Well, it’s official: The Allegheny County Elections Board has conducted a small random-sample audit of voting machine software. Apparently, they did it last weekend, with no need for a three-month bidding process, nor any guidance from the state of PA with regards to an audit protocol. (Well that wasn’t so hard, now was it?)
This would not have happened were it not for the incredible pressure we all put on the BoE within the last week. Jamming the phones on Thursday must have left an impression, forcing the Board to take action.
Even so, there’s still much more to be done. For starters, the process needs to be far more open and transparent than it was. In this day and age, there’s no reason to only talk about something after the fact, even if it takes place on a weekend — people will disseminate the relevant information virally via electronic communication. We could have known that the audit would take place when it did.
Also, the county needs to go through and check more than 18 out of the 4,700 machines — yes, that’s right, they checked fewer than 0.3% of the machines — that we will be voting on in just one week.
Why is this all so important? The software that our voting machines use was updated a few months ago, but we had no way of knowing that the updated software still complied with state and federal regulations. After a massive public outcry at a County Council meeting in September (see Success!), the Council passed a resolution calling on the Elections Board to audit the software. The Elections Division, in turn, started stonewalling, claiming that the process would take too long — requiring a three-month bidding process before the audit could even start — and that there was no state-established protocol for an audit.
The moral of this story is that, public pressure prompts elected officials to act and do the work. Even though the method that the County decided to use in “verifying” the voting machine software is questionable and insufficient, at best the County Executive and the Board of Elections demonstrated that decisions could have been made in a more timely fashion, and that now the public has the upper hand in demanding a thorough inspection and testing of the voting machines before THEY are up for election in 2009.
If we can’t be confident that our voting machines will count our votes accurately, what’s the point in voting in the first place?
Tags:
allegheny county,
election protection,
elections,
voter rights,
voting machines 
