On today’s BradCast: We make short work (for now) of several breaking news stories from over the weekend and into today. Then its straight on to our main story today, which you will hear nowhere else in the media. [Audio link to today’s full show is posted below summary.]
In January, we broke the news here on The BRAD BLOG and The BradCast that Los Angeles County’s brand-new, unverifiable, $300 million, 10-years-in-development touchscreen polling place voting system had failed to meet more than 40 different California Voting System Standards, according to independent certification testers hired by CA’s Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Despite critical security issues that alarmed voting system and cybersecurity experts, the machines were nonetheless “conditionally certified” by Padilla just prior to the March 3rd Super Tuesday primary in the state. The new machines (known as Ballot Marking Devices or BMDs) and the electronic pollbooks that are required to work with them, both failed spectacularly. Voters were disenfranchised by the “Voting Solutions for All People” or VSAP system, as many across the nation’s most populous voting jurisdiction were either turned away or forced to wait for hours in line to vote.
It was well after midnight before all of those still in line finally cast their votes on Super Tuesday. It was, of course, impossible to know if any of those votes were tallied as per any voter’s intent, because BMD systems print out a computer-marked paper ballot which may or may not reflect the actual intent of any voter. It’s impossible to know if results are accurate in any election that uses BMDs for the majority of voters. Recent studies [PDF] find that more than 90% of voters do not notice when a BMD has misprinted one or more of their votes on the paper printout.
After the March 3rd disaster in L.A. (which we had warned about long in advance, to little interest from media or public officials, even from the L.A. County Supervisors, much less Sec. Padilla) the system’s brainchild, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, was allowed a mulligan. He promised to fix what didn’t work before the November election and told us all to simply trust him. Next time would be better. Many in the media then lost whatever interest they had as it was just weeks after Super Tuesday that COVID pandemic struck hard.
Well, now Padilla has recently posted the new certification testing results from Logan’s mulligan, VSAP 2.1. The results do not inspire confidence, as many of the same problems with the system originally — such as paper jams and misprinted QR Codes {PDF] — still exist, according to testers. Now Padilla must decide in the next two weeks whether or not to certify them again. In truth, he has little choice as Early Voting is now just weeks away. While the state’s decision to send every active voter a Vote-by-Mail ballot may help to ease many of the potential log jams at the county’s new Voting Centers, ballots cast on the new systems — as opposed to verifiable hand-marked paper absentee ballots — are still vulnerable to manipulation and can never been known to reflect voter intent after the polls close.
However, there are some things that Padilla could require to be done to mitigate some of the worst dangers of the system if it is to be used for this year’s critical November election. Several dozen election integrity and activist groups, along with a number of esteemed cybersecurity and voting systems experts, recently signed on to an excellent public letter led by the California Clean Money Campaign, demanding Padilla implement a number of the mitigations before certifying the updated voting systems.
We’re joined today by LULU FRIESDAT, co-founder of SmartElections.us and ROBIN GIBSON, longtime Los Angeles Election Integrity advocate, to discuss those potential mitigations and the one-and-only public comments hearing held today online before Padilla’s pending decision to certify. They report that Padilla did not bother to attend, though Logan, apparently, came by near the end of the session to claim that everything is now working fine. “Our registrar got on the call and dismissed two hours of worried voters, and said he had tests that said it was fine,” Gibson explained. “It was like ‘I win, nah, nah, nah.'”
As Friesdat and Gibson explain, the citizen advocates and experts are asking in their letter for the ballot boxes attached to each touchscreen tablet system to be removed, so that the computer-printed ballots don’t have to pass back through the same printer heads after they’ve been (theoretically) verified by each voter. Experts warn [PDF] that sending the ballot back through the same printer path after verification is a major security risk, allowing the system to change voters votes, without their knowledge, after they have supposedly already approved their printed ballot. Instead, the group is urging that the attached ballot boxes be removed, and that ballots be deposited manually by voters into a separate ballot box at the polling place, for tabulation later.
