Travis County Commissioners Court
August 26, 2008
Item 35
Number 35 consider and take appropriate action on the following: request for additional resources for the November 4, 2008 presidential election, including the need for additional temporary personnel and election equipment; and b. Receive comments from vote rescue regarding use of electronic voting equipment in November 2008 general election.
>> good morning, judge, dana debeauvoir, county clerk. We are here today to consider a couple of things for us to get ready for what we do believe will be the largest turnout election we have ever had. You have before you the draft of the early voting program. The point that I make to you in bringing this program to you is I would like -- I know y'all have heard about this program we are working on but I would like permission and funding to move ahead with an idea that we add two extra early voting locations to our current plan. And those locations would be described as mega sites, very large, like 40-50 voting booths with adequate parking. There is one north and one south in the proposal but to do that, I need a few more pieces of s equipment with about 45 more e-slates, really not very much and we'll be able to cover those locations plus allocate -- we've been very careful about allocating to ensure that we have enough booths as many as the locations will handle so that people will have the minimum waiting time. Now, the purpose of trying to get mega sites for early voting is we anticipate that more than 400 and probably more like 440,000 people will vote this election. It's exciting. It's probably going to be the biggest turn out in the history of Travis County and the biggest that we'll see probably in future years at least for a while. And in order to prepare, I really think we need to encourage people to take advantage of early voting. We seem to have a habit that voters like to vote on election day in Travis County, which is mine, but if they wait until the last couple of hours of the day, then that guarantees long lines for everybody. And so what we are trying to do is make it less inconvenient for people. We don't want to have them wait in a line that is excessively long. We will offer at these mega sites extended hours for the last three days. We'll be open 7:00 to 7:00 through the entire early voting period but then the last days of the voting period they will be open until 9:00 p.m., and so people who have very busy days with kids and car pools -- we are hoping that the last hours at a retail location will make it easier for them to take advantage of early voter. If we can get half or better even, more of our voters to vote early then we only have to push through approximately 220,000 through our election day polling places. If we can spread that out and try to avoid a rush hour, I think what we'll see is everything going pretty smoothly. We will still have lines in places depending on if somebody decides to vote at rush hour, and the action that I want the court to take today is to give me permission within this current fiscal year, '08 to purchase 35 additional e-slates, the cost for those and their condornt jbc is $102,000 which ,000comes out of '08. And other funds are earmarked in '09 so we do not have to talk about that today. The good news for the '09 expenditures is that so far we are only at about a third of what our initial guess was that it would cost first to be able to spend money to handle this. And today what I'm asking for is out of '08 funding is $102,000 to buy additional equipment to we can try to deal with the crowds.
>> $102,000 --
>> yes, sir, and die have the number of the account, it it it would be an 800 account. And permission to move this from 00198009819898 -- okay, 9892 --
>> okay, that is a general fund --
>> al indicator reserves, judge.
>> to 00120203328001.
>> and what is the from a0 #-
>> I'm sorry, can you say that again?
>> fy09.
>> this is fy08.
>> but you mentioned 09, also.
>> we have earmarked the fail-safe call center, to handle the number of people who show up to vote, yes, I've moved and it throws them into a process to get them properly identified for their precinct, and we estimated that -- right, and at this point we are only estimating the expenditure and we've cut that down, only about $60,000 as we can have that discussion as a part of the '09 budget and so everything is looking like it will cost less and that gives us room to work in '09.
>> yes, sir, that is an al indicator against earmarks.
>> what is the balance of the unallocated reserve today?
>> I would have to get back to you on that. In planning and budget, dana has been talking to us about that and we've put this into our planning. And we've determined that the unallocated reserves can absorb this at this time.
>> have we determined projected surpluses?
>> yes, sir.
>> any other questions for the county clerk?
>> sir, I have one more item that you need to bring to your attention.
>> all right.
>> one of the things that aisd has asked us to consider doing is to move approximately eight of our elementary locations on election day to other schools that are nearby. We've looked at the list and we believe that the school district's concern about the level of space that is available availablable some of the elementary schools including parking is significantly problematic especially considering that we'll have this wonderful, exciting huge wave of voters. But the Austin I said pent independentschool district has o consider moving the following locations --
>> let me ask you one question first, are we satisfied that the agenda language is broad enough to cover this?
>> not quite --
>> do we have time to bring it back next week?
>> oh, certainly, I was just trying to bring it to you early.
>> but needs to be different language.
>> I'm just trying to give it to you early, judge.
>> but we need to be legal.
>> I understand.
>> judge, along with that, have we properly posted to see if we can determine the cost sharing aspect, because as you know, we are doing something here but there are other entities involved in the election process and it would be good to know what their anticipated role will be as far as the cost sharing --
>> I am sorry, I don't know what the cost sharing is going to be but suffice it to say that the city and aisd are significant partners in this election, and I can get you estimates -- won't be exact until we finish the budget --
>> yeah, yes, but ball park and is that something that can be brought back next week --
>> certainly, I can do that, bring you back that number.
>> any other questions? Dana, thank you very much.
>> thank you.
>> please don't leave, we have a b part of this item. Residents are asked to address the court on the electronic voting equipment, and some residents have come down today. As many as five and if you gives your name, we would be happy to get your comments. As one finishes if you would return to your seat, we'll give other residents an opportunity to come forward and have their say. Morning.
