At 11:14 p.m. this past election night, Carolyn Crnich, the county clerk and registrar of voters, released her office’s “Election Night Final Report.” This report tallied the results from most — but not all — of the ballots cast, which was intriguing because one election in particular was a real nail-biter.
In the race for the board of the Northern Humboldt Union High School District, incumbent Colleen Toste and challenger Brian Lovell had easily secured two of the three available seats. The election night results for third place showed special education teacher Dana Silvernale with 2,429 votes, putting her just behind real estate agent and former triathlete Mike Pigg, who’d earned 2,475 votes. But provisional ballots, along with ballots hand-delivered to polling locations, had yet to be counted. They remained sealed in envelopes, awaiting signature verification before they could even be opened.
Those ballots proved pivotal. After every last one had been counted, Pigg had picked up 283 more votes for a total of 2,758. Silvernale picked up 350 votes, bringing her total to 2,779. She won the third and last available seat on the school board by just 21 votes, or 0.15 percent.
In squeaker elections such as this one, how can voters trust that the counts are accurate? It’s a problem faced by election officials and activists throughout the country. Here in Humboldt, an endeavor called the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project has pioneered an approach that delivers a new level of accountability. It allows anyone with a computer to examine every single ballot cast.
I started volunteering for the project in 2007. Here’s how it works: Volunteers scan each and every ballot using an off-the-shelf scanner. The scanner then prints numbers on the ballots so that the images can be checked against the original paper ballots. As an extra security measure, a computer program creates a digital signature that corresponds with each batch of image files. This ensures that any tampering 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 integrity 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 eight-hour 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.
Mitch Trachtenberg is a local programmer and freelance writer.
This article appears in Probing Pot.
Great, another neatly written election piece that can join virtually all the others in omitting the overwhelming context of this story: only about 30% of eligible voters are participating.
Congratulations on the award.
It appears that Keven Collins is much more than a “commercial fisherman”, not that anyone around here needs any inspiration, 70% aren’t even noteworthy!
I too use to think that more people should vote, but I’ve come to realize that most non-voters are so entirely uninformed that we may better off with them not voting!
IF we could inspire more people to have the intellectual curiosity to want to know something more about the issues we face as a society and to not assume that any one media sources is giving them both sides of every story, then I would be pleased to have those folks vote.
Thanks for offering the candid reality that no one dares to utter in Sacramento or D.C.: The potential electorate is abandoned because they are not trusted. Why would anyone want an abused and angry dog off its leash? Will there be an FDR, or a dictator that finally throws them a bone? First come first serve?
The question is not “if we could inspire more people” but why a local or national effort is never made.
It’s never been done in Humboldt County, so we are forced to wonder what would happen if canvassers no longer had to skip 5-10 homes to find the next Dem/Grn/Ind voter? For example, what if volunteers took the trouble and demonstrated the interest in educating each unregistered household on Cheryl Seidner’s actual leadership credentials and 27 years of public service ensuring that underprivileged kids get a college education?
The next lost opportunity in this unbroken legacy will be Eureka’s popular Fair Wage Initiative that registered more voters with a tiny handful of volunteers than the HCDCC has registered in years. Is the HCDCC or the Greens gearing up to educate and register non-voting households on this fundamental democratic issue?
We can continue to bitch about the unwashed masses, or we can decide to pass the soap.
I feel sooo secure now knowing Trachtenberg and (hidden) partner identity fraud Richard Salzman are counting our Humboldt County votes. It’s so reassuring to see how a fellow Progressive political activist managed to round up 21 votes to win over her political political opponent.
I would rather expect to see Stephen Lewis (Stephen 1) trolling the more populated comment sections of the LoCO. At least he got through his entire comment without using his favorite word, “prog.”
Anyone who wants to can get the images and count the votes themselves — that’s the point.
For those who are concerned that both the elections office and the volunteers that provide this service are tricking them with altered scans, I can only suggest that they volunteer to participate in the scanning process. Come ready to work, not to discuss politics.
While it’s important to have a system people trust, (like the old manual methods that worked fine), U.S. elections will remain illegitimate and easily corrupted no matter how accurate the count, due to the 70% of eligible voters that continue to abstain for over a generation!
As long as political reporting keeps treating this overwhelming public reality as an “unrelated story”, (self-censorship) the public has no idea of the impacts, except for a general feeling that the system is corrupt….and they’ll have no part in it!
Self-government is hard. I can understand those who go to the polls and write-in names like Pee Wee Herman to express their opinion of the system. I agree that our political system is heavily tilted by the effects of wealth and income inequality, that propagandists lose no opportunity to increase that tilt while denying its existence, and that, at the national level, respectable candidates who will not give the wealthiest what they want are usually filtered out long before they reach the ballot.
American elections are not about letting an informed electorate choose its leadership. In the TV age, they are competing propaganda campaigns. This is not hidden; political junkies watch the horse race and debate the wisdom of “putting an extra million into Ohio” to run more advertising in order to shift the outcome. This is all in plain sight, blessed by the same “supreme” court that shamed and delegitimized itself with its indefensible decision in Bush v Gore.
Despite that, my personal belief is that not voting is about as effective a driver of change as threatening to hold your breath until the spinach is removed from your plate. It’s too easily confused with not caring. By all means, people should be doing far more than just voting. But that doesn’t excuse not voting — I firmly believe that an Obama administration is not identical in its effect on society as a Romney administration would have been.
It is an astounding leap of logic to wax poetic about the breadth and depth of corruption you call the “American election” only to demean the victims as spoiled children, and worse, “uncaring”. I suppose this is an improvement from your earlier bigotry on a local blog where you used, “Those People”. Have you considered using aliases?
