Election Officials Defend Security Measures

Election Officials Defend Security Measures

Clerk/Recorder will run for re-election to redefined post

By Charles Douglas
HUMBOLDT SENTINEL

EUREKA - The ramifications of recent revelations regarding the security of election systems used across the country, including in Humboldt County, continue to mount as local officials defy calls for their resignations and pledge their continuing commitment to reliable elections.

County Clerk/Recorder Carolyn Crnich and Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams said in an interview with the Humboldt Sentinel on Thursday that they weren’t willing to go along with Voter Confidence Committee (voterconfidencecommittee.org) founder Dave Berman’s call for resisting federal mandates which require the installation of new voting machines at every polling place by Jan. 1.

“[Reform] is not going to start here,” McWilliams said. “What Dave [Berman] wants us to do is engage in civil disobedience and that’s just not what we’re about.”

Berman had remarked in a Dec. 2 interview that the constraints implied by the relationship between local election officials and federal mandates should be disregarded.

“We should make having fair elections in Humboldt County the focus of our attention,” he said. “We’ll get back to the HAVA people later.”

Crnich distanced herself from the scandals involving Diebold, the vendor for Humboldt’s traditional optical-scan ballots as well as the proposed touch-screen system, which is intended to operate parallel to normal ballot booths in order to satisfy access requirements for the disabled under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). This month, Diebold faced the initiation of a class action lawsuit by shareholders for securities fraud and the resignation of its longtime Chief Executive Officer, Walden O’Dell, whose activities on behalf of the re-election of George W. Bush were widely criticized when coupled with his company’s responsibilities regarding voting security.

“To me I’m not here to defend Diebold, only the system and the decisions we made in this county,” Crnich said. “We have had four years of reliable service.”

McWilliams was more sanguine about the company, noting that the optical scan ballot system in use for several years was actually produced by Global Election Systems, which was bought out by Diebold in 2001.

“For us as end users or customers, the service and support has increased since Diebold took over,” he said.

Both officials discounted the outcome of a test performed by Finnish security expert Harry Hursti, whose demonstration of how a Diebold voting machine could be manipulated with an alternate memory card to change an election’s outcome spurred election administrators in two Florida counties to discontinue their use of Diebold equipment.

“In fact they gave Hursti the keys to the room, the codes to the computer and turned him loose…that’s not a real world test,” McWilliams said. “In my personal opinion, if you only want to test the susceptibility of the system… its saying here’s our system, you go out to that real world and see if you can break in.”

Black Box Voting (blackboxvoting.org) founder Bev Harris said on Dec. 2 that the idea Hursti had complete access was a myth perpetrated by Diebold.

“The truth is we were never given any passwords, we bought the materials off the Internet,” she said.

Crnich said it would be unreal for the elections office to invite every person in, as this in itself would degrade protections.

“That’s the reason for security in the first place,” she said. “I really hope that we’ll be active to do education on the part of this community to understand the procedures we’re working with now, but we’re not inviting hackers in.”

Harris claims Diebold’s system is intrinsically vulnerable due to its reliance a credit card-sized memory device.

“Anybody who gets their hands on one, including poll workers, could swap the card,” she said. “It won’t necessarily just affect the machine, it could affect other machines as well. One bad card could spoil the bunch.”

The problem of where Humboldt County would be able to obtain a different system weighed heavily on McWilliams’ mind if Supervisors changed their minds about a purchase of disabled-friendly Diebold equipment, as every vendor on the market used proprietary software and were disinclined to disclose trade secrets.

“Here this election director in Florida gave Hursti the complete access to everything,” McWilliams said. “Does he do that to all the other vendors? How many vendors are going to do business with him?”

Crnich said the only a system failure would cause her to rethink the election office’s relationship with Diebold, and suggested activists focus their attentions on the state legislature, where the law requiring the manual hand recount of 1% of the vote tallies for every election could be strengthened. Until then, neither official would be willing to countenance a Hursti-style test for Humboldt County, as an original non-disclosure agreement with Global Election Systems continues to be in force with Diebold.

“We will not disclose the software,” McWilliams said. “If we did what [Leon County,] Florida did, Diebold could sue us, and the County wouldn’t defend me or Carolyn if we did that.”

Re-election for a new post?

While Crnich was first elected as County Recorder in 1990, her promise to run for a fifth term next year will be the first time where she will be running for office at the same time as she oversees the election.

“I have never really been in that situation before,” she said, although McWilliams was quick to point out that Crnich’s role was administrative and he bore the responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the office.

Crnich’s pledge to run comes on the heels of a call for new personnel to administer local elections by Berman on his GuvWurld blog (guvwurld.blogspot.com).

“We can’t continue on this path and part of changing course is having a different attitude in the elections department, people who would be willing to resist federal mandates against the interests of the people of Humboldt County,” Berman said earlier.

Crnich welcomed the chance to connect with voters about their election-related concerns, as the Board of Supervisors transferred these duties to her office in 2003 with the intent of putting the Elections Division under elected oversight, rather than that of an appointed Registrar of Voters, which McWilliams had served as since 1996. Before that, the County Clerk was its own elected office, which McWilliams first ran for in 1990 under a self-described banner of efficiency.

“Discussion is good and I think this is an opportunity for discussion, albeit an expensive one, but that’s what elections are about,” Crnich said.

