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Friday 13 2004
You're Gonna Get a Visit: Mischelle Townsend, Registrar of Voters, Riverside County, CA
1. We found the Riverside Elections Division to be inappropriately obstructive, secretive, and nonresponsive.
2. The Sequoia touch-screen L&A test was so absurd that we are calling for a volunteer to create a simple animated presentation of it so that the 650,024 Riverside voters who did not attend can see the silly thing.
3. Mischelle Townsend — You've Gotta Be Replaced. Ms. Townsend is overly reliant on an L&A test that runs like a Las Vegas slot machine, and she sees absolutely no need for running even simple audit reports like getting a printout at the polling place.
Obstructive, secretive and nonresponsive
On Friday 13 Feb, 2004, Riverside County, California held a public "Logic & Accuracy" test. Well, as minimally public as possible, perhaps. The Republican party was missing.
We spoke with members of the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, who told us they believe their respective parties received no notification. The Democratic party was represented. There was no notice on the Riverside Elections Division Web site, and from the tiny attendance, we wonder whether any notice was printed in the newspaper. We are therefore doing a public records request to examine the notifications sent by Townsend to invite the public and the political parties to this public test.
One or two citizens were quietly touching votes into 10 Sequoia machines. Jeremiah Akin asked how these 10 machines were chosen, and was informed by the Riverside Elections Division that they were randomly chosen. Yes, folks, what we witnessed on Friday the 13th was a remarkable statistical anomaly then, because of the 10 "randomly" chosen machines, we were then told that five were actually from the same precinct, and there are 4,200 Sequoia touch-screen machines in Riverside County.
After the handful of citizens practiced entering votes, the really silly part began. It was announced that we were now going to begin the automated L&A test, which supposedly proves that these machines are accurate. If we can get a volunteer animator for this, here is exactly what it looks like — we would love to get a link to an animation to e-mail around the country.
The technician goes up to the machine and invokes the automatic L&A program. It ostensibly counts a large number of votes with no touching involved. When activated, the screen displays votes scrolling by so rapidly they look very much like the cherries, bars and bells on a Las Vegas slot machine — the difference being that this wild scrolling does not stop for an hour. During this time, the program makes a Pac-Man noise. Stephenson will post a recording of this noise for any volunteer animators. So, what we have is a touch-screen machine that is not touched, scrolling for the jackpot, making Pac-Man noises, which we are not allowed to videotape, nor, we discovered, to watch either.
"It is time to leave the room," Townsend announced. While the machines performed their video game magic, we dutifully trooped into another room for a brief question-and-answer period, where most questions were not welcome.
Questions and Answers
Townsend announced (for the second time, actually), that she would not be answering the questions provided by Jeremiah Akin, a computer programmer. Several attendees asked if she would answer them by mail and provide copies for each of us.
Jeremiah Akin: "The last time I was here Brian Foss told me that that was an Access database, but the Jaguar representative says it is not."
OK, again, picture this. We are now talking about the tabulation machine for Riverside's DFM optical scans, which runs on Windows. We observed the computer; on it was a screen which contained a vote report. This screen was a Microsoft Access screen, with the little maroon key icon on it, and two more Microsoft Access windows were minimized at the bottom of the screen. No, we absolutely do not use Microsoft Access, the tech said, "That is just an interface. It is a relational database." Stephenson said if it is not Access, then what is the database exactly that you are using, and was told that is a proprietary secret.
We then were taken back to the room where the machines were touching themselves, and given a printed list of numbers which, they said, "proved" that the machines counted correctly.
Following the meeting, Harris explained to Townsend that she had signed in with her legal, married name, and that her authorship was under the name Bev Harris. Townsend then went to get the security guard (for the second time) and ordered Harris out of the building on the grounds that she had lied about her name. Harris pointed to Chapter 1 in Black Box Voting, which gives her legal married name.
As everyone began leaving, Townsend apparently ordered the security guard to follow Stephenson and Harris out of the building. He was kindly and quite friendly, saying quietly, "I'm just doing my job, you know. I hope the two of you have a really nice trip."
We will. More people are gonna get a visit!
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