOLDT SENTINEL
EUREKA - The ramifications of recent revelations regarding
the security of election systems used across the country,
including in Humboldt County, continue to mount as local officials
defy calls for their resignations and pledge their continuing
commitment to reliable elections.
 County
Clerk/Recorder Carolyn Crnich and Elections Manager Lindsey
McWilliams said in an interview with the Humboldt Sentinel
on Thursday that they weren’t willing to go along with
Voter Confidence Committee (voterconfidencecommittee.org)
founder Dave Berman’s call for resisting federal mandates
which require the installation of new voting machines at every
polling place by Jan. 1.
“[Reform] is not going to start here,” McWilliams
said. “What Dave [Berman] wants us to do is engage in
civil disobedience and that’s just not what we’re
about.”
Berman had remarked in a Dec. 2 interview that the constraints
implied by the relationship between local election officials
and federal mandates should be disregarded.
“We should make having fair elections in Humboldt County
the focus of our attention,” he said. “We’ll
get back to the HAVA people later.”
Crnich distanced herself from the scandals involving Diebold,
the vendor for Humboldt’s traditional optical-scan ballots
as well as the proposed touch-screen system, which is intended
to operate parallel to normal ballot booths in order to satisfy
access requirements for the disabled under the federal Help
America Vote Act (HAVA). This month, Diebold faced the initiation
of a class action lawsuit by shareholders for securities fraud
and the resignation of its longtime Chief Executive Officer,
Walden O’Dell, whose activities on behalf of the re-election
of George W. Bush were widely criticized when coupled with
his company’s responsibilities regarding voting security.
“To me I’m not here to defend Diebold, only the
system and the decisions we made in this county,” Crnich
said. “We have had four years of reliable service.”
McWilliams was more sanguine about the company, noting that
the optical scan ballot system in use for several years was
actually produced by Global Election Systems, which was bought
out by Diebold in 2001.
“For us as end users or customers, the service and
support has increased since Diebold took over,” he said.
Both officials discounted the outcome of a test performed
by Finnish security expert Harry Hursti, whose demonstration
of how a Diebold voting machine could be manipulated with
an alternate memory card to change an election’s outcome
spurred election administrators in two Florida counties to
discontinue their use of Diebold equipment.
“In fact they gave Hursti the keys to the room, the
codes to the computer and turned him loose…that’s
not a real world test,” McWilliams said. “In my
personal opinion, if you only want to test the susceptibility
of the system… its saying here’s our system, you
go out to that real world and see if you can break in.”
Black Box Voting (blackboxvoting.org)
founder Bev Harris said on Dec. 2 that the idea Hursti had
complete access was a myth perpetrated by Diebold.
“The truth is we were never given any passwords, we
bought the materials off the Internet,” she said.
Crnich said it would be unreal for the elections office to
invite every person in, as this in itself would degrade protections.
“That’s the reason for security in the first
place,” she said. “I really hope that we’ll
be active to do education on the part of this community to
understand the procedures we’re working with now, but
we’re not inviting hackers in.”
Harris claims Diebold’s system is intrinsically vulnerable
due to its reliance a credit card-sized memory device.
“Anybody who gets their hands on one, including poll
workers, could swap the card,” she said. “It won’t
necessarily just affect the machine, it could affect other
machines as well. One bad card could spoil the bunch.”
The problem of where Humboldt County would be able to obtain
a different system weighed heavily on McWilliams’ mind
if Supervisors changed their minds about a purchase of disabled-friendly
Diebold equipment, as every vendor on the market used proprietary
software and were disinclined to disclose trade secrets.
“Here this election director in Florida gave Hursti
the complete access to everything,” McWilliams said.
“Does he do that to all the other vendors? How many
vendors are going to do business with him?”
Crnich said the only a system failure would cause her to
rethink the election office’s relationship with Diebold,
and suggested activists focus their attentions on the state
legislature, where the law requiring the manual hand recount
of 1% of the vote tallies for every election could be strengthened.
Until then, neither official would be willing to countenance
a Hursti-style test for Humboldt County, as an original non-disclosure
agreement with Global Election Systems continues to be in
force with Diebold.
“We will not disclose the software,” McWilliams
said. “If we did what [Leon County,] Florida did, Diebold
could sue us, and the County wouldn’t defend me or Carolyn
if we did that.”
Re-election for a new post?
While Crnich was first elected as County Recorder in 1990,
her promise to run for a fifth term next year will be the
first time where she will be running for office at the same
time as she oversees the election.
“I have never really been in that situation before,”
she said, although McWilliams was quick to point out that
Crnich’s role was administrative and he bore the responsibility
for the day-to-day operations of the office.
Crnich’s pledge to run comes on the heels of a call
for new personnel to administer local elections by Berman
on his GuvWurld blog (guvwurld.blogspot.com).
“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,” Berman
said earlier.
Crnich welcomed the chance to connect with voters about their
election-related concerns, as the Board of Supervisors transferred
these duties to her office in 2003 with the intent of putting
the Elections Division under elected oversight, rather than
that of an appointed Registrar of Voters, which McWilliams
had served as since 1996. Before that, the County Clerk was
its own elected office, which McWilliams first ran for in
1990 under a self-described banner of efficiency.
“Discussion is good and I think this is an opportunity
for discussion, albeit an expensive one, but that’s
what elections are about,” Crnich said.
