In an area that’s figuring out humanity’s future, or at least its space travel plans, smartphones and connected thermostats, the process of determining who will represent it in the United States Congress, lead its biggest city and watch over its water supply is underway.
A young man, surrounded by a few serious faces and swaying bodies with half-empty Chardonnay glasses, clicks the refresh icon on his laptop’s browser. It’s to no avail. A wall in one of the San Jose Marriott’s ballrooms, illuminated by projected election results, displays the frozen statistics the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters released three hours earlier.
The pinstriped union bosses. Political consiglieres with shocks of white hair or greased Pacino manes. Community activists who look agitated as usual. Significant others who want another drink. They have all come here to celebrate Dave Cortese’s presumptive triumph in the San Jose mayor’s race.
Instead they grouse about the cash bar, pick at cupcakes and sugar cookies in tables behind the TV stage, look at the wall and wait on a prayer. Time drags on.
Silicon Valley may be home base to many of the world’s most celebrated technical disruptors, but it also holds the dubious distinction of using a voting system that, to be kind, is, well, not exactly state of the art. Only one county in the state took longer than Santa Clara County to tabulate its election results. Mono County, the state’s slowest county, probably deserves a little leeway on its last-place finish; it spans 1,209 rural square miles of nowhere, straddling the border of the Yosemite and Stanislaus national forests.
But in what has become a consistently embarrassing reminder that the public sector could screw up a one-car funeral procession, Santa Clara County failed yet again last week to get out of its own way and deliver election results in a timely manner. The reasons vary—from a $19 million investment in 5,500 disenfranchised voting machines, most of which gathered dust in a county warehouse for the last seven years, to a sharp increase in absentee voting that kept county workers tabulating results an extra five days after the election. The likelihood that things will improve soon begs one simple answer: get real.
County employees worked 12-hour shifts each day last week to sort and count the 140,000-plus vote-by-mail ballots.
Electoral Dysfunction
Shannon Bushey and Matt Moreles looked at one another Wednesday evening and realized it was time to go home. Both were tweaked on coffee and Red Bulls and beginning to feel the silliness that comes from sleep deprivation. Neither had gotten a wink of sleep in more than 37 hours. Both wore the same clothes they’d put on a day before. Election Day and Night (and another day and night) had made monsters of them.
As head of the Registrar of Voters, Bushey instructed her No. 2 to go home and get some food and sleep. She would do the same, mostly unaware of the frustration brewing outside of her office. She hasn’t been to an election night party in 20 years. But the anger would become apparent two days later, when word leaked that the ROV’s IT director, Joseph Le, walked off the job on election eve, casting doubt on why it took so long for Bushey’s office to gather results.
Sources tell San Jose Inside that Le quit because he felt unfairly singled out for a mistake in sample ballots, which were sent out in September and omitted information about candidates for the boards of Santa Clara County Unified School District and Gilroy’s Gavilan Community College. The exact tab of such a blunder is unknown, but is likely to have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Le reportedly chafed at having his work double-checked the rest of the way.
Bushey wouldn’t comment on the circumstances of Le’s departure—it’s a personnel matter, of course—but she insisted the accuracy of vote totals was unaffected. “None of our processes depend on one person,” she says. To prove the point, Bushey took the unusual step of asking the Secretary of State to examine the office’s execution. While not consulted, the call for a review apparently has support from her overseers.
“I think Shannon was making the prudent step, even though we’re all very confident that there are no irregularities in the counting,” county executive Jeff Smith says.
Slow results, several miscues on sample ballots and rumor of a mutiny within the ROV has once again cast a spotlight on an office that has undergone a decade of dysfunction. The last ROV, Barry Garner, resigned under a cloud of suspicion in early 2013. Sources tell San Jose Inside he was accused of sexual harassment by a staffer—and a similar incident during his employment as Fulton County, Georgia’s elections chief was apparently missed in the pre-hiring background check. Before that, Jesse Durazo oversaw the ROV for nine years. His tenure was distinguished by repeated absentee ballot count slipups, but he’s credited with increasing the number of people who vote by mail—a customer-friendly improvement that, ironically, has contributed to the current mess.
By far, however, the biggest setback to the county ROV’s mission of making election results public in a timely fashion occurred in 2007, when California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified 5,500 electronic voting machines that the county had purchased for roughly $19 million from Sequoia Voting Systems in 2003. (Funds came from a combination of the county, the state and the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.)
Bowen, interestingly enough, was elected a year earlier with the help of the very same machines that her campaign platform opposed. Six months after taking office, she enlisted a team of University of California computer scientists, who over the course 28 days hacked three separate electronic voting systems: Diebolt, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia.
“Debra Bowen basically ran on a platform of the electronic voting machines in California not being safe and secure,” says Warren Slocum, a San Mateo county supervisor and Bay Area expert on electronic voting systems. He was elected as supervisor two years ago after serving as San Mateo County’s election chief for 25 years. “And to her credit there was evidence that the concerns were well-founded.”
What an effing mess.
I strongly suspect that the problems were ultimately created by do gooders trying to vacuum every conceivable liberal democrat vote into the system, and mindlessly creating mammoth security holes.
As far as I’m concerned, voting should take place by registered-to-vote citizens, on election day, at a polling station, with proper identification, using auditable paper ballots, with thumb print verification. Absentee ballots should be allowed only for people who are either in ambulances or on gurneys in hospitals.
I know: UNFAIR! UNFAIR! UNFAIR!
But likely more honest.
