PDA Statement Calls for Hand-count in Busby-Billbray Race (CA-50th)

By Mimi Kennedy, PDA Board Chair

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) declares "no confidence" in the machine tally results of California's 50th district June 6 Congressional special election.

PDA calls for a full hand-count of both the paper ballots and the Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail to determine the level of accuracy or error in the Diebold voting system used in this election.

The reason for this statement is that the Diebold machines, which have memory cards, were not kept in proper custody as prescribed in guidelines issued March 22, 2006, by Sandra Steinbach, Chair of Voting Systems Board of the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED):

"Every memory card requires at least the same level of protection as the ballot boxes and ballots used in the election. To prevent corruption of memory cards NASED hereby adopts an official addendum to the qualification of all voting systems that include a memory card that functions to store and transfer ballot images or tabulation data:

1. Throughout the life of the voting system, the election official shall maintain control of all memory cards and keep a perpetual chain of custody record for all of the memory cards used with the system. Programmed memory cards shall be stored securely at all times with logged accesses and transfers."

The concluding statement of Steinbach's letter is this: "Failure to comply with this addendum negates the voting system's status as a NASED-qualified voting system." [read complete NASED letter]

This election had national significance to both major parties bitterly contesting balance in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The margin of difference in the unofficial results, with many votes still uncounted, is within 5 percent.

The San Diego Registrar followed practices, established before the arrival of computer voting, that create broad security risks now. Pollworkers were allowed to take home machines, and some of those machines were stored in unsecured locations such as cars and garages, for days and weeks prior to the election.

The machines are the easily-tampered-with Diebold systems which were publicly shown (by Harri Hursti, Dec. 13, 2006, and others) to be completely hackable in less than two minutes time, with no password required. San Diego's breach in security is in direct defiance of regulations both by the CA Secretary of State and the Federal oversight board who had warned against precisely such a breach.

Security risks are amplified by hidden programming errors. In Pottawattamie County, Iowa, on the same day as the CA-50 election, two Republican elections were counted on opti-scan systems and the results looked suspicious to the elections director. Were two popular incumbents really losing to two little-known challengers? The opti-scan was stopped and all the ballots were hand-counted. In a case of healthy suspicion serving democracy, the voters' intent was read by human eyes and the apparent "losers" were victors. Subsequently, technicians determined that the opti-scanner had not been programmed correctly for the ballots for those races, and was "reading" those ballots wrong.

We call on the candidates in CA's 50th to strengthen American democracy and support a hand-count of paper ballots and paper trail in this election.

The outcome of the hand-count, whatever it is, will reflect the voters' intent and verify the degree of machine accuracy or error, at least in this one election.

Let's honor the voters. The hasty swearing-in of the Republican candidate dishonored them. As the ceremony went forward, thousands of votes were not yet counted and the Secretary of State had not certified the election results. No wonder participation in democracy is at an all-time low: this haste sends a signal that, for many of our officials, a large percentage of voters are superfluous, unnecessary, and more or less a bureaucratic burden. Nobody likes to be a burden. So nice people--increasingly--not only don't engage in political debate--they don't vote!

ACTION: SIGN THE PETITION FOR A HAND-COUNT!
PDA calls for a hand-count of the paper ballots and paper trails in California's 50th district before recognizing the legitimacy of any announced winner. We make this statement for the sake of democracy at a time of technological transition more than for the sake of a particular candidate, party, or outcome. The outcome we wish is a determination of true voter intent, which, because of the custody breaches and well-publicized security vulnerabilities of the voting system used, cannot be determined by the machine tally in this race.

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PDA Statement Calls for Hand-count in Busby-Billbray Race (CA-50th)

By Mimi Kennedy, PDA Board Chair