'Parallel election' to check votes

Richard Halstead     Marin Independent Journal    06 November 2005

Marin is one of a handful of California counties in which a cadre of suspicious poll watchers will conduct a "parallel election" on Nov. 8 to check up on government vote counts.

An elections watchdog group calling itself the Citizens' Audit Parallel Election has recruited volunteers in Marin, Humboldt, Los Angeles and Orange counties. The volunteers will go to polling places on election day and ask exiting voters to duplicate their votes on paper ballots that will later be hand-counted in public.

So far, about 22 Marin residents have volunteered to visit polls here, said Linda Bagneschi Dorrance of Novato, a 37-year-old publicist who is coordinating the local effort.

CAPE's leaders worry that the move to computerized voting has set the stage for massive voter fraud.

"California election officials cannot demonstrate that our votes are actually counted as we cast them when our ballots are counted with secret software," said Judy Alter of Culver City, the group's founder. "The official ballots and vote tallies are recorded on optical scanners, electronic voting machines, and central tally machines that are operated with trade-secret software not disclosed to the public, not even to public elections officials."

"We need to have a transparent vote-counting process," said Dorrance. "We used to have that when paper ballots were hand-counted in public view. Now that takes place in a machine, and then ballots are locked away, and if you want a recount, you have to pay."

This will be the second such parallel election that the group has conducted. During San Diego's mayoral election in July, CAPE's volunteers convinced about half of the voters exiting five polling locations to fill out duplicate paper ballots. The locations consolidated 11 of San Diego's 700 voting precincts, or about 1 percent of the total vote.

Dan Ashby, CAPE's northern California coordinator, said the group found a significant discrepancy when it compared its paper ballots to the official computer vote totals in those San Diego precincts.

The Democrat in the race, Donna Frye, did about 4 percent better on the paper ballots; while the two Republicans in the race - Jerry Sanders and Steve Francis - received about 2 percent fewer votes on the paper ballots, Asby said. Frye, who finished first with 43 percent of the vote, and Sanders, who finished second with 27 percent, are battling it out in a run-off election that concludes Tuesday.

"I'm not sure about the validity of what they're trying to accomplish," said San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas. He noted that CAPE relies on a tiny subset of voters accurately recreating their original ballots.

CAPE paid more than $8,000 to have 11,000 of the ballots in the San Diego race recounted. The recount failed to find any significant discrepancies.

"When all was said and done, the machine count and the hand count were essentially identical," Haas said.

In Marin, voters manually fill in bubbles corresponding to the candidate or issue they're voting for. The ballots are read by optical scanners and the data is stored in a computer. After the election, county workers do a hand recount of 1 percent of the votes in each race.

County Registrar of Voters Michael Smith said he supports making the process more transparent by disallowing proprietary software. But Smith says he isn't overly worried.

"I don't subscribe to the conspiracy notion that the software is tainted and will favor one political party over another," he said.