>> good morning. I'm sorry, if you don't mind, we are going to start with jenny clark and then I'm going to speak and then the rest of the residents.
>> don't mind at all --
>> okay, thank you.
>> good morning, Commissioners and judge. I'm happy to be here, and thank you so much for allowing vote rescue to speak to this important issue of approving funds for more electronic voting machines. We have delivered to all of you reams of evidence of the risks of the electronic voting machines. I appreciate dana's purpose of encouraging early voting and I think that is fine; however, based on new information which comes out daily about the risks of these machines, I think it's important to be cautious about rushing in to buy more machines. I have sent you all a personal letter last night, I don't know if you got it or not but I will submit it here. What I'm suggesting is instead of more machines for your two new early voting locations perhaps you could try a pilot program where voters vote on paper in early voting, and if the goal is to speed up the process to deal with large crowds, paper is faster and you can fit more people into a room, it's more practicable and you don't have to wait to use more hackable electronic voting machines. We attend ad hearing at the Texas capitol for the Texas committee on elections where we invited our experts to give presentations about the risks of electronic voting machines. At that meeting, dana was there and I listened to her comments carefully and I also listened to the comments of the experts very carefully. One of the thing that dana said is that there was wide-spread support for electronic voting machines but I would question that based on the fact that the public is not informed about the severe risks and if they were informed they may not be so excited about voting on machines that may not count their votes successfulfully. On August 23, 2006 a poll showed that 92% of the public supports the right to view vote counting and obtain information about it in a very strong political value of transparency and against secret vote counting outside the observation of the public. This is a little known fact and I think that the public, as you can see with the support in the room here clearly does not support secret vote counting which is what is happening with the use of the intercivic voting machines. We witnessed the testimony at the hearing of a computer security expert from rice university. I have submitted a 7-minute tape to play from his testimony and I would like to play that and let you listen very carefully and then I will reiterate again about some of my concerns. What we've observed from years of discussing this with dana, she depends on her testing procedures and what dr. Walich is telling us, no matter how many testing procedures an honest election official pursues there are ways to program around these features. And we listened to computer programmer clint curtis who designed what he called the vote flipping software and how it's easy for a programmer to change -- to create hidden buttons in a system so that the voters -- the testers -- no one would ever know that your vote is being flipped in the machines, in cyberspace in bits and bytes. I'm not a computer person and so please bear with us as we go into the gory details of the risk of these machines. I guess that is a good setup for dan, and so if the person is ready to play the 7-minute tape, we can listen to that.
>> video, let it roll --
>> a pleasure to testify before you today about the security
>> [indiscernible] electronic voting machines. My research focuses on computers. I've been examining these systems since 2001. Also the associate director of the national science foundation
>> [indiscernible] to improve our election system. Present day electronic voting systems have a variety of security flaws many of have you have already heard about and I will tell but more. Of course we can find problems with my voting system but the present-day systems
>> [indiscernible] fraud, of a scale and -- furthermore they tend to fail in the real world in a fashion that make it is difficult or impossible to figure out what went wrong. In my written testimony I detail a variety of real-world failures ranging from a disputed judicial election in laredo to a conditional election in florida. Hoping to briefly summarize here,
>> [indiscernible] boiled down to a margin of victory of 100 votes out of 50,000, and that is two tenths of a percent margin of victory. -- expert, among other problems found that the margin of the victory was attributed to -- candidate and included in the final tally, oops. And the system used simply lacked the safe guards for these simple efforts. Similarly in the election in florida, we heard about that, ultimately yielded a margin of victory
>> [indiscernible] out of a quarter million passed. -- outside of regular elections. Among other results we can now say with reasonable certainty that -- systems are neither more faster or more accurate that paper ballots. In many cases the electronic systems are much worse, and you can also say that straight ticket voting required in Texas, causes unnecessary errors. Get ready of straight ticket voting and you will fix that problem. While voters love review screens most failed to note errors on the screen when is they occurred. -- tested whether people would figure it out and and 63% didn't notice. My primary expertise is in computer fraud -- on the team that examined the source code -- when we found was staggering. In short, an attacking can plug into the back, extract all of the votes and replace them with other votes. A hacker can completely change the software inside the machine all without tripping any of their tamper detection mechanisms. Today hear about -- easy to work around. Even worse we found that a single corrupted machine when brought back to the warehouse and connected to the tally system it turns out there are a bunch of vulnerabilities in the tally system, and that boils down to what we call a viral attack and I cannot overstate the impact of this. One attacker corrupting one e-slate can arrange for every ea e-slate in the county to be corrupt in future elections. And the only way to fix that is to open the case and replace the memory chips, not a part of election procedures. Serious vulnerabilities exist in these systems both of which are used here in Texas. Now, vendors downplay these results saying that our threat models are unrealistic or that we didn't consider how actual poll workers -- this is incorrect. Our studies very much considered what poll workers could do and the most powerful attacks are the ones that require the fewest number of attackers. It's unrealistist to assume that poll workers are infallible. They can make mistakes or get distracted or perhaps one poll working is evil. In the real-world, voting machines are often left alone and the mechanical seals that we have are easily worked around, and they are not terribly secure, not if you have a voting machine left for days without s supervision and being behind a locked door, the type of thing that I have seen repeatedly in Travis County. All of this exists without state and federal serious if I federal certificationprocesses. And we cannot wait for the vendors to release their next version of their software correcting the vulnerabilities of previous versions if they have so far within unable to respond in a serious way. -- engaging in a public process of designing their future technologies and encouraging expert and public feet back. The vendors should be impressing us with their open and clever designs rather than hiding behind a process that has failed us all, and so I have a couple of recommendations --
>>
>> [indiscernible]
>> most of his recommendations had to do with suggestions for the state of Texas to deal with, having to do with the certification processes. I don't know if I can -- my mic is on? That is one reason we cut it off right there, and we didn't want to confuse the court about the difference between your responsibilities in the purchase of the machines and the state's responsibilities in the certification of the machines. It can get complicated and so his recommendations were -- sorry?
