Democracy Gets Audited in California

It's another nightmare scenario.

In a Florida district this election, 18,000 people declined to cast a vote in a congressional race but voted in other contests on the same ballot. That was four or five times the number of "no votes" than in other elections, raising alarms about Florida's electronic voting machines.

In the race, Republican Vern Buchanan has been declared the winner over his Democratic challenger, Christine Jennings.  Buchanan won by 369 votes out of 238,000 cast, state officials said, but there is no paper trail to verify what happened to those 18,000 "no votes." Oh, and by the way, Buchanan and Jennings were running to replace Republican Rep. Katherine Harris, who was Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 election debacle and vacated her seat to run for U.S. Senate.

Could this happen here? What is wrong with those people? Should Florida just be eliminated as a state? Now, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein wants to answer at least one of those questions and take a hard look at electronic voting machines when the new Congress convenes.

In California, little-known to the general public, election officials have been auditing their electronic voting machines, as required by law, after the November election. Each county must compare the voting machine results from 1% of precincts to the voter-verified paper trail that the machine produced.

With all the squawking about the dangers of voting machines, a remarkably small number of people have been attending these public audits and observing the process. In some counties, nobody shows up while election officials verify the accuracy of the machines. But Kim Alexander with the California Voter Foundation, which fought to require a voter-verified paper trail in the state, and Stanford professor David Dill, who founded Verified Voting, have observed some interesting things while watching the audits over the past few days:

• It's up to county election officials to figure out the method of picking the precincts they want to audit. In San Mateo County, Dill said, they rolled 10-sided dice. Los Angeles County uses a random-digit generator. Some counties asked the voting machines themselves to pick which precincts to audit — which Dill said was like asking a bank to pick which part of the bank to audit.



• Alexander and Dill both worried that some counties were picking which precincts to audit several days before actually auditing the machines. "It does compromise the process because people know in advance what is going to be audited," Dill said, "and that means that maybe mistakes won't be caught if someone wanted to cheat."



• Alexander said that during the audit in San Joaquin County, a paper jam on one machine forced election officials to print out a new record of the votes. That meant they were using a record of votes produced by the machine and not verified by the voter on election day. "If somebody tampered with the results after the election, a printout from that same data wouldn't show that," she said.



• Few counties seemed to have written procedures for their audits. They sort of winged it. And it's unclear what is supposed to be done if errors are found. Alexander said in San Joaquin County, there was a two-vote difference between the voter-verified paper trail and the electronic results from the Diebold machine. In Yolo County, a one-vote difference was found. Which is correct?

Ordinary people can call their county elections office to see about watching e-voting audits that haven't been finished yet. Alexander has a tip sheet for observing.

For the most part, alarm bells are not ringing about California's auditing process, but look for legislation next year to reform the process and additional scrutiny from incoming Secretary of State Debra Bowen. "I've gained a lot of respect," Dill said, "about how complicated it is to do good auditing."

(Photos: George Clark / AP; Joshua Roberts / Gettty Images)