Eliminate vote by mail! Eliminate provisional ballots!
I guess all military personnel will have to leave their posts to vote.
When I ran for CA SOS one of my goals was to undo the damage Bowen had done to the election process, and modernize the voting process.
“’I think Shannon was making the prudent step, even though we’re all very confident that there are no irregularities in the counting,’ county executive Jeff Smith says.” The blind covering up for the lame.
The question of why absentee ballots cannot be counted as they arrive needs to be investigated and corrected. If that requires legislation, get it done. Mail in ballots–which they don’t count until after the precinct ballots are counted–are a huge component of the slow results in SCC, where such a high percentage of the few who do vote do it by mail. Surely there are geeks who could write software that would quickly detect if a person who had sent in a mail in ballot was trying to vote again at a precinct.
Regarding Mr. Le: government agencies always decline to discuss such things, citing that it is a personnel issue, and therefore confidential. However, the holder of the confidentiality privilege regarding personnel matters is the employee. All privileges may be waived by the holder of the privilege. Mr. Le is free to discuss the situation as he sees fit. If he does discuss it, his privilege is waived and the county can respond. Inquiring minds want to know. The ball is in Mr. Le’s court.
2 pages Josh? So wordy.
I agree on your sentiment though. A few years back they had an e-voting machine at my polling place. The volunteers didn’t want to let me use it, much less plug it in. It took me a few good minutes of haggling before they let me use it, and they made me cast a paper ballot anyways (2x votes)
We really do not need voting machines though. All voting could be handled with a well designed intranet. Voter gets a random login from a pile of logins, hops on a machine VPN’d in with the ROV’s, casts their ballot, and prints the page as a receipt. $19m for what amounts to some PC’s in a fancy case doesn’t really cut it for me.
They should give me the old IT guys job. I’d have things well and squared away by next election without costing the taxpayers millions. For that price, we could have hired at least 76 iOS developers for a year and had something that we as a county could sell to other counties.
Yes–this Glenn Beck-style conspiracy attitude by some is why it’s unsurprising that theorizing about voter fraud and their solutions to curtail “voter fraud” mostly actually end up curtailing actual voting. If you really wants to put an end to all the problems, you might consider supporting universal voter registration.
In other words, the way to eliminate lawlessness is to eliminate laws.
Ummmm. I can’t argue with that.
Which is why I expect to see a big drop in the crime rate after Prop. 47 (along with a big jump in what used to be called property crimes of $949).
Just go read your first post. sadly with you its not surprising since a great deal of your innuendo always plays off right-wing paranoia about us shifty minorities voting more than we should..
> a great deal of your innuendo always plays off right-wing paranoia …
Rossty:
I never want to miss a chance for a good innuendo, but you’ve got me stumped.
What in my earlier post set off your PC your alarm bells about “shifty minorities”?
And, by the way, I have always been agnostic about whether minorities are “shifty” or “shiftless”.
Perhaps you would like to tell us more about your minority self, particularly, what it is about you that makes you “shifty”.
We need to get to the bottom of this.
you can say what you like, you can complain about the other side and point fingers saying they are whiners and they lost but the truth is this Government Department SCREWED UP Big time, and still did nothing really about it. It’s not just that names were left off the sample ballot and statements, it’s how they then addressed, a simple letter was sent out that looked like a piece of junk mail. Not even on colored paper, perhaps a READ URGENT DATA in red writing across the envelope. Nothing but a black and white envelope that looked junky. Apart from this people have not even looked at how or why this happened, and if you talk with some of your neighbors you will find some called because their ballots hadn’t turned up to be told they were no longer wishing to received ballots by mail. Not true. What a total sham and muck up. Not only heads should roll, not just the one that walked out but the whole department should be looked at. How many others did not receive their ballot? How many others have been told they are no longer on the voter rolls? What’s that about? Clearly there is more to this story, and perhaps the right thing to do is have another election.
As someone who votes by mail but this year dropped my ballot on Saturday at the ROV offices to ensure it got there before Tuesday, I was frustrated that my vote did not get counted until a week later. As to why doesn’t the ROV start the counting process, the following info from the Secretary of State Web Site at http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/official-canvass.htm
The second paragraph says they can start the process week in advance but not TABULATE. They can TALLY. I guess they can process them in the readers but not look at the results until election night. That should still get a lot of the backlog cleared you would think.
:
The Official Canvass of the Vote
Immediately upon the close of polls on election day, the county elections officials and the Secretary of State begin what is called the “semifinal official canvass of the vote” – the tallying of early-returned vote-by-mail ballots and the ballots cast in each of the state’s 24,000+ voting precincts. The semifinal official canvass begins at 8:00 p.m. on election night and continues uninterrupted until the last precinct is counted and reported to the Secretary of State.
The vote tallying process actually begins before election night, with the vote-by-mail ballots. Counties may begin processing vote-by-mail seven (7) business days before the election. Having verified the signatures on the return envelopes, elections officials remove the voted ballots and process them through their vote tallying system. Under no circumstances may they tabulate the results until after the close of polls on election day. Most counties continue this processing until they begin their election-day preparations for counting the precinct votes. Mail ballots not counted by that time and all those received on election day, either through the mail or at the precincts, are tabulated during the official canvass of the vote.
“The vote tallying process actually begins before election night, with the vote-by-mail ballots. Counties may begin processing vote-by-mail seven (7) business days before the election.” Apparently the SCC ROV does not take advantage of this opportunity; but instead waits until all precinct votes are tabulated. Why not?