Rick Hasen, our favorite election law expert, has an interesting article in Slate.com this week about the sudden disappearance of the American Center for Voting Rights, the conservative "think tank" created in the wake of the 2000 Florida election recount and dedicated "to the
unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections."
Democrats and liberals have been leading a fairly aggressive campaign to prove that unverified electronic voting poses a serious threat to democracy because the machines can be hacked by partisan elections workers and others. But the American Center for Voting Rights took a different route. Hasen writes the center uses its influence ... "to support the passage of onerous
voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor,
minorities, and the elderly — groups more likely to vote Democratic.
Where the Bush administration may have failed to nail illegal voters,
the effort to suppress minority voting has borne more fruit,
as more states pass these laws, and courts begin to uphold them in the
name of beating back waves of largely imaginary voter fraud."
The group practiced the art of using anecdote as evidence, Hasen writes, but could never credibly prove widespread voter fraud. Now, they are gone. No website, no more documents or reports. And even the group's attorney has wiped the organization clean from his resume.
(Photo: Alan Diaz/AP)
The disputed race for Orange County supervisor between Janet Nguyen and Trung Nguyen provides a cautionary tale for critics of electronic voting machines. In one high-profile case in California, the state's legal requirement to produce a paper receipt from all the electronic voting machines turned out to be ignored in a very close election.
When Janet Nguyen "lost" the race to Trung Nguyen by a sliver-thin seven votes in February, she demanded a full recount. Jon Fleischman, a vice chairman of the California GOP, picks up the story: "As part of her recount strategy, Janet Nguyen had the paper (absentee) ballots recounted manually looking for errors. Then, mid-recount, seeing that she had picked up enough votes to probably be in the lead, her campaign made a tactical decision to switch counting methods and requested that the remaining ballots - the electronic ballots - be recounted by simply re-downloading the memory sticks and that the paper balloting receipts generated by the electronic voting machines not be recounted." [Emphasis added.]
At this point, 30-year-old Janet Nguyen (pictured below) was declared the winner - by three votes out of about 46,000 - and sworn into office. She became the first Vietnamese American to serve on the OC board. Trung Nguyen immediately ran to court to contest the election, but a four-day trial ended up in Janet Nguyen's favor.
The judge ruled that the person requesting and paying for the recount can choose which method of counting to be used. It was reasonable, the judge said, for Janet Nguyen to ask for about 35,000 paper absentee ballots to be checked by hand, and to have the 10,000 electronic votes from election night be checked by the machine itself.
The verification trail from those machines, meanwhile, was not touched. As Trung Nguyen's attorney said: "What, then, is the point of producing the paper receipts?" California lost a big opportunity in this disputed election to check the veracity of electronic voting machines.
(Photo: Gail Burton/AP)
You may have missed Stephen Heller's three episodes as a wedding planner on "Passions," but the Van Nuys actor is getting some publicity this week for another crime he committed. (That's a joke! I'm sure he's a fine actor.)
 Heller, a former temp worker at a powerful Los Angeles law firm, recently pleaded guilty to lifting 500 pages of secret memos showing how Diebold tried to sell untested voting technology in California. Heller passed the information to the Oakland Tribune, and the Secretary of State quickly yanked the certification for Diebold's touch-screen voting machines in California.
Voting machine watchdogs consider Heller a hero for blowing the whistle on Diebold. But the L.A. District Attorney thought otherwise and indicted him for unauthorized access to a computer. Heller agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and write a letter of apology to Diebold and the law firm where he worked, Jones Day.
Now Heller has become something of cult hero for his act. He gave his first live interview about the incident, BradBlog reports, where he said about stealing the documents: "Ultimately I took them because dishonorable people at Diebold were
trying to turn our Democracy into a facade. They were trying to turn
our elections into a mockery, into a lie. Lies must be challenged." He's also very candid about what he did: "I think I am a whistleblower. I also think I'm a thief. I stole
attorney-client privileged documents. That's a serious crime. I pled guilty to the crime and I'm taking responsibility for it. But what is a
crime is not necessarily wrong. And in fact, I believe that I exposed
something that all Americans needed to know about. So I do think I'm a whistleblower."
Read the full interview here, on BradBlog.