The group is also asking Padilla to do away with the unverifiable QR Codes that are printed on each ballot. It is that code — which can’t be verified as accurate by any voter — that is actually read by the optical-scan computer tabulators to tallly each ballot, rather than the human-readable text print out that voters may or may not have verified! “It is not secure to have the vote encoded in a QR code,” Friesdat joins cybsersecurity experts in warning.
Moreover, the groups are calling for real, hand-marked paper ballots to be made available to any and all voters at Voting Centers for voters smart enough to want to cast a verifiable vote. “This is basic,” Friesdat insists. “Hand-marked paper ballots are the gold standard that security experts recommend. It’s not hard to provide them, and voters should be encouraged to use hand-marked paper ballots if they’re able to mark by hand.”
They also uge Padilla and Logan to finally release the source code to this supposedly County-owned and developed system. The money appropriated by tax-payers was done on the basis, advanced by both Padilla and Logan, that it would be a fully “open source” system, 100% publicly owned. All of that is also important because elections officials in other states and counties across the country have expressed interest in adopting this exact system if it ever actually works in L.A.
Friesdat and Gibson detail many of their own concerns, as well as others who offered public comment today before we open up the phone lines to listener questions about this terrible new system, just 64 days before Election Day and mere weeks before early voting is set to begin in Los Angeles County…
CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!…
[audio:http://BradBlog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_LuluFriesdat-RobinGibson-VSAP21_083120.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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What a failure Brad that you didn’t send an email reminding “US” that public comments were held yesterday.
What a failure Brad that as an advocate, you fail to advocate that electronic touchscreens & tallying will be hacked and votes stolen in conservative states NO MATTER if the code is open source. Hand counted paper ballots. How hard is that to UNDERSTAND & promote? Reading you, I wonder whose side are you on?
Well, that’s a bizarre comment, Lyn.
a) I only found out about it very late Sunday night. And b) I am a journalist, not an activist. I don’t send “email reminders” about anything.
An even stranger critique. I’m fairly certain that I have been among the loudest, if not the loudest voice in the nation for the past nearly-20 years or so regarding the dangers of both electronic touchscreens & computerized tabulation. That critique has nothing to do with “conservative” states. The concern is the same in every state that uses such systems.
I will not, and never have, “advocate[d]” that any system “will be hacked and votes stolen”, because I don’t know that to be true. I know that they systems can be hacked and votes can be stolen with such systems (really, with any system, but much more easily so with computerized systems). Moreover, I’ve warned as loudly that even when votes are not hacked or stolen with such systems, the secret computerized counting and lack of public oversight means that even when systems are not hacked and votes not stolen, the public cannot know if they have been. That, as well, results in a lack of confidence in our election system which poses an equal threat to the survival of American democracy.
If voters can’t know their votes are counted accurately, confidence in elections falls as surely as it does when and if elections are purposely manipulated.
I’m fairly certain I’ve been exceedingly clear on all of these points for many years!
And, yes, all of that is equally true whether disclosed source or open source is available for the computerized system in question.
Not hard at all. I understand and report on that constantly.
I leave you to make such determinations, of course. Sounds like you’ve got an (interesting) mind of your own in that regard.
You only heard about Padilla’s Monday one day only public comments on a Monday (of course), Sunday night? Somewhere in my internet searching I had heard about it days ago. My point is I read and really appreciate your emails completely. I read them without missing any. When I read this last one, I said to myself, “fuck, I missed adding a comment” and you the failsafe didn’t alert us. You’ve been our rock. Sorry. I should have noted the details of and been prepared but I’m not the first to follow another search…
The part of me that asks “What side are you on?” is electronic voting and tallying is a nightmare here in this country. It is ABSOLUTE theft in lower income countries. What gets me is all of the talk like electronic is workable. That parts of it are workable, when the world is at stake.
I’m sorry. I’m disappointed. You heard Sunday night? A simple alert. Most people check their email at the beginning of the day on.
I apologize for disparaging you. I’ve said many times to many people, “Where in the fuck we’d be if Brad hadn’t been fighting all of these years.” You are a hero.
to lyn: visit CA SOS site public hearings – you can submit comments until Sept 15, 2020