Fourteen machines inside the county Registrar of Voters take stacks of ballots and spit them out rapid-fire for results.
Abundance of Caution
Santa Clara County’s machines, although never compromised, were deemed highly susceptible to viruses and vote manipulation. In their report, scientists found, amongst other concerns, that the Sequoia machines’ cryptography could be easily circumvented. A memory stick containing a virus could easily corrupt one machine and potentially infect others if linked together in a precinct. That type of hack might not even be detectable down the line.
Later, however, Bowen recertified the county’s Sequoia machines to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, forcing each precinct to have one DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting machine—even though anyone can use the machine if they want.
County Executive Jeff Smith, who came on board in 2009, sounded dubious regarding why the machines would be good enough for the most vulnerable voters but not everyone else.
“The information that I have, which granted is not everything that exists, is that the only way these machines were cracked is with multiple individuals sitting at the machine, hooked into the machine, and that’s just not something that could possible happen at a precinct,” Smith says. “It’s pretty much impossible to imagine somebody sitting at a precinct cracking into a machine.”
But with the county’s requests to recertify the machines dismissed—and virtually no one still with the county seems to remember exactly what efforts were made to get them back into compliance—the ROV reverted back to what’s known as a “central-count voting system,” in which every paper ballot must be returned to the ROV office after polls close at 8pm. The ballots must then be hand-fed into machines that use optical scan technology to process results.
DRE results, on the other hand, are submitted via an electronic cartridge from each precinct. The centralized counting not only has slowed the tabulation process of votes cast on Election Day to a crawl—it also delays the commencement of absentee ballot counting.
Bushey afforded San Jose Inside a tour of the ROV’s internal processes—an assembly line with the jagged edges of a gerrymander. First, absentee ballot envelopes are fed into a machine that scans signatures and sorts ballots twice by precinct. Nearby, a few dozen people in a room several doors down open envelopes and flatten ballots for scanning. There, 14 machines count and spit out ballots rapid fire—although they are so hammered that one went down. Bushey says the tabulating devices are so old that replacements and parts are impossible to find.
Processed ballots are marked with red ink near the top and bottom, banded together and then boxed and stored behind a steel metal curtain in what’s known as “The Blue Room.” It’s basically a holding pen and looks like a batting cage. Complaints about the length of the process have rolled in to the ROV over the course of the last week, but Bushey says election observers should understand the limitations.
“They should look at their expectations,” she says. “I mean, November 2012, I went and looked at our last results: 4:36 in the morning. I mean this is nothing new, that it takes us all throughout the night to do this. I really don’t know how anyone out there would expect results 11 or 12 o’clock.”
Outside of Bushey’s office last Friday, a few dozen county employees sifted through vote-by-mail ballots while Cortese’s supporters and operatives of the San Jose mayor’s race’s presumptive winner, Sam Liccardo, observed the process. As she provided a tour, motivational signs that could conceivably line a high-school locker room or dentist’s hallways could be found at every turn. They featured buzzwords and inspirational one-offs like: “Excellence—Some excel because they are destined to, most excel because they are determined to.”
Bushey installed them after assuming control of the ROV on a permanent basis in February. Discussing them brings tears to her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just I love this place. I love the people here, and I’ve worked with them a long time. And to me, as [important] as a voting system and running this office is how you treat your employees.”
Bushey points to the inspirational sign above her desk, which features the march of the penguins and the words: “Walk the Talk.”
“Why do you think this is the first one, the one I look at the most?” she asks.
“Because you love penguins?”
“No,” she says matter-of-factly. “It was to remind me to walk the talk. Treat people good. Be good. Do a good job. Be ethical. It’s my talk. I better walk it.”
Accurate, not fast
So, how did the county screw up by picking a hackable voting system? It’s a question few seem interested in answering. Even Bushey, who has been with the office for 19 years, can’t recall why Sequoia was selected. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that Kathryn Ferguson, the county ROV up until 2002, may have influenced the purchase that was made a year later. She left her county job to take a position with Sequoia, but there’s no indication she was involved in the vendor selection process a year later.
Bushey prefers to focus on the future, even if that remains uncertain. Once the results for this election are certified—the deadline is Dec. 2—Bushey says the ROV will take a closer look at technology it hopes will be ready in the next two years, with a new voting system possibly in place by 2017.
“I want people to get the results fast, because I know they’re anxious,” she says. “And of course I would love to update my voting system.
“Logically, in my mind, it only makes sense to hold off a couple years, because we’ll have new technology options,” she continues. “If I was to go out and buy equipment last year, or this year, or two years ago, I’m buying technology that is 15 years old. Ours is working fine. The process of what it produces is accurate. It’s just not fast.”
The increase in absentee ballots would also limit any improvements made in tallying precinct votes, which can’t be opened until after 8pm. County figures show that approximately 80,000 vote-by-mail ballots were cast in November 2002, compared to nearly 200,000 this year.
“I think it’s the perfect storm—with the ever increasing popularity in absentee mail and the fact that a lot of people still like to drop their vote-by-mail ballot at polls,” Slocum says.
“And I think it comes down to money. It’s an expensive proposition to replace a voting system. Not only is there the acquisition cost of the assets, but then there is training and manuals and testing. Basically, everything has to be redone. All of that takes time. You try to do these things in a non-presidential year, which is probably why she’s saying 2017.”
Political consultant Jude Barry, who has worked on voter registration technology around the country, is not alone in arguing that the county’s approach is shortsighted.
“It’s truly a systemic problem, because there’s little incentive for local governments to spend the resources on something that happens every two years,” Barry says. “But it’s a mistake. It makes local government look incompetent.”
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?