Democracy needs defending

By: PAUL JACOBS - For The Californian   17 October 2004

Let's imagine a society without currency where monetary exchanges are recorded onto a memory chip within an ATM card. Printed receipts are no longer necessary, because all of our transactions are electronically secure within the bowels of assorted computers, operating systems and software. The reliability of information systems these days is such that we can totally trust machinery with our financial security.

What? You have doubts? If this scenario leaves you a bit uncomfortable, how is it we entrust electronic voting machines with our democracy? Do we place less value on our votes than we do our money?

In a disputed banking transaction, a paper trail is the pathway to resolution.

ATM receipts, cancelled checks and other hard-copy data can prove an error or verify a correct transaction. We rely on this backup for our peace of mind as well as to resolve discrepancies.

The Riverside County registrar of voters office zealously defends the 3,690 touchscreen voting machines used throughout the county. When Secretary of State Kevin Shelley issued an order for voting machines to be certified and to provide a printout of cast votes by the year 2006, our county tax dollars funded a lawsuit to protect the machines. While these defenseless machines enjoy enthusiastic, strong advocacy, I wonder who is protecting our votes?

A number of community members have questioned the veracity of the secretive inner workings of Riverside's electronic voting equipment and both the current and former registrar of voters have resisted efforts to make the process of processing votes open and transparent.

There have been allegations of unauthorized personnel accessing a tallying machine during an actual election, as well as doubts concerning the reputed flawlessness of the election equipment. These concerns have been discounted and rebuffed by the registrar, who is charged with ensuring fair and honest electoral procedures.

Although I tend to doubt the viability of the lawsuit filed by Linda Soubirous contesting her losing campaign against county Supervisor Bob Buster, I am appalled that the registrar has been so resistant to providing requested evidence that will either verify or refute the accuracy of the voting and tallying system.

Experts in the Soubirous camp, who seem to have a better understanding of the system's internal complexities than those on the county payroll, describe what the registrar has called a recount of the disputed race as simply a reprint of the data. Although the election equipment has internal memory backups to provide for recounts, the registrar has thus far refused access to that information that has since been cleared for the upcoming election.

When more than a dozen observers attended a recent testing of the county's electronic voting system, they were given very limited access that didn't allow them to fully see computer screens or the input of data. Although the tallying machine crashed three times during the demonstration, the registrar confidently approved the system for use in November.

Democracy is something that requires scrutiny, tenacity and openness whether fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, or resisting a tally ban right here in Riverside County. For fear of vulnerability to some kind of electronic caper, on Nov. 2, I'll be voting on paper.