>> so that is something that will be sent to the secretary of state?
>> yes.
>> that is basically what we had is recommendations that he did not mention that was cut off --
>> that is true, yes, he was making recommendations to the committee to make those recommendation I presume to the secretary of state, yes, uh-huh.
>> I would just like to add a comment here. Dan does believe in paper ballots and it is written in statements that he has made. Being a computer scientist such that he is, he would still like to see a machine in the equation, particularly optical scanners but he would say outright that optical scanners can be compromised and are hackable just as easily as the screen types that we use here in Travis County. Dan thinks there is a possible way of auditing and the only way to really audit these optical scanners is to count all of the votes. So our position is if your going to use the optical scanners, why pay the money if you have to count all of the votes anyway to make sure they've counted correctly.
>> okay.
>> I would like to remind you of dan's credentials, he is a professor at rice in computer science and he is focussed on computer security and he has been examining these systems since 2001. He has the rare privilege of being one of the few people in the planet to look inside the heart innercivic software while I was working for the california secretary of state during her top-to-bottom review and it was during that period that he learned some of these socking allegations. I would like to remind you that he said that present-day electronic voting systems enable fraud of a scale and simplicity previously unknown in the administration of elections. And it doesn't matter how honest and well-meaning your election officials are. When the machines come from the factory, they can have an internal hack attached to the machine. Meaning that the computer programmer can design vote flipping software at the factory that that can be over looked with dana's efforts with her accuracy tests and the testing -- I don't know what it means because I'm not a computer person. I'm just reporting to you what we have heard from our computer science experts --
>> okay.
>> and because we are having to rely on computer science experts this is another problem. It's not transparent to the public, and we don't understand this. There is no reason why we should have to trust computer experts to tell us that the machines are working correctly. What voters understand is a aballot that they can see. Clint curtis was a computer programmer who designed the vote flipping software and he worked with nasa in encription and for the florida department of law enforcement and he says the computer programmer owns the universe, they own the input, the output and the printer it's connected to. And you cannot trust electronic voting machines no matter how many honest people are involved, all it takes is one person with access. And programmers can be bought. You can do whatever testing, whatever script you want to run, and you can have as many honest officials as possible, no one will ever know. When I flip the vote he says I flip the log and flip everything because the programmer rers the universe. And so when dana says she has a paper log of the electronic voting machines there is no guarantee that that log is actually reflecting the intent of the voter and that is what is missing here is a clear voter intent. He says you won't see the buttons or the flips and you never can and that is the problem. That is why people can't have confidence because you have removed them, meaning people -- from the process. You have to have computer geeks analyze them and hash codes and people do not understand. He says elections should be something that every bubba in a pickup truck can say I saw that piece of paper and that is good enough for me, it should be easy and uncomplicated. Hand counting a paper ballot in a public forum is the best way otherwise the machine will beat you every time. We tried to get dan to come here in person to present to you and visit with dana and her computer experts to work this out. It worked out that dan teaches stuesday and Thursdays and was not available and this was the closest this we can come to bring his testimony to the court today. I also have more details from dan about how her hash code testing -- I'll back up. At the hearing, one of the legislators asked dana well, how will you deal with the machines that come from the factory if they are already hacked, how would you know that and dana's response was well we do hash code and acceptance testing. And what dan, our expert from rice university says says when she does, quote hash testing what they really means is when a new cd arrives in the mail, they verifies that the consents match something submitted to the institute of science and technology database, and it depends against people who pretend to be from innercivic but if an e-slate has been tampered with, this hash code testing would not detect it. If someone tampered with it after the software was installed, her hash code detection would not detect it, this is entirely meaningless in the face of tampered voter machines and it's trivial to detect between this in an actual election and a machine therefore can be hacked during the creas accuracy test. We can go on with the details, but the upshot is I appreciate the effort to support voter interest and support early voters but I really think that it's a really risky idea for the court to continue to purchase these high-risk electronic voting machines and I propose again that we return to paper ballots and that would be fine to use that for the early voting. And so I will wrap up with that and let other people have their say, and I will be available for questions.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
>> yes?
>> good morning.
>> anybody else here to give comments on this item? We will need that chair, then okay? Sorry to interrupt you.
