Well, folks, here in California we made the news recently with all the famous "glitches" that one can expect with electronic voting technology. No, it wasn't just Diebold counties that were left red-faced... but of course we did outshine the others. We had federal observers, state observers and even the ACLU got in on the act... (better late than never).
Our citizen watchdog group, SAVE-Democracy (SAVE = Safe, Accurate, Verified Elections), testified to the Board of Supervisors before the election, asking them to make sure there were paper ballots in all the precincts (Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's recommendation), since this was new 'untested' (and, unbelievably, still uncertified) equipment... but they ignored the request, so many people were turned away not just in the a.m. when the vote-card encoders weren't up and running, but later in the day in some precincts when machines malfunctioned or shut down.
Security measures taken for this election were laughable, close to non-existent. After training, pollworkers were given some $20,000 worth of voting equipment to TAKE HOME with them prior to the election--no background checks; no i.d. checks. Plain stickers instead of tamper-tape were used for seals over memory-card port doors on the touch-screen units, easily removed and replaced. Plastic zip-ties instead of locks were used on the units, but the precinct workers had extra zip-ties so machines could have been tampered with and no one would know.
No one checked the seals; no one counted the zip-ties; in some cases zero tapes weren't printed in the a.m. In some cases tally tapes refused to print out at the end of the day; in NO case were the required totals printed out and posted at the precincts (state law AND an explicit requirement of the SoS). In fact, the pollworkers guidelines specifically said to press "NO" when asked if they needed a second copy of the end of day tallies to print out. So the Registrar had no intention of complying with state law, as I pointed out in the North County Times in my scathing opinion piece... however, it's been removed from the site's archives. Hmmmm....
No one at the Registrar's office seemed to care about it--nor even understand the problem. It's as if they believe these are not computers, but just empty wooden boxes with a slot on top. A good system with poor security measures will result in problems; a bad system with good security measures will result in problems. A bad system with bad security measures? You do the math.
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