Primary elections in Arizona were conducted on September 12th, but in Pima County “45 precincts did not return touch-screen voting machines to election headquarters” and “four touch-screen machines and three optical scanners had evidence of security-seal tampering …”
A request by the local Democratic Party Chairwoman that the recount be conducted was finally completed despite the fact that PIMA County’s Director of Elections, Brad Nelson had claimed that the required hand recount to verify the election (a very limited hand recount of 2% of the precincts and involving only 4 races) would be “a daunting task” and in the face of opposition from Republican Party officials and the County’s chief civil attorney:
The head of the Pima County Republican Party questions the legal authority of a planned county audit of last week’s primary election, as does the county’s chief civil attorney.
In response to concerns about new voting machines, the Board of Supervisors asked the county elections director Tuesday to review a sample of ballots cast using the Diebold election machines […]
While not questioning the primary results, supervisors said they want to ensure the integrity of the election system before next month’s general election. […]
But according to Huckelberry, the county needs approval of the political parties that participated in the election before auditing the results. The chairwoman of the Pima County Democratic Party asked supervisors for the audit Tuesday. […]
Chris Straub, the county’s chief civil attorney, repeated his earlier advice that the county didn’t have the legal authority to audit the election. That’s because a voting plan by Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer is still under review by the U.S. Department of Justice, he said.
The supervisors voted last week to follow Straub’s advice and not audit the primary results. They voted differently Tuesday after hearing that Maricopa County conducted an audit of its primary results.
So what was the upshot of all this fuss? The hand recount ordered by the Pima County’s Board of Supervisors, involving both paper ballots which were optically scanned and paper receipts from Diebold touch screen machines took all of three hours to complete:
TUCSON, Ariz. — A hand recount of select races and precincts from the Sept. 12 primary election did not turn up any significant discrepancies, Pima County officials said. […]
The hand recount process that county Elections Director Brad Nelson warned would be a “daunting task” took a little more than three hours Wednesday afternoon.
Nonetheless, I am not encouraged by this outcome …
Don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy the Pima County Board of Supervisors changed their mind and proceeded with this limited hand recount in the face of opposition from Republican officials and against the legal advice of their own counsel. They did the right thing, and should be commended for it. And I’m glad that despite the obvious election “irregularities” that always seem to pop up whenever these touch screen machines are employed, the hand recount matched the machine count.
No, what troubles me about this story are the following matters:
1. Most states do not require that the electronic touch screen machine to be used in this year’s elections employs a system of paper receipts (i.e., a “paper trail”) which can be used to verify the machine count.
2. The Republican Party officials continue to consistently oppose any recounts involving these machines, even when the “election irregularities” are glaringly obvious.
3. The delays by the US Department of Justice on approving state recount procedures.
4. My concern that many state and local governments will refuse to conduct recounts in the face of the types of election irregularities that, based on recent experience suggests are more likely than not to occur this November.
I’m happy for the modicum of transparency regarding the voting process that just occurred in Pima County, Arizona. But I’m hardly sanguine about the prospects for honest, fair and “problem free” elections this year.
But don’t just take my word for it. Consider the following from well known conservative American Enterprise Institute Scholar, Norman Ornstein, on the problems he foresees with this year’s elections:
… So here is a nightmare of nightmares: The House hangs in the balance, and the districts that make the difference cannot do recounts because there is no paper trail; the paper trail in jurisdictions that have it find huge discrepancies between it and the numbers recorded on the machines; screw-ups like Montgomery County’s, or worse, disenfranchise large numbers of voters and make any outcome seem less legitimate; jurisdictions across the country lack established procedures for handling disputed elections and get mired in litigation or gridlock; and partisan election officials (à la Florida Republican Rep. Katherine Harris) make decisions that produce outcomes that are questionable at best.
This is not fanciful; it is all too real. And the reality would be even worse than the litany above suggests. All of the horrors above actually could occur with machines that are widely considered to be benign and safe from any corrupting influences. But we do not have such machines.
To all who have not yet done so, I urge you to look at the video of Princeton University researchers corrupting a widely used Diebold voting machine in less than one minute and creating a virus that alters results, spreads from one machine to another and corrupts the whole network, and disappears without a trace after the elections are over. […]
A study by experts of voting in the 2006 primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where touch-screen machines with paper trails are used, found huge differences in results between the machines’ internals and the paper trails–and they found that many of the Smart Cards that record precinct results got lost on the way to the central office, resulting in incomplete results.
… Brace yourselves: Troubled as its election was, we could end up looking with envy at Mexico.
When even a conservative think tank writer tells you that this year’s election is headed for disaster in large part due to electronic voting machines, don’t you think we ought to be doing something about it? Now?