>> okay, my name is Karen rennick the founder of a group call vote rescue, a nonpartisan group of voters from all over Texas and beyond who want to have transparency in the vote process and we want to noi that know that our votes are being counted accurately so that our right to vote is not taken away from us. I wanted to basically talk about some concepts here, but before I do that, I just want to make it clear that we as an organization as well as our partners in a coalition that we have formed called texans for real elections which includes quite a number of other groups from throughout the state of Texas that we do not give our consent to any additional monies spent on any more voting machines to be used in the state of Texas, but more specifically here in Travis County. Additionally -- I will just go a little further than that. I think it's quite obvious that we want to see all voting machines discarded, banished, trashed or whatever because they do not allow us to know that our votes are being counted correctly. These machines as jenny was saying and the experts say, they are counting our votes in secret. It's just like you hear in the movies or whatever n the old days where people would take the ballot box into the other room and count the ballots and come out with a result. It's the very same thing, it's just done electronically now. And so I think at the moment we are really talking about a confusion and the way that people have been not told the truth, let's say, by the media. And I would say this is led by not only the vendors who are touted wares as being fantastic machines that fix everything, but we have also heard that it's easier to vote and faster and it's more secure, and we think it's easier to slip elections with the machines and it's faster to change the results, and it makes it much more secure for hackers to do what they would like to do. I want to be sure that the Commissioners court here understand that there are quite a number of states now that have literally thrown out these machines. They are getting $1 for these machines. In some cases they are not even getting anything. Some of the states are even considering shipping them overseas and I just think that is ironic that here we are, we want to sent democracy out to the world and sending these machines out is probably the worst thing that we could do. I want to say that as jenny talked about, too, we've presented an incredible alternate of evidence to not only you the Commissioners and the judge but to the legislators in the state house. And to the secretary of state and to our representatives in congress. We've been doing this for five years and that is a lot of copying of material to hand over to our public servants. No one is listening. And the question I have, really, is what is it going to take for you and the other public servants to listen and understand that using machines that count our votes secretly is wrong? And that the people do not want their votes counted secretly, and we do not want to have to trust that our votes are being counted correctly. Trust is not a part of this equation at all. In fact, this country with its system of checks and balances is based on mistrust, that is what it's all about. And it's not about trust but verify, it's not. It's about knowing. We want to know that our votes are being counted correctly. The only way to know that is to keep the ballots in public view for the entire time until they are counted and the results are publicly posted. And that is exactly what we propose. So I would like to just finish I think and thank the few people -- we have had one or two individuals over the five years that have listened. One member actually sits in the Commissioners court here in Travis County, Gerald Daugherty, and unfortunately he is not here today but I feel he has taken steps to find out about this. He travelled to meet with dan at rice university, and he been our one glimmer of hope that someone locally is listening. The other person that I would like to mention now is lon burnham, he was the lone supporter that introduced our hand-counted paper ballot bill at the last state legislature and we intend to repeat by introducing this bill once again in the next legislature hoping there will be many more people supporting it, but other than those two individuals, I have to say there have been really no other public officials, public servants, whatever, that have listened to us, and it's time that you listened and it's time that something is done about this. I would say we are done presenting you with the evidence because unless you tell us what it's going to take, we don't know what to do. Thank you.
>> thank you, let's start here and work our way around. It may help us to hear something new and different. I think we get your point, and I don't know that hearing it multiple times helps a whole lot. We have an election coming up in November. I don't see us making a major change like this before that election to be honest, and I told ms. Rennick this by phone a few days ago, and the other thing there is a big difference between listening and agreeing. I have listened more than any otherissue I think but I just don't agree, and I will be glad to tell you in writing what I think it will take after I give it some thought, but we have 5 million of electronic equipment, and 4.1 million of that was given to us by the state and so there is a major investment and for those who have been around we had similar complaints about paper ballots before we got the electronic equipment, and so it was a major change to goelectronic and we didn't do it easily, but we can go back if we need to, but talking to state and federal officials, that is how you get it done --
>> we are tired of talking, after today, we are tired. Yeah. And I don't know what you mean by the need --
>> but saying we don't listen is not true, and saying we don't agree is true.
>> okay, what is it going to take you to agree --
>> I will tell you that --
>> and -- and understand that it's secret vote counting that is happening. That is wrong t's wrong.
>> you say that the tallies are inaccurate?
>> can you prove to me that the tallies are correct sf.
>> can you prove to me that cre are not?
>> can you prove to me they are correct?
