Today, I viewed the results of an extensive public records request in King County, Washington. Working with Kathleen Wynne, who has added her talents to Black Box Voting, we reviewed hundreds of pages of documents.
One item of interest was the set of "trouble slips" from the Sept. 14 election. Many precincts ran out of ballots.
At first, the solution was acceptable and efficient: Runners were assigned to bring new ballots to locations with less than 15 left.
Then it got more bizarre:
1) They started taking ballots to Kinkos to have extra copies made. Again, vote-counting is a form of bookkeeping. The reason you NEVER do this is that ballots are printed with a serial number. The ballots are accounted for when distributed to each precinct, and there are no duplicate serial numbers. Poll workers keep track of how many ballots they are given, and how many they use.
When you start duplicating ballots at Kinkos, you produce multiple ballots with the same serial number. This ruins one part of the audit.
2) It became more bizarre when they decided to start having people borrow ballots from other polling places, some of which did not have exactly the same ballot questions.
3) The most bizarre thing of all was a trouble slip giving poll workers permission to deal with running out of ballots by "letting voters vote on the Chinese ones "if they don't mind."
Keep in mind that the ballots included both candidate names and other questions.
We are finding, with the Cleanup Crews (
http://www.blackboxvoting.org) that elections are run in a much more slipshod way than most people realize. This has been going on a long time, but is getting worse.
The answer, of course, is to follow sound bookkeeping principles and count the vote in public -- and public scrutiny helps a great deal.
You can have the fanciest computer program in the world, but if you fall apart on basic bookkeeping principles, your election will not have much integrity. Printing ballots at Kinkos is not acceptable. Borrowing the wrong ballot from somewhere else is even worse. But giving people a Chinese ballot when they don't speak Chinese is simply indefensible.
At first, I thought this might have taken place in Seattle's Chinatown, but apparently it happened in Kenmore, a North Seattle suburb.
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And if you think this is bad -- the implications of what John Gideon and Ellen Thiesen (VotersUnite.org) in their King County records request is even worse!
1. King County bought software that was "provisionally certified" in direct contradiction to state law.
2. It gets worse: The contract Diebold put in place made King County promise NEVER to get it certified by any ITA. In a nutshell: It came from a programmer's desk in Canada right into our central tabulator.
3. And yes, it gets worse yet: The software will apparently be removed on Nov. 16 or thereabouts, when the "provisional certification" expires. This reminds me of Georgia, where they put in a last minute patch that no one certified, and later purged it from the machines.
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And if you think that isn't bad enough: I now have my hands on one of the very rare official Ciber ITA reports. It is for GEMS, and it is about as improper as it gets. Shawn Southworth did things like give it an "A" for secure source code, and worse. What he did, and the fact that about 9 members of NASED, including technical guys, signed off on this report, indicates either incompetence or collusion or both.
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Bev Harris
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