Santa Cruz Co. tries for 10% audit of VVPAT

[emlev]

Today the Board of Supervisors of Santa Cruz County, CA (like a city council but at the county level) authorized the county clerk to negotiate a contract with Sequoia Voting Systems for one accessible DRE with VVPAT in each polling place. The County Clerk is trying to put in as many checks onto the system as she can, and I recommend checking out her report at www.votescount.com to see what she's figured out about how to do this.

The good news is that the Board is very interested in 10% audits of the "paper trail" even though the state only requires 1%. They've instructed the county clerk to study this matter and bring it back to them in December.

The other good news is that the county didn't go 100% DRE, which it could have done, but plans to use a precinct count optical scan system for all voting stations beyond the one DRE per polling place.

Additionally, the contract has not yet been negotiated so there's room to work on getting more protections, and it has not yet been signed, so maybe there's some hope there, too.

The bad news is, of course, that both the DREs and the optical scans operate on private software, and all the safeguards being attempted may not be enough to protect the integrity of our elections.

Interesting development: the county clerk reports that the source code for the Sequoia DREs will be put into escrow so it can be looked at if the election results are called into question. Does anyone know details about this? I question who will decide when and whether access to the source code will be granted.

Below are the made to the Board in my three minutes (and I had one whole second leftover!). (I also sent them a letter which I will share with you upon request.)

Thanks to guvwurld, landshark, Ellen Theisen and John Gideon for the help you gave me (directly and indirectly) as I prepared for this meeting.

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October 18, 2005

Testimony for 10/18 Board of Supervisors meeting:

Thank you for this opportunity.

I have lived in Santa Cruz for 18 years. I am an election integrity advocate. I also served as the chairperson for the City of Santa Cruz Accessibility Committee, which developed the City’s compliance plan for the Americans with Disabilities Act. I am a disabled voter.

Neither the public nor the Board has been given sufficient time to become fully educated on the complex issues or grave implications involved in the choice of voting systems.

Do you know the answers to these questions?

Why would SC County choose a system for the purpose of meeting the requirements of accessibility, federal qualification and state certification that is neither accessible nor state-certified, does not meet federal requirements and, in addition to all that, is guaranteed to produce inconclusive election results?

Why were criteria such as security, accuracy, reliability and verifiability absent from the scoring system used by the County Clerk to rate voting systems?

How can county officials be held responsible for the security of the proposed system when they are prohibited access to crucial parts of the system due to claims of proprietary information?

Why would we risk our election system based on promises of full certification and accessibility made by a corporation that is trying to win a contract? Especially when the requirement of certification means that it is not within Sequoia’s control to keep those promises? What will happen if the Sequoia system is not certified in time to meet the HAVA deadline?

How has California defined a “valid vote,” which it was required by HAVA to do (according to Pellerin’s proposal), and do the proposed systems ensure that the votes cast are valid?

When bugs are found in the software--which they will be--their “fixes” must go through the State certification process, which takes months. What effect will that have on our elections?

Have the exact systems under consideration been tested independently, or have they only been tested by so-called independent testers hired by the vendors?

How would we obtain the funds to maintain, upgrade and replace expensive DRE systems, especially given that Sequoia scored low in this area in Pellerin’s rating system?

Might SC county become the next Snohomish County, WA, being sued for privatizing the vote with Sequoia DREs? If the county risks being sued no matter what its decision, why not make the decision that best preserves the integrity of our elections?

What will happen when the public realizes that election results may no longer reflect the will of the voters, and that the consent of the governed--the basis for legitimate government--cannot be determined? What are the risks of running elections where no one knows for sure who won and who lost?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you are not ready to vote on which system the county will use to conduct future elections.

I urge you to reject the election corporatization interests trying to foist upon us systems which amount to faith-based elections. The concept of the “secret ballot” was never meant to be secret from the voter!

Thank you.