Vote By Mail Election Day in Oregon: An Interloper's Journey

An Interloper's Journey to Election Day

(Following is an excerpt of a report from K. Shawn Edgar in conjuntion with his visit to the Washington Co. Election office on Nov. 4, 2008. Watch the video of his visit on the right.)

Prelude
This is where my Washington County elections office entered the story. I had emailed them questions and received flat textbook answers – answers in which the responder avoided details about any possible problems. "It's all by the book, sir. It's all by the book," they assured me. After two to three links had grown in our email chain, I received a direct response from one whom I believed at that time to be the divisions number one man: Luther K. Arnold Jr., the Senior Administrative Specialist.

(After calls and emails to several other officials...) I wound up on the phone with Brenda Bayes of the state elections SOS. Ms. Bayes was cordial and answered my questions by the book – refusing to even consider my base assumption that elections have faults and the process has been manipulated in our recent past (see documents by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast).

Ms. Bayes' great contribution to this part of the story was to pass me the name Mickey Kawai (Wash. Co. Clerk). She turned out to be the manager of my Washington County elections office – the exact person I was hoping to talk with in the first place. On the phone with Mickey Kawai later that day, the background noise from her end spoke in many voices urgent and oscillating. With my eyes closed the scene through the receiver became a whaling ship at sea, and Mickey Kawai became a captain. However, her voice told me she was holding it all together – the chaotic operations of a county elections office the day before our biggest election day in recent history and the amped regular citizens eager to participate in her domain. At the same time there was an underlying threat of a Chernobyl-sized mishap hanging in the air, as much on my end as hers, congealing the entire county. Before I disconnected, she had convinced me to come in with my video camera the following day for the big event. To observe. To participate.

Early on that day, November 4, I had to work my “real” job from 8 to 1, and then bolted straight to the elections office – camera and tripod in hand. My good friend and fellow interloper, Mr. Waldow, met me on the way. We drove by the county building. Two lanes of backed up automobiles for blocks, the right lane full with voters preparing for a drive-by drop of their ballot into the solid steel box flanked by county workers under a portable tent set up in front of the main entrance.

Out front we met county press officer Philip, wearing a high-contrast yellow reflective vest and name badge. Philip gave us the lowdown on the orchestrated effort to reduce traffic and line time, the state and county police played a predominate roll. Also, a second drop site had been set up across the four-lane highway at Kmart.

Process
Inside I set up the tripod and video camera, got shots of several vote casting stations provided for those citizens who didn't receive or lost a ballot, or simply preferred to come in and cast by hand. Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, but many county elections offices have voter's booths and offer provisional ballots, as mentioned above. According to Philip, Washington County residents choose – for diverse reasons – to drop off their ballot on election day, hence the crazed scene described outside the building.

Ballots flow into the county office from every precinct, and are sorted and the outer envelope is removed by party workers. Other workers verify signatures on the back of the actual security envelope that contains the ballot by crosschecking voter registration cards via computer. And then the security envelopes are “wanded in”, meaning each one's arrival is documented by hand-held bar code scanners.

The next part of the operation is all about straightening the ballots and feeding them into the computerized counting machines made to a large extent by a company called Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). Of course, ballot length changes from election to election, and the longer the ballot, the more difficult this process becomes, often causing delays and mistakes.

In a review of voting systems, the EVEREST Report found that every component of the ES&S optical scanning machines were vulnerable at the precinct level to physical tampering that would cause the machine to reboot, adding delays and confusion, as well as the PCMCIA memory cards the scanners use to encode ballot types. At the level of the board of elections office network attacks were found to be the biggest threat.

Although Philip, our press officer, and the staff he introduced us to, were helpful and knowledgeable, they could not bring themselves to believe what they inevitably termed conspiracy theories, and refused to believe my base assumption (formed of previous experience and research like the EVEREST Report) that all ballot counting software and hardware are risky and vulnerable to tampering.

In the moment I wished I had a hard copy of the EVEREST test results to show them, to make them see the danger, but although their heart was in the right place, their eyes were shackled with tunnel vision by training and a need to protect operations – and save face.