While the 1990 race was, according to Crnich, so hotly contested that the wife of then-Governor candidate Pete Wilson complained that it was receiving more local coverage as compared to statewide elections that year, no challengers had stepped forward in the three following elections.

“Since then I’ve run unopposed and most people can’t name the County Clerk/Recorder,” she said.

Even if elections are now part of her bailiwick, Crnich said proprietary software, most likely from Diebold, would be used no matter the objections from other candidates.

“If someone’s going to run for Clerk/Recorder on the basis of we’re not going to use proprietary software, then there is no election,” McWilliams said.

Harris thought it was an interesting approach to run for local election administrator positions as a means of putting pressure on vendors with unreliable track records.

“We definitely have to get rid of this secrecy business,” she said.

McWilliams said his previous contest for County Clerk was more about who could do the most professional job and make the best use of available resources, with issues he characterizes as national in nature absent.

“Down here for the most part running people running for office or [who] are in office [do so] because they want to make this work,” he said.

Berman is nonetheless committed to making these issues the centerpiece of local elections in Humboldt and 16 other California counties in the upcoming June primaries when election administrators face the voters. Berman has already submitted his complaint to the District Attorney and the Grand Jury in Humboldt and has called for activists across the state to do the same in their counties.

“We are trying to draw a line in the sand demonstrating our refusal to accept election conditions that will continue to guarantee inconclusive outcomes,” Berman stated on his GuvWurld blog. “Necessary to this goal is a similar line in the sand laid down by elections officials. After all, if they say elections ‘could not be conducted’ under certain circumstances, why have we not seen a cancelled election? Where will elections officials draw their line in the sand?…Anyone who continues defending, excusing or apologizing for current election conditions has no business in election administration or in any other public office.”

No candidates have yet stepped forward, with a March 10 filing deadline for all county offices.

Stumbling block for preferential voting?

One of the reforms promulgated by Berman’s Voter Confidence Resolution is the use of Ranked Choice Voting for single-seat offices, with indications from activists such as Mark Konkler that they intend to pursue a charter amendment to this affect for Eureka’s Mayor, as well as choice voting for the City Council and School Board.

McWilliams, who has said he is agnostic on the subject personally, was nonetheless skeptical about how it could be implemented locally without support from other layers of government.

“We have a contract with Diebold and that contract says at no cost to us they will make any changes required by state or federal law,” he said. “If the City of Eureka wants it, they’re going to have to pay for it.”

In addition to uncertain costs, McWilliams said any new system would have to go through the process of federal qualification and state certification. Without this, the local elections office would be unable to honor Eureka’s request, even if approved by voters, and no polls would be set up within the city limits.

“They can say they want what they want, but we only conduct their election when they request it and if we can’t conduct their election, they can do it like Trinidad and conduct their own,” McWilliams said. “If they required Instant Runoff Voting, we could not do their elections.”

Crnich again called upon local activists to set their sights on the state level instead of putting local officials on the spot with a potentially expensive conversion process.

“When we’ll see Ranked Choice Voting in the rest of California, it will be by the initiative process and I hope the initiative will come with the funding,” she said.

Some areas of agreement

Despite the gulf of perspectives, election officials concurred with Berman on the need for greater physical security at election device storage areas, although McWilliams said the only county workers with access to the present storage area were with the survey crew.

“Janitors don’t have access to the room, not that we have anything against janitors,” he said, to which Crnich added, “…they have no more interest in the voting equipment than the average voter.”

Crnich also said Berman’s exclusion from the precinct-based ballot counting at Arcata City Hall on Nov. 8 was unintentional, although she did not comment as to whether it constituted a violation of state election law. McWilliams claimed he would have been willing to e-mail precinct results to Berman on the night of the election.

“Dave [Berman] didn’t contact us, he didn’t go in to introduce himself to the [precinct] board, so I can’t blame the board for closing the door, I can’t blame City Hall for locking the doors,” he said. “We have an open door, Dave [Berman] has to walk through it.”

Activists and bureaucrats alike were looking forward to a meeting of minds early next year when an Election Advisory Board will be developed with representatives of local political parties and election-minded non-profits like the League of Women Voters and Tri-County Independent Living. Officials are looking to the new EAB for help in recruiting new energy for the rapidly graying compliment of poll workers, as well as to find new polling places to replace those unable to meet accessibility requirements.

“As an election that has to serve every registered voter in the county, it makes it very difficult for us to find polling places that meet these standards,” Crnich said.

In areas like Whitethorn, some blocs of voters are already considered to be permanent absentee voters as no public or private facilities up to standards exist, while in others McWilliams is faced with the prohibition on the use of public funds to fix up churches or other private properties.

“It’s a mutated Burger King, it’s everybody have it their way,” he said. “It just drives up the expense and the logistics of the election.”

Although she is based in Washington and won’t be in town for the meeting, Harris hoped it would serve as a way to bring local skeptics and insiders into a better working relationship and a shared understanding of what their joint demands on state and federal legislators should be.

“I’ve met a lot of the elections officials in California, they are excellent, wonderful people for the most part,” she said. “They are not the problem, I think the problem is at a higher level.”

An organizational meeting for the EAB will be held on Jan. 5, 6:30 p.m. in Conference Room A of the County Courthouse.