While the 1990 race was, according to Crnich, so hotly contested
that the wife of then-Governor candidate Pete Wilson complained
that it was receiving more local coverage as compared to statewide
elections that year, no challengers had stepped forward in
the three following elections.
“Since then I’ve run unopposed and most people
can’t name the County Clerk/Recorder,” she said.
Even if elections are now part of her bailiwick, Crnich said
proprietary software, most likely from Diebold, would be used
no matter the objections from other candidates.
“If someone’s going to run for Clerk/Recorder
on the basis of we’re not going to use proprietary software,
then there is no election,” McWilliams said.
Harris thought it was an interesting approach to run for
local election administrator positions as a means of putting
pressure on vendors with unreliable track records.
“We definitely have to get rid of this secrecy business,”
she said.
McWilliams said his previous contest for County Clerk was
more about who could do the most professional job and make
the best use of available resources, with issues he characterizes
as national in nature absent.
“Down here for the most part running people running
for office or [who] are in office [do so] because they want
to make this work,” he said.
Berman is nonetheless committed to making these issues the
centerpiece of local elections in Humboldt and 16 other California
counties in the upcoming June primaries when election administrators
face the voters. Berman has already submitted his complaint
to the District Attorney and the Grand Jury in Humboldt and
has called for activists across the state to do the same in
their counties.
“We are trying to draw a line in the sand demonstrating
our refusal to accept election conditions that will continue
to guarantee inconclusive outcomes,” Berman stated on
his GuvWurld blog. “Necessary to this goal is a similar
line in the sand laid down by elections officials. After all,
if they say elections ‘could not be conducted’
under certain circumstances, why have we not seen a cancelled
election? Where will elections officials draw their line in
the sand?…Anyone who continues defending, excusing or
apologizing for current election conditions has no business
in election administration or in any other public office.”
No candidates have yet stepped forward, with a March 10 filing
deadline for all county offices.
Stumbling block for preferential voting?
One of the reforms promulgated by Berman’s Voter Confidence
Resolution is the use of Ranked Choice Voting for single-seat
offices, with indications from activists such as Mark Konkler
that they intend to pursue a charter amendment to this affect
for Eureka’s Mayor, as well as choice voting for the
City Council and School Board.
McWilliams, who has said he is agnostic on the subject personally,
was nonetheless skeptical about how it could be implemented
locally without support from other layers of government.
“We have a contract with Diebold and that contract
says at no cost to us they will make any changes required
by state or federal law,” he said. “If the City
of Eureka wants it, they’re going to have to pay for
it.”
In addition to uncertain costs, McWilliams said any new system
would have to go through the process of federal qualification
and state certification. Without this, the local elections
office would be unable to honor Eureka’s request, even
if approved by voters, and no polls would be set up within
the city limits.
“They can say they want what they want, but we only
conduct their election when they request it and if we can’t
conduct their election, they can do it like Trinidad and conduct
their own,” McWilliams said. “If they required
Instant Runoff Voting, we could not do their elections.”
Crnich again called upon local activists to set their sights
on the state level instead of putting local officials on the
spot with a potentially expensive conversion process.
“When we’ll see Ranked Choice Voting in the rest
of California, it will be by the initiative process and I
hope the initiative will come with the funding,” she
said.
Some areas of agreement
Despite the gulf of perspectives, election officials concurred
with Berman on the need for greater physical security at election
device storage areas, although McWilliams said the only county
workers with access to the present storage area were with
the survey crew.
“Janitors don’t have access to the room, not
that we have anything against janitors,” he said, to
which Crnich added, “…they have no more interest
in the voting equipment than the average voter.”
Crnich also said Berman’s exclusion from the precinct-based
ballot counting at Arcata City Hall on Nov. 8 was unintentional,
although she did not comment as to whether it constituted
a violation of state election law. McWilliams claimed he would
have been willing to e-mail precinct results to Berman on
the night of the election.
“Dave [Berman] didn’t contact us, he didn’t
go in to introduce himself to the [precinct] board, so I can’t
blame the board for closing the door, I can’t blame
City Hall for locking the doors,” he said. “We
have an open door, Dave [Berman] has to walk through it.”
Activists and bureaucrats alike were looking forward to a
meeting of minds early next year when an Election Advisory
Board will be developed with representatives of local political
parties and election-minded non-profits like the League of
Women Voters and Tri-County Independent Living. Officials
are looking to the new EAB for help in recruiting new energy
for the rapidly graying compliment of poll workers, as well
as to find new polling places to replace those unable to meet
accessibility requirements.
“As an election that has to serve every registered
voter in the county, it makes it very difficult for us to
find polling places that meet these standards,” Crnich
said.
In areas like Whitethorn, some blocs of voters are already
considered to be permanent absentee voters as no public or
private facilities up to standards exist, while in others
McWilliams is faced with the prohibition on the use of public
funds to fix up churches or other private properties.
“It’s a mutated Burger King, it’s everybody
have it their way,” he said. “It just drives up
the expense and the logistics of the election.”
Although she is based in Washington and won’t be in
town for the meeting, Harris hoped it would serve as a way
to bring local skeptics and insiders into a better working
relationship and a shared understanding of what their joint
demands on state and federal legislators should be.
“I’ve met a lot of the elections officials in
California, they are excellent, wonderful people for the most
part,” she said. “They are not the problem, I
think the problem is at a higher level.”
An organizational meeting for the EAB will be held on Jan.
5, 6:30 p.m. in Conference Room A of the County Courthouse.
|