>> good morning, thank you for your time in hearing us this morning. I am a volunteer election judge for Travis County. I have always volunteered to conduct elections without pay. There are many others out there like me, I'm not alone in this, I would like to see transparent elections. During our primary election earlier this year and I did testify to this during the same filming that you saw, the gentleman from rice, I testified at those proceedings as well. Dozens of people were disenfranchised because of mechanical failure and the county forbidding us the use of the available paper ballots during the period, I was threatened with jail when I requested to give the voters the back-up paper ballots which is the county's standard appropriating procedure in the event of failure. The console, about this --
>> [indiscernible] comes home with me for a camper trip ever election. Nobody supervises me and I can do whatever I want with that machine. Thankfully I'm an honest working. I would never compromise an election. I can't guarantee that for everyone whose homes these jvc's are visiting with. This is the brains of your election process, and it tabulates the vote and zeros out the count and that tells us who voted for whom. I could easily hack that machine if I were dishonest. Thank god I'm not, but I can't vouch for everyone else. The machine goes home with me on the Saturday or Sunday for an election held on a Tuesday. There is no one watching me, and they don't know if I'm keeping it safe or not. Again, this is a very hackable brain for our elections. The same security code on each and every one of those jvc consoles throughout the entire Travis County has the exact same security code. Okay, wouldn't you like to have a security code of a series of ones for your bank account and your home alarm and security system and your e-mail? No? Well, then why should we want the security of our votes to be held in that type of safety. I am a decorated desert storm veteran and gave up my help defending my countrymen's rights. Please, don't give them away. Yes, you can dig up somebody's dead grandmother and somebody come in and pretend to be that person but that is a vote-by-vote-by-vote process and it's much more difficult to perpetrate that fraud than it is with a hacker that flips thousands and thousands of votes in one bit of binary code, which if you continue to watch the tapes from the hearings, you will see in a matter of moments how fast it can be done. Hand counting is more verifiable. People can stand over my shoulder and look as I read out a name while someone else records it on a piece of paper and stand over my shoulder to ensure that I read the right name and standing over another person's shoulder to see they did indeed put that vote in the right column. I know there are thousands of citizens that are interested in transparent elections. I know they would gladly volunteer to count our precious ballots. What we have an opportunity to do is to ensure democracy. What we have an opportunity to do is to make every single vote count no matter what your political persuasion is, and no matter what your gender identity is. None of that matters. One vote, one person counting accountably and verifiably in public is what our constitution calls for. Please, give us the opportunity to know you that we'll step up to the plate, we'll come and count those ballots and we'll garner such volunteerism like you have never seen before. Give us the opportunity in the early election voting process of causing us to put our money where our mouths are. We'll come out in droves and we'll count those votes and we'll help return this to an honest process. We just ask for that fair chance. Thank you for your time. (applause).
>> name please.
>> william troutman, having been born under the shadow of landslide lindons's 1948 senatorial election I would like to see a return to a more honorable and honest election process. I would like to see it in my lifetime, and it begins with a return to verifiable hand-count paper ballots. I also offer my time to help count ballots at the end of an election. Your job -- your duty -- as Commissioners of this court is to stop the funding of any more electronic devices which are not count verifiable. You can count off of a tablet or off of individual ballots but when you're using electronics you're trusting the electronics, the machine to actually add and total and record and sort the numbers. Electronics in the book that these women in vote rescue talk about, there is a book called act, a bunch of editorials and small articles about different examples of different people's experience and discoveries and this would be a very good book -- I'm sure that the writers of the book would be glad to give you all copies. I would be glad to buy you copies and let you take it home and let you use it as an evening or a restroom or go to sleep and read a chapter or just a book to look at when you want and you might learn some really interesting points. Like you say, you're not convinced. I've read that book and there is a whole lot of amazing information there about how obvious it is that paper ballots are the only way that we can actually keep track of and count honestly. Grant, it's not per like in the landslide lindon's history, there are a certain number of votes that can be had but nothing to the size of what these computers can do. It's like johnson and steroids many, many, many times over. And it's -- well, the information is really clear and succinct in this book. Hacked by abbey waldman, deloseire and carp. They editorialized a number of people's articles. I ask you to abandon the use of all electronic devices and return to hand marked ballots that we can see. And even if we have the basic -- and this is covered partially in the book, some people have found it, but even if you have just the most basic like optical scanner and the basic standards of electronic collection of the vote tallies, and you say, well, we can protect that by going back and recounting and maybe 3%, well, that is only if you can come up with some evidence that there is a problem with the count in the first place, and then you're only going to count 3%, so by taking any electronics into the equation, what we have done is given up a visual, verifiable count that can be done after every election like it used to be done and then posted at the precinct after each election. Thank you.
>> thank you, mr. Troutman.
>> my, my name is leonard, and I apologize for any unable to speak clearly, thank you for allowing me to speak. I am very computer savvy and I can tell you that no computer system will ever be safe. I'm self-taught and I'm astonished at the stuff that I can pull off, and there will never be an electronic system that is totally safe and secure. Somebody will also find a back door, a way around it. The paper ballots do have their downfalls as my cohorts have said, but it's so much harder and with the growing mistrust in the system that you're all aware of these days I think it would go so far with helping the people in general to feel thing things are turning in the right direction. I'm a family man, married with kids and I'm concerned about what I see going on and I know I'm not the only one. The only people that I have talked to that have not had a problem with the voting machines speople that are totally apathetic to the system. Those are the only people that I have met that don't have a problem, because I can tell you they will always be able to get through, always. I'm going to keep my comments brief and thank you for allowing me to speak.
