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Vol.
I No. 8 Election Advisory Board Convenes
as County Misses Federal Deadline By Charles Douglas
A plan approved by the Board of Supervisors to comply minimally with the standards by placing one disabled-friendly touch screen voting device next to the standard optical scan ballot booths at every polling site fell through after Diebold failed to obtain certification for its TSX system by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. He announced in a letter last month that his office was sending the equipment back to the federal vote machine testing laboratories because of a key interpreter code that may be present in all Diebold systems, including those currently in use. Such codes are prohibited by standards and guidelines published by the Federal Election Commission.
“There may be things that are beyond our reach as a committee,” Crnich said. “Please don’t think this is where the sidewalk ends.” Crnich will appoint a majority, if not all of the eleven community members who joined county officials and the media at the EAC meeting, which will be kept open to the public and held again on Feb. 2. Supervisors on Tuesday appointed, from amongst their own, Jimmy Smith to represent them on the EAC, with John Woolley as his alternate. While both were present for the EAC, they maintained they were only there to listen. Smith had noted in earlier comments that while he had full confidence in local election officials, more public education and involvement was needed, a sentiment echoed by the newly formed Humboldt Voters Association (HVA). “I’m hoping this move will be the beginning of a new era for Humboldt County,” HVA member Dave Ogden said. “This is a golden opportunity for doing for ourselves what the state and national government will not do for us.” HVA organizer Scott Menzies said his group would focus on campaign finance reform, election security and the adoption of ranked choice voting for local elections, which would require the purchase of a compatible system by the county in order to implement. “Our concern is the ballot be of the sort that validly respects the opinions of the voters for all candidates,” he said. McKinleyville fisherman Dave Bitz said the ability to verify the results of machine-computed results was of paramount importance. “There is always going to be instances of glitches, instances of fraud,” he said. “We have to maintain faith in the integrity of the process.” Fellow commercial fisherman Ken Collins of Blocksburg believed Humboldt County could set an example to be exported to scandal-ridden areas like Georgia or Florida, a sentiment echoed by Green Party Chair Greg Allen. “I hope we’re going to do more than talk about the weather, I think we can do something about it, damn it!” he exclaimed. “If we get it right enough, people are going to want to do this.” Democratic Central Committee member Pat Higgins also thought a pawl was cast over the election system with the continuing uncertainty over the accuracy of voting machines. “I really don’t have confidence in our election system at this point, I’m concerned our Republic is becoming a democracy in name only,” he said. “The proprietary software often can’t be audited.” On that note, Higgins recommends working with the Open Voting Consortium (www.openvotingconsortium.org) to develop open-source, public domain voting software. Higgins is also promoting the Clean Money Campaign (www.caclean.org), which proposes to create publicly financed state elections. “The fact that we have a closed system and we’ve drifted down so fare, this is not a viable path, just nibbling around the edges is not enough and we have to bite this bullet,” he said.
While election reform activist Dave Berman, whose Voter Confidence Committee divied up its membership and scope of work to allow for the creation of the HVA, wasn’t at the EAC meeting, he said this shouldn’t be construed to mean he disagrees with the areas focused on by attendees. “The deadline came and went, nobody’s in compliance and the world didn’t end, so lets get some perspective and address what’s really important,” he said on Friday. “I think any dialogue about the options is better than no dialogue, but we need to see a lot more openness on the part of the elections department to confront the reality of the problems inherent in our current equipment, [because] until now I’ve only seen denial of the problems and defense of the equipment.” With Diebold seemingly out the window following a wave of rejections by election officials in Florida, North Carolina and Connecticut as well as a shareholder lawsuit, consideration of systems such as VotePad’s Assistive Device, Vogue Election System’s Automark or Election System and Software’s Votronic was accompanied by Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliam’s sober reminder that no new system could be installed in time for the statewide primary election on June 6, which means voters would continue to use the AccuVote system maintained by Diebold.
McWilliams warned that action from the state Attorney General’s office was not out of the question if his office opened even a single polling place that didn’t meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. As many as 34 precincts had to vote by mail in the special election last November and whole areas of Southern Humboldt may be permanently without polling places in future elections. Meetings are scheduled to occur on the first Thursday of the month at 6:30 p.m. at the county courthouse, with next month’s session to feature a demonstration of logic and accuracy testing for voting machines. An election guide for state and local offices up for grabs this year can be found through the county elections website (www.co.humboldt.ca.us/election/). A non-divisive split? After the EAC adjourned, Menzies said in an interview that the creation of his association shouldn’t subtract from, but would instead compliment the work of Berman’s Voter Confidence Committee (VCC), which he characterized as a “platform-promoting organization” through the Voter Confidence Resolution (guvwurld.blogspot.com), while the HVA considers its foremost goal the implementation of preferential voting in Eureka. “We want to really make concrete changes…to take actions and create results people can feel and see,” Menzies said. “We want to spend our time taking on the reforms themselves, instead of a platform of reforms.” Berman couldn’t agree more, suggesting election reform isn’t as much a goal in and of itself as a tactic towards peaceful resolution. “We’ve planned for a very long time to divide the VCC into a campaign oriented departments and this has been a long time in the works, although perhaps hastily announced,” he said. “They have stated their preference for prioritization. It’s what, in their opinion, they would like to work for and I respect that.” Berman said the VCC is working on an allocation scheme to figure out how best to direct the financial and volunteer resources on its subscriber list. “We’re trying to engage people in a new way that suits their interests and their strong skills, there’s things emerging in the community that will allow many groups, not just the VCC, to plug into a coalition.” Berman said his group had no plans to support or oppose the anti-corporate
contribution initiative or to connect with its sponsor, the Humboldt Coalition
for Community Rights. Berman had also never heard of the Humboldt Pro-Democracy
Coalition, also sponsored by Democracy Unlimited and purportedly devoted
to implementing ranked choice voting. |
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Copyright © 2005-06, Humboldt Sentinel. All rights reserved. |
EUREKA
– Humboldt County’s new Election Advisory Committee (EAC)
met for the first time on Thursday to grapple with an ever-widening crisis
of voter confidence in election security and voting systems as its vendor,
Diebold, Inc. faces a revolt by wary election officials across the country.
Like the majority of counties across California on Sunday, Humboldt officially
missed its deadline to comply with provisions of the federal Help America
Vote Act (HAVA) concerning the provision of disabled-accessible voting
devices.
To
deal with accessibility issues and rebuild voter confidence in the wake
of recently contested national elections is the purpose of the EAC, according
to County Clerk/Recorder Carolyn Crnich, although she warned that the
Legislature might be needed for some of the systemic reforms sought by
election reform activists.
Fortuna
student Michael Smith said he wanted intracampus voting in the California
State University system to be examined, even though elections at HSU and
elsewhere are conducted within the campus system and do not in any way
involve county elections officials. Former attorney David Cobb, seated
next to Smith, said his view that California was better off than most
states was one that came from a national perspective, although he had
already resigned his seat on the National Committee of the Green Party
last year.
“They
could very easily decide to implement hand-counted paper ballots and at
this point that’s the only solution for the short-term,” Berman
said in a later interview. “They can’t give the go-ahead for
Diebold knowing that interpreter code is there and they kind of have egg
on their face because how did they let it past them in the first place?…I’ve
been exploring legal possibilities for an injunction against their continued
use since they’re more than likely proven to be out of compliance.”