“Those Uncaring Child-People” are the vast majority and, despite your denials, their absence from the polls has changed everything in the last 35 years. Use you imagination.
Also, the point of propaganda is to obfuscate, thus, there is painfully little public reality whatsoever in “plain sight” contrary to your assertions. Even in rural weeklies appearing to cover rural election and political news, we never see the mere mention of the overwhelming context and national disgrace of having the lowest voter turnouts in the industrialized world. EVER. Would relevant and routine reports of reality begin to return folks to the poles? Probably. Would regular headlines covering the unprecedented number of our neighbors being bankrupted, foreclosed, and catapulted into poverty, including the biggest causes? Undoubtedly. Will they ever see this? Never.
“They who put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindness” (John Milton 1624).
Anony 27,
As far as I can tell, you are upset with me because I think people who don’t vote are not fulfilling their responsibility as citizens. If that’s it, that’s at least accurate, because I really do think that. Or perhaps you are upset with me because I don’t think this is primarily due to a concerted conspiratorial effort by the media to suppress voter turnout and hide America’s problems. That’s OK, too, because I don’t think that’s the cause of low voter turnout.
In the meantime, I continue to feel that Americans can accomplish far more by writing-in Pee Wee Herman than by not voting at all, but I also continue to feel that only people with remarkably privileged lives and/or an overwhelming determination to ignore the obvious can truly fail to see the difference in people’s lives between an Obama presidency and a Romney presidency.
A Nader presidency or a LaDuke presidency would be very different than a typical presidency, though Congress and the court would have prevented such an administration from achieving many of its goals, just as Congress and the court have prevented the Obama administration from creating as much change as it might have hoped to create. But the 70% of people who don’t vote didn’t think it was worth it to vote for Nader/LaDuke, either. Unless there have been guns held to “those people”‘s heads, or armed police preventing them from getting to the polling places, I think their decisions not to vote were irresponsible. “Victimhood” is just an excuse.
Apparently your sophistry is as good as your writing.
1) “As far as I can tell, you are upset with me because I think people who don’t vote are not fulfilling their responsibility as citizens.”
“Upset” and rightfully angry are very different, sorry if that disappoints you.
Maybe if I repeat my remarks with emphasis-added it will be clearer: It is inaccurate, self-serving, irresponsible, and arrogant of anyone (you) to demean the vast majority of your nation as uncaring, spoiled children, (your fellow citizens that are effectively written-off by local and national political parties, media and academia), based upon an intergenerational legacy of 30% voter turnouts.
Sadly, Rob Arkley Jr. utilized identical bigotry to yours at the Warfinger building last September 18th when he characterized 50 million impoverished Americans as “takers” for “not fulfilling their responsibility as citizens” by taking better care of themselves.
Maybe you can explain how you and Arkley’s demeaning characterizations of so many Americans will make them “more responsible”.
2) Unless there have been guns held to “those people”‘s heads, or armed police preventing them from getting to the polling places, I think their decisions not to vote were irresponsible. “Victimhood” is just an excuse.
This point is particularly amusing because no one is holding a gun to local/national media’s head; there are no “thought police” or Stazi threatening to imprison journalists, and yet, widespread self-censorship (not your clever sophistry of “conspiracy”) ensures that the average citizen knows nothing of common public realities.
Unfortunately, this NCJ article provides another example of how easy, effortless, expected and IRRESPONSIBLE it is to have yet-another important election article published that is completely devoid of its single most overwhelming context, that the vast majority of Americans are fed-up with being ignored and lied to and they are not going to participate.
Please join in canvassing Eureka for the Fair Wage initiative so that you might shed your bigotry by understanding how quickly “Those People” sign up to vote for the first time when someone bothers to educate and register them over issues relevant to their daily lives.
Anony 27,
OK, got it. You’re rightfully angry at me, because I think people who don’t vote are responsible for their not voting. And I’m a bigot, just like Rob Arkley. But I should canvass Eureka, a city in which I don’t live, on behalf of your issue. Oh, and it’s irresponsible to write about the transparency project without mentioning your concern about low turnout. Got it. Thanks for letting me know your thoughts.
No, you don’t “get it”.
Not voting simply doesn’t merit your simple-minded characterization of the vast majority of a nation’s citizens as “spoiled, uncaring children” any more than utilizing public services merits the characterization of “Those People” as “takers”.
Short of “bigotry”, holding opinions that disregard facts is clearly “prejudice”.
“Those People” are no more, and no less, irresponsible than is the nature of our species. They are us, you silly person! For example, it is irresponsible to publish any article omitting the subject’s overwhelming context which has effectively become taboo in contemporary media. Do you think it’s a coincidence that you can find articles condemning other nation’s “undemocratic” and “illegitimate” elections where half the nation abstains, (compared to our 70%)?
Too bad you’ve never registered voters on any issue…anywhere… or you would understand how “Those People” are receptive to education and care deeply about their culture once someone, anyone, takes the time and interest to explain the relevance of an issue to them, otherwise, you’d think that more than 10% of our nation’s best and brightest university graduates would vote.
This issue is far more complex than an individual’s responsibility to merit your arrogance and prejudice.
You’re welcome.
Get a room you two!
If Americans took more interest in self-governance it would undermine man’s unquenchable desire to grovel and admire the heroes that step up to assume responsibility for the fleeting pleasures of condemning the rabble from a tenuous lofty height.
I think you meant that, in Humboldt County, superiority is most easily achieved and most readily admitted.
“Man is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness”. (H.L. Menckin, “The Cult of Hope” 1919).