The Diebold voting machine company - whose chief executive promised Republicans in
a fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio
deliver its electoral votes to the president" - may be getting out of the election business. The much-maligned company is worried that the tarnished reputation of its voting machine division may hurt its mainstay: ATM sales. Read the story here.
In California - where Diebold is used in 20 out of 58 counties (PDF) - state officials have assured voters that the "political preferences" of voting machine companies won't influence election results. From the Secretary of State: "California has taken extreme measures to implement checks and balances to ensure that the integrity of the data is preserved." Nevertheless, SOS Debra Bowen has ordered a top-to-bottom review of the state's voting technology.
When Riverside County activists questioned the results from last fall's election, supervisor Jeff Stone issued a challenge to skeptics of electronic voting machines. He would allow them to hack into a Sequoia Voting System machine used by the county.
"I'd like to set up an appointment with one of our machines and I'd
like him or her to verify that they can manipulate that machine," said Stone (pictured below). "And
I'm gonna bet a thousand to one that they cannot do it. ... I'll make that
challenge."
But California's elections chief isn't buying it. Secretary of State Debra Bowen has rejected Stone's request to participate in a "hack test" on the machines in Riverside County, one of the first places the nation to introduce touch-screen voting. And it's not because Bowen knows the Sequoia machines are safe and can't be compromised. She writes in a letter reprinted by Bradblog: 
"As you know, voting equipment is subject to tampering in a wide range of settings. This test you have proposed wouldn’t address the issue of whether
someone who can reach around the back of the machine undetected or can
bring a tool into the voting booth without being noticed by a poll
worker will be able to gain access to the machine."
With another presidential race nearing, Bowen is under pressure from critics of electronic voting machines. Those same people helped with a grassroots effort to unseat incumbent Republican Bruce McPherson, and Bowen herself ran a campaign built on fears about the manipulation of public elections through e-voting. Bowen now has begun a "thorough review" of California's electronic voting systems, part of which will be conducted in secret because the voting software is considered proprietary.
(Photo:
Steve Yeater / AP)
 Brad Blog, the state's most persistent blogger-watchdog on the dangers of voting technology, reports that Secretary of State Debra Bowen has hired a fierce critic of "unverified" voting machines as her chief deputy in charge of ... voting technology. Lowell Finley, the lead attorney for VoterAction.org, will become her new deputy secretary of state.
"Finley and VoterAction (his group) have filed a number of landmark lawsuits in several states, including in California, over the past year or so, demanding an immediate halt to the use and purchase of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE/touch-screen) voting systems and decertification of many of those systems, as well as improved processes for certification of such systems.
"The Berkeley-based attorney Finley -- also one of the attorneys representing voter plaintiffs in the contested election in Florida's 13th congressional district in Sarasota --- had one of his most recent and notable successes last September, when a Colorado judge ordered a complete review of certification procedures for voting machines in the state. The court found the official placed in charge of testing and certification didn't have the qualifications necessary, and performed little or no testing."
The Oakland Tribune reported that Finley "has pulled out of lawsuits against elections officials in California, Florida, Ohio and other states in order to accept" the post.
Almost exactly three years ago, Finley represented Bill Camp of the Sacramento Labor Council. They successfully convinced a Superior Court judge that Schwarzenegger had illegally "loaned" his campaign $4.5 million. The ruling forced Schwarzenegger to pay the money back from his own pocket rather than through campaign contributions. The absurdly optimist governor called the ruling "fantastic," but Finley told the S.F. Chronicle (me, working there) at the time: "He is on some kind of medication that I would like to have a prescription for."
In photo, Bowen is sworn in Monday by Justice George Nicholson of the 3rd District Court, standing with her stepdaughter, Nora Miller Nechedom, left, and husband Mark Nechodom, right.
(Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / AP)
The corporate parent of an electronic voting company that supplies machines to 20 California counties — including Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara and Alameda — is under scrutiny from federal investigators to determine whether it paid bribes to win a Venezuela election contract in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reports today (subscription required):  "The Justice Department has been conducting a probe of Smartmatic for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and recently started looking at possible tax evasion as well, said two individuals familiar with the case."