>> thank you. (one moment, please for a change in captioners)
>> ... What the world cannot believe, 700 billion people are bettered off because of the use of computers and the use of the new ways to make life easier. We need to find a way -- and I think the simple route to this, professor harrison from u.t., who has specialized in voter questions, urges that this state, this county, this nation use a paper trail. It's possible to print -- I can't stop throwing out my military research scientist experience. I worked with 160 people who depended on numbers crunched. We always had a paper trail. And I tell you what, when research scientists begin fighting with one another, there's a voice for integrity. And that's what the nation is asking for is integrity. I think that -- I think there's one thing that we need to do is to lean into to problem and really accept the volunteers. Have more of it. I lived in brazil in 1963 to '65, 271 political parties. I lived in mexico when they went from the three that had one for 71 years and elected the
>> [indiscernible]. I know what a nation that turns the past to the future, I lived in taiwan when the mayor was elected in four months and experienced democracy in action and came back home and found myself in desperate worry and despair because a little third world nation could be doing what we have failed to do is stand up for integrity. Thank you for this time. I'm sorry I've taken so long, but it really -- I'm -- if you've made a $4.1 million investment, don't just throw it out for one dollar a machine. I'm sorry, I can't buy that kind of approach. We've got -- we've got an option to do the paper trail. And every voter has a chance to read what the paper trail says. And it goes into a hopper and it's there to back up what the machine --
>> I'm looking at mr. Spoonham's interview provided to me and page 6 he suggests that if the electronic machines were made more transparent by producing a concurrent paper ballot that was then roughly 2 to 3% of those paper ballots were randomly sampled, he feels that would prove up the accuracy of a particular vote so that you wouldn't be throwing the baby out with the bath water, per se, you might be able to achieve the efficiency of electronic while at the same time achieving the credibility of the paper ballot to a 2 or 3% random sample. Is that along the lines of what you are talking about?
>> that's along the lines of what I'm talking about.
>> thank you.
>> judge, Commissioners, thank you for your time. My name is larry nelson. I do have a technical background. I've been in the field for 16 years. I'll reiterate on a couple of things and then I'm going to move on to what the really important. When you talk about what dana does with the testing and like what dan was saying, the machine can go -- it can -- anything you can think of, the machine can do. They can program it to a point where it may not show up on this election but it would show up in another election. The machine can go -- whenever you do these types of tests and so forth, because of the way the program can be set up and you can't -- it's hard to see, okay? You can go -- you can do the logic test, this or that test, it can go into the mode and disguise it where you can't see it. She does everything with what she can with what she's given. And so after looking and everything that's going around, I wanted toe answers. So what I did was I filed an open records act. And I've done it twice with this particular agency and they've refused to respond. The first time I did it, I contacted the county attorney upstairs, county attorney's office, and I said what do I do? They are not responding. Under the open records act, they have 10 days to respond, call me, do something, let me know. I waited 21 days. They told me, well, we can't do anything. Call the agency. I contacted the agency. And I've talked to a gentleman with this agency, and he goes, I said do you realize -- you understand the open records. He said I do. I said you understand the seriousness of this. I said -- he apologized and said it would never happen again. Well, they did it again. So I'm going, what am I supposed to do? You know, the law gives you remedy to go before greg abbott's office, and I don't want to do that and I have five documents here, printed documents because I want answers to what's going on with this -- some of them may have to go to dana, I don't know, but regardless of fact, I submitted it to this agency and they should have called me and said, oh, well this is the wrong place. So, you know, I don't know what to do at this point. I don't want to do that. But I need answers to this situation. So if you have any suggestions, I can give you a copy if you want it.
>> that's the open records request?
>> yeah. I'm not getting a response.
>> is your phone number on here?
>> yes, sir.
>> we'll see if we can help, mr. Nelson. Thank you. County attorneys be on the alert.
>> my name is nancy rob benefits and over the last year and a half I've had the opportunity to speak with thousands of people, and out of all of those people I have yet to find one that is very happy about having a voting machine that we don't know if our votes are being counted. While I was sitting down, I had a chance to ask dana a question and that was, you know, what were her objections to a voting machine -- or to having hand counted paper ballots. Two big objections she brought up was how many people it would take and how long it would take. Now, I know I speak for a lot of people out there when I say I would rather have an accurate count than a quick count. And if it takes a few days, that's okay with me, and I would be more than happy to volunteer to help count ballots and I know of many, many, many people here, even in Austin in Travis County that would also be more than happy to help count. Paper ballots. The numbers she gave me were 18 and a half days to count all the ballots in Travis County, 440,000. I think that's a little extreme, to say the least. I don't think that it would take that long, near that long. And I do know that we can get thousands of volunteers out to help. Now, in regards to the equipment, you said we had $4.1 million in state dollars that came to help Travis County pay for these machines and $5 million total. That's still taxpayer money. And I know that if I go and I purchase something and I have been told that this item that I have purchased is going to work a certain way and then it doesn't, I can take it back and get a refund. We need to demand our money back.
>> what -- do we have any -- and I have not heard of any evidence that they are not working as they were intended to in Travis County.
>> well, if I was given -- or if I had purchased for $5 million machines that I was told were not -- that were going to give me accurate vote count and I have reams of evidence that state that they can be easily hacked and --
>> that can be, but what I'm asking is do we have any indication at this point that our protocols that we set up have indicated any voter fraud in the use --
>> I think the point would be that you can't very easily see what would happen. I know I've spent time speaking with clinton curtis and other programmers and I've done a little programming myself, just about enough to be dangerous, really, but I know how easy it is to manipulate codes and I've talked to people that have done it, and that can make it so you can't see it. It's very, very easy to do this. And if you can't see it and you don't know enough to -- and I would guarantee most people don't know enough to be able to find in thousands and thousands of lines of code maybe the five lines that would flip it. If I don't know how to do that is correct I know I can sit here and look at a stack of ballots and I can count. And anybody that goes through our school system I would hope would be able to do that as well.
