Audrey N. Glickman                                                                                                                                                                                       

Secretary/Treasurer, VoteAllegheny                                                                                                                                                           

Member, VotePA                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

To the Honorable Board of Elections:

 

It is interesting that the Onorato Administration tells the public, generally through the news media, that everything in our elections is fine.

 

On one hand, the Post-Gazette reports that the administration – the top five or six persons, maybe, all compensated by our tax dollars – feels that the election went well despite the views of “a few” activists – maybe fifteen or twenty or fifty of us volunteers of varying expertise.  There is no question that the Elections Division worked very hard and did a good job.  (That is what they do for a living, and we expect them to do it well, and appreciate when they do.)  The administration itself seems to want to take credit for a job it declares was good, to maintain a certain public image:  “we are pleased,” says Kevin Evanto.

 

On the other hand, all across the country the election did not go well.  It was not fine.  The NIST just told the EAC that this kind of machine we bought – DRE without paper – is not sufficient.  Hearings by the House Administration Committee have produced influential witnesses testifying similarly.*  Based not just on failures occurring during the election but also on fallibility and vulnerability of the systems, the public is getting restless and angry.  Add to that the unmitigated gall of the vendor companies which declare their software and machine construction to be so proprietary that those spending tens of millions of dollars and trusting their very votes to it can never see it, and the fact that the systems already purchased will not meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act as early as next year, and we have a recipe for a very discontented public.

 

The goal is not simply for the voters to have faith in the machines.  The goal is to implement a fully wonderful system, so that the voters will automatically have faith in it. 

 

So the more the Onorato Administration declares that the election was perfectly fine, the better you might look in the short term, but the more culpability you reserve for yourselves – the more ridiculous you will look – in the coming weeks and months.  Even on the outside chance that we could someday obtain a printing mechanism from the current vendor, it will not be sufficient – their current model is insufficient, and they are making no moves toward improvements.  We missed the opportunity to spend our original HAVA money on machines with good and recountable paper, and it makes little sense to spend $3 million more, throwing good money after bad.  We miss our levers and we missed the boat.  AccuPoll!  Optical scan!  We missed the boat.

 

And so it is presumptuous for the members of the administration to advise citizens not to worry because if the dilatory legislature ever passes a law necessitating the wonderful ES&S to ever produce a machine for the hapless County which made the decision, we will be spending those citizens’ taxes on it.   The voters deserve better.

 

Everyone expects you to support your staff, to say that they have done well.  The Elections Division did do well.  We may remain disappointed that the otherwise highly respectable Mr. Wolosik probably attended The Election Center in Houston,** as I recently heard, where they brainwash election officials in favor of the very companies which now have our billions of dollars, and against paper records, but we still respect his ability and acumen and years of experience.  The choices made by the administration, and ultimately by this Board of Elections, is where our regard is slipping. 

 

We continue to offer you our knowledge and voluntary work toward secure, accessible, accurate, and recountable elections.  We deliver it in three-minute speeches, in 250-word letters to the editor, in emails filled with information, in piles of papers sent to your offices, on CDs, on our websites, through the media, all on our own time and expense.

 

And we ask you questions, and expect complete and prompt and comprehensive answers not because we want you to appear as failures, but because we want you to do right and to do well.  And we know that it will be a long, hard road toward that goal.


* Barbara Simons (ACM), Edward Felten (Princeton), et al.

** Sponsorship of events at the Election Center's annual conference

In August 2004, the Election Center held its annual conference for election officials in Washington, DC. A number of events were sponsored by e-voting machine manufacturers: