Out with the old & in with the new ing with the image file will be detectible. And finally, the ballot images are released to the world, where people can count them manually or with any software they choose. This level of accountability is important in the age of touchscreen voting and hackers. Kevin Collins, a commercial fisherman and the informal leader of the transparency group, approached Crnich a decade ago, concerned about the county switching to touchscreen “black box” voting machines. Collins, Crnich and others got together and came up with the idea of scanning the ballots. They linked up with others, including Tom Pinto of the District Attorney’s office and this author. According to Collins, Humboldt County now has an almost unprecedented level of accountability. In the rest of the country, he says, there’s little if any ability to check whether each individual vote has been counted. “States with paper ballots that could be audited usually don’t [do so],” he says, “and those that do [audit the ballots] have minimal requirements.” In California, for example, only one percent of ballots have to be counted to verify election results. “The Humboldt Election Transparency Project allows for a 100 percent audit that can be done by any citizen,” Collins says. The transparency project made national news in the 2008 election when it discovered what’s now called Diebold’s “Deck Zero” bug, which caused the elections office to accidentally drop more than a hundred Eureka ballots from its count. The California Secretary of State’s office investigated and eventually decertified the version of Diebold’s election counting software that was in use in Humboldt. Crnich switched local elections to the Hart InterCivic system. Since 2009, the transparency project and its members have received awards from the National Association of Secretaries of State, the Lori Grace Foundation for Election Integrity, the local branch of the ACLU and the local Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, among others. Bev Harris, founder of a national election in-
tegrity organization called Black Box Voting, calls the project “an important and groundbreaking improvement in election transparency.” And she hopes it spreads. “This project shows that technology and transparency can work together for good governance.” Crnich feels much the same way. “I don’t like saying to my constituents, ‘Hey, just trust me,’” she’s quoted as saying in a 2012 Palm Beach Post story. “Now, I don’t have to. Count them yourself, and if you find anything out of the ordinary, I want to know.” After each election, the transparency project puts together DVDs with scans of the ballots, and they’re available to anyone who wants them. I take a copy and run the images through independent counting software I’ve put together. “This is not glamorous work,” Collins points out. He says it takes up to 10 eighthour days to run the ballots through an office scanner, with two-person teams working four-hour shifts. The project is always looking for more volunteers, especially people who are comfortable with computer programming and Linux, the open source operating system that runs the office scanner and counting software. Of course, even this system isn’t perfect. The transparency project gets the ballots after they’ve arrived at the elections offices, so it doesn’t track the entire chain-of-custody. But then, neither do hand recounts. Still, Humboldt County is unique among jurisdictions in the United States because elections here are independently tabulated by people who don’t work for the elections office. How well does the system work? The good news is that my independent count of November’s votes matches the official county results to within a vote or two in every contest. The better news is that if you don’t want to take the elections office’s word — or mine, for that matter — you can get the image files and count them yourself. l
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This level of accountability is important in the age of touchscreen voting and hackers.
Mitch Trachtenberg is a local programmer and freelance writer. northcoastjournal.com • North Coast Journal • Thursday, Dec. 5, 2013
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