>> I would think just from a statistical standpoint, though, given the number of rather close and highly contentious elections that we've had in Travis County, local elections over the last number of years, if there was -- if there was an allegation of a fraudulent vote, that the east lake machines had been utilized to steal an election, we would have had -- we live in a rather contentious community, which I think quite frankly speaks well for us, I think we would have had canned by elections their elections had been tampered with.
>> it comes back to the question of how many people are actually aware of what's going on and educated on this matter.
>> I think the candidates would be rather -- rather up to speed on what their polls were showing versus what was coming out of the machine.
>> since I don't personally know any of the candidates, I can't speak to that. I do know that there are a lot of people that are very concerned, and if we can't see that our votes -- we can't see and verify that our votes are being counted, wouldn't it make sense to have a system where rather than 5% of the population can say yeah, trust us, it's right, where you can have 95% of the population feel comfortable that they can participate in this process and that they know that it's working and they are not just going on somebody else's word.
>> okay. Thank you.
>> could I address what your concern was?
>> sure.
>> I've done a lot of research just in the last couple of weeks on this subject, and everything that I've been able to find out is that the races are contentious, but there's nothing that can be done because you can't go back and verify votes that are not there. And that's one of the reasons that there are beginning to be lawsuits that are showing up all over the internet now. And if y'all haven't yet, I would recommend you spend some time on the internet researching this because there are some huge, huge lawsuits that shocked me and gave me the courage to come down here because I knew when y'all got these machines it was a mistake. I own a computer and I have for a long time and they all break down, they all get corrupted and they all create problems. If there's anybody in here who has had a computer and hasn't had a problem, then they have some great angel that's walking around following them.
>> well, I don't know --
>> there's a lot of information that's on the internet about that. And to answer your question about -- I'm the one that brought you all this envelope with information from steven spoonMoore and the -- in the news document. And that d.v.d. Also I'll explain to you what that is in a second. You said that a 2% was said to be okay by mr. Spoonamore.
>> 2 to 3%.
>> well, if you -- he said that there are may mean that you have a legitimate election in all likelihood. But if y'all take the time to look at that d.v.d., I didn't realize that I could bring some clips in here and get y'all to see the highlights of this because I makes some incredible points. I had in my speech here that I was going to explain to you who he is. If you are not familiar with him, steve was the ceo of cybreth and that is a security company that handles -- it says at the first of the transcript they developed policy and the secure architecture for i.t. Systems primarily for international banking corporation, credit card companies and a number of governmental agencies. And if you watch the d.v.d. And read the transcript, you will see that he is very, very familiar with diebold. And as he speaks about diebold, he speaks about electronic equipment in general, and from the research that I've done, I can tell you that when people are talking about an electronic machine, they are talking about all electronic voting machines, leviers, machines that count the cards that have the hanging chads, they are talking about optical readers, anything that's electronic that takes a program, it is hackable. And this is one of the top experts in the nation. Let me back up to my speech. I am a fourth generation native Austinite, my name is elizabeth barr. I hold two degrees from the university of Texas and served on the board of adjustment. None of that makes me an expert on the east lake machine, but all of my experience has honed my common sense and I can tell you with 100% certainty now I believe that these machines are manipulatable and unreliable and should be abandoned immediately. They are -- and it can be done in such secrecy that the users of the machines, the people who have purchased them, we, the people who have purchased them and spent $5 million purchasing them, will never know. And I am here today because I've done a lot of research about a lot more than just these voting machines because I've been real concerned about what's going on in this country and I've been getting more of minus from sources other than the newspaper and what you are getting off the network news, and I can assure you that there are big, big money behind what these machines can do for them. And y'all need to pay attention to it and help us stop it and help us get our democracy back. What started this for me is when I knew you all were buying these machines, I knew in my heart something was wrong but I couldn't come up here and tell you what. It would be wasting your time and mine and why would you want to listen to me. Well, in November 2004 I went to vote. And when I placed my vote, I saw before my very eyes, and I didn't believe it when I saw it, in a mili second, my vote for president changed. And I thought it was crazy. I went and talked to election officials and they play indicated me into believing it couldn't have happened. Well, I brought this document I found on the internet if y'all want to look at page 6 in Travis County, it's in the news a partial list of documented failures. You all may have seen this before because you've got some people giving you a lot of really good evidence. This is the first time I saw this. There are problems of all sorts with this machine and it's not unique to this machine, it is happening with every single electronic voting device that's out there now. And it's almost -- it's almost maddening to have learned that this much fraud, intentional fraud and simply ignorant fraud is causing so many people to lose their right to vote. Vote. Well, what they described in Travis County is it was written off as user -- what did they call it? User error. That they hit the enter button rather than the cast ballot button. Well, I have used computers all my life, all my adult life anyway, since I got out of college, I know how to use a computer, and I got instructions on the machine before I started using it. And because that vote was important to me, I checked what I was entering three times. And I remember very well what happened because it was shocking to see my vote change. Well, I've waited four years to come and talk to you guys so thank you for this opportunity and thank you for hearing me out. What I saw happen then, I know now really did happen. It wasn't just an anomaly. Frankly, it pisses me off and it ought to pisses you all off.
