the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Smörgåsbord of scandal

(Aug. 2, 2007) One.Vice President Darth Cheney evidently had elsewhere to be Tuesday morning, but the House Resources Committee nevertheless plunged ahead with its hearings on if and how and why he engineered the deaths of around 70,000 salmon on the banks of the Klamath River in August 2002. The hea…ring was called “Crisis of Confidence: The Political Influence of the Bush Administration on Agency Science and Decision-Making.” It was prompted by last month’s Washington Postseries that fingered the Dark Lord for the Klamath fish kill, and for associated acts of political bullying directed at government scientists.

Among those testifying in Washington Tuesday morning: McKinleyville’s Mike Kelly, aka “The Klamath Whistleblower.” (See the Journal cover story of that name — Nov. 13, 2003.) Kelly was a fisheries biologist employed by the National Marine Fisheries Service charged with developing an opinion about how much water would be required to sustain the Klamath salmon in the dry year of 2002. He foresaw the fish kill. And his report was scuttled, and his name impugned, apparently because it had been politically determined that the water had to be used for other purposes.

“My immediate supervisor advised me, early on, that she had been informed that Vice President Cheney had been briefed on our consultation,” Kelly told the committee. “That is the only time the vice president was mentioned to me during the process. I was also aware that President Bush had declared that he would do everything he could to get the water to the farmers. I was keenly aware of all the controversy.

“I realized that political pressure might be applied to my superiors, but I naively believed that I was shielded from such pressure. … As it turned out, I was essentially asked to support a conclusion that made as much sense as one plus one equals three.”

Two.Ruh-roh, Shaggy. The California Secretary of State recently assembled a team of computer hackers and set them loose on an assortment of computer systems used to tabulate the results of our elections. Among the systems tested: The Diebold optical scanning machines used in Humboldt County and its associated software. The results came in last week — the hackers basically made mincemeat of the machines, demonstrating a variety of ways to skew the vote. The hackers (code-named “The Red Team”) created backdoor routes into the central tabulating software used by Diebold machines, altering vote totals at will or corrupting the entire elections database. The Red Team also verified that the optical scanning machines found at our precincts could be easily jimmied and rendered inoperative.

Troubling, but Humboldt County Clerk-Recorder Carolyn Crnich wasn’t altogether surprised. These vulnerabilities have long been known, she said, and the studies didn’t take account of strategies that have been developed to address them. “There are a lot of things in place now that weren’t five years ago, but none of those things were taken into consideration in the Red Team testing,” she said. Mostly, the fixes she listed had to do with extra human security, a greater numbers of checks and balances on Election Day.

Nevertheless, Dave Berman of Humboldt County’s Voter Confidence Committee, a tireless and perhaps somewhat obsessive advocate for transparent elections, welcomed the Red Team study. “I don’t know if ‘vindication’ is a word I would consider,” he said. “I would say I’m not at all surprised. The question now is what the secretary of state will do, now that she has her own studies.”

Berman’s suggestion: Ditch the machines and go to a pure hand-count of all votes cast. Initial twiddling with the numbers suggests that it wouldn’t be all that time-consuming or costly — and wouldn’t you rather wait a few days and spend a little more for a trustworthy count?

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