Smartmatic, which last year purchased a U.S. voting machine company, Sequoia Voting Systems, is owned by Venezuelan investors, the newspaper reported, and has been the subject of speculation that it is controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, seen in photo. The Venezuelan ties, first reported by the L.A. Times' Marc Lifsher last June, prompted Smartmatic's Venezuelan president, Antonio Mugica, to proclaim: "No foreign government from any country ever held a stake in Smartmatic, period."
Nevertheless, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. is determining whether the Sequoia purchase is a national security issue. In a separate investigation, the Justice Department is probing whether Smartmatic bribed officials to win its contract in Venezuela. The company admits it paid $1.5 million to a Venezuelan consultant with "close ties to the Chavez government and who helped win the Smartmatic contract," but investigators are looking into whether the actual payment was $4 million.
Venezuela used Smartmatic machines in a 2004 recall election that Chavez easily defeated, and they will be used Sunday in the presidential election there. Its U.S. company, Sequoia, has been certified to operate in California.
(Photo: Leslie Mazoch / AP)
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)
The liberal political action group MoveOn.org is offering a $250,000 reward "for new material evidence leading to a felony conviction for an organized effort of partisan voter suppression or electronic voting fraud."
L.A. Times reporters in the field have described only a few problems at polling stations:
South L.A.: Confusion over ballots brought voting at the Theresa Lindsay Senior Center on East 42nd Street in Los Angeles to a crawl. Poll workers said voters selected multiple candidates for an office, resulting in an "overvote," which the electronic Inkavote machines quickly spit out with a receipt of errors. Volunteer poll inspector Tesra Jackson: "They're coming in with different kinds of literature from different candidates and that's what's making it really confusing." She said that candidates are sending out ballots that aren't official ballots and voters are bringing those in thinking they can just copy from that. —Times staff writer Ashley Surdin
 Los Alamitos: Don Angel, a former Times editorial writer, said he waited in line for more than an hour Tuesday afternoon after three electronic voting machines malfunctioned at his precinct in the Rossmoor community of Los Alamitos. Angel said he was told by poll workers that the three machines broke down at 9:45 a.m., leaving only five in working order. The delays were exacerbated by the fact that three precincts had been consolidated into one at the Rossmoor Park site. —Times staff writer Dave McKibben
Irvine/Huntington Beach: There were reports of long lines because of electronic voting machines malfunctioning. Rhona Kershnar said she was unable to vote at an Irvine elementary school when a "printer unavailable" message popped up as she began voting shortly after 7 a.m. Kershnar said she and other voters contacted a poll worker, who was unable to get the problem immediately resolved. After some 20 minutes, Kershnar left for work. At a polling place in Huntington Beach, two of the seven voting machines were not working and poll workers were hesitant to hand out paper ballots, said Nick Carter, a voter who arrived at about 7:30 a.m. —Dave McKibben
(Photo: Tony Avelar / AP)
There is a lot of buzz over a new report by a Princeton University computer science professor and two students who hacked into a Diebold voting machine and manipulated the results.
The trio obtained a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine, created a virus and downloaded it into the machine using a memory card inserted into a locked hatch on the side. They found: "Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."
Diebold says the report is flawed because its authors hacked old software and went through numerous locks and security tags, something a precinct worker might easily notice.
Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation says California doesn't use the Diebold system in question and requires a paper trail for each vote. (This is in part because she pestered the state for years.)
But Alexander says this problem remains: "California has a voter-verified paper audit trail law, as well as a law requiring random audits. However, California's 'manual count' law, which mandates a public recount of the ballots from one percent of each county's precincts, may not be sufficient to detect fraud or error. The one percent level was set back in 1965, when voting systems were still largely paper-based. In light of the physical and technical insecurities we now know of in Diebold's electronic voting systems, the percentage of ballots to be recounted in California needs to be increased to mitigate the new risks. Another and perhaps better way to avoid these risks is to rely primarily on paper ballot voting systems in the first place."
Extremely close elections do occur in California. Republican Tom McClintock came within 23/100th of one percent of Democrat Steve Westly in the 2002 state Controller's race, the closest margin in state history.
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Rick Hasen, our favorite election law expert, has an interesting article in Slate.com this week about the sudden disappearance of the American Center for Voting Rights, the conservative "think tank" created in the wake of the 2000 Florida election recount and dedicated "to the
unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections."
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