>> this is part of the straight ticket ballot problem.
>> I did not write a straight ticket ballot. I started out writing a straight ticket ballot because I thought I knew computers. And I thought, if I pick this party, I'll fill in most of the people that I want, I can go back and make some changes and I did and I checked it and rechecked it and rechecked it. Then I hit the cast ballot button and then I saw my vote change. I'm sure that those machines now that there are particular problem -- you begin to get very cynical after you do your research and you start looking at this information from a naive standpoint, and you begin to realize there's potential for people to do things all over the place here that is just too inviting, from my perspective, to continue to allow. It's just -- it's just crazy. But no, I did not vote straight party. I did not intend to vote straight party. From my perspective too, when I hit the cast ballot button, my ballot is gone. I don't have anything that can be reviewed. And you can tell me, well, once you drop your paper ballot into the voting box, your ballot is gone too, you don't have anything to review. But if somebody walks up and starts to re-mark my ballot before I dropped it in the voting box if it were paper, I could pull it back out and say, hey, judge, somebody is messing with my vote. Once it's gone into the internet there's no way to tell. If you will look at one of the top experts that speaks on that d.v.d., I understand mr. Biscoe you don't want to waste any more of our money, but $5 million over the period of time that we've had these doesn't amount to -- it doesn't quite amount to a million dollars a year, if I understand it correctly. Here's another thing that's really concerning me. A laptop computer can get -- you can buy a brand new one for $650. I did some quick math on how much these things cost. If you are getting 35 machines for $102,000, they are costing $2,913 a pop. And you can put a man on the moon with a $650 computer, why do you need to spend that kind of money for a bean counter that actually is supposed to just tally up votes like an adding machine? This is a glorified bean counter, and this is really scary to me as a taxpayer too, because all of the issues that have been brought here today, but it's also very expensive and you think about the fraud that is posteriorly there from the various directions and then you want to add another complicated piece of machinery like -- and I've seen them on the internet. They are not talking about a complete paper ballot as an option. And by the way, if a paper ballot receipt fails, you lose your vote and you lose your ability to track it. There's no way to retrieve it. And what they are putting out and thinking it's going to suffice is a ticker tape cash register type of document that is on a continual roll. And I don't know enough about the technology, but everything I have read from the experts is will not work and it is not fail safe. And by the way --
>> do you know of any voting system that's fail safe?
>> I realize that. This is earth. If we could come up with something better, we would.
>> he cites tickler had 90% approval of his voting initiatives and he wasn't using --
>> what now?
>> let me play county judge and be arbitrary. We've spent about one hour on this item so far. Unfortunately we've got four or five other major items. I will ask you to self-impose a time limit of about two to three minutes.
>> okay.
>> from now on so those who have come today will have an opportunity to have their say. It will help us to have something new and different. We are post-to decide whether to add additional machines for the upcoming election. That's the only item posted today. Not whether or not we convert to paper battle. I have said I can go there. If we as a community decide that's what we should do. In terms of where we should go, it seems to me that we ought to plan to have maybe a citizens advisory committee, maybe experts, maybe the state of Texas, other folk take a real hard look at this and decide whether we keep the electronic voting equipment that we have now or whether we go back to paper ballots. I don't have a vested interest in either one of them. But I do think we ought to try to be accurate. Now, this idea about having a paper trail, I mean maybe we ought to pursue that. If that will satisfy a majority of our, you know, residents.
>> if you add that paper trail, I think you are throwing really good money after bad.
>> okay. Two to three minutes from now on out.
>> I can help you -- not today, but I can help you at a later time after I've done more research to give you more specifics.
>> I'm not sure that a major decision like that should be made by just the five of us after we listen to those who come to address us. It seems to me there ought to be a lot more inclusion than that. But a comprehensive look seems to me would be more than justified. Okay? I'll try to wrap up and I realize you guys are trying to make a single decision here today about whether or not to invest in more of these machines or not. And my recommendation to you is not. I realize that if there is a transition away from these machines, there's going to be some practical difficulties. I'm a realistic person. I think everybody in this room is. We would like to be able to wave a wand and have the perfect thing happen. There's going to have to be a transition. But we need your help and we need to make a concerted effort to go forward because right now money that could be spent going in a different direction, y'all are about to -- and I hope you won't -- put into these new machines. I guess that can wrap it up for me. Thank you for your time, thank you for listening, and if you would please humor me and take a look at that film, and if there is any other information -- my telephone number is on the statement that I brought you. Okay.
>> if I can be of help to get you additional information off of the internet, if y'all don't go there, or I can send you information about sites where you might be able to get information, I'd be delighted to. Thanks for listening.
>> thank you.
>> I'm charlie johnson. I use my atm card a lot and every once in a while I'll punch a wrong button. It doesn't say too bad, you cannot try again. It gets me a chance to try again. The same way with paper ballot. If you happen to make a mistake, you could get another ballot. But once you make a mistake of hitting the cast ballot, there's nothing you can do. And I guarantee you a lot of people have accidentally cast their ballot and can't do anything about it. And that's what scares me, that you don't have another chance to get it right. Thank you.
>> thank you, ms. Johnson. Good morning.
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners. My name is celia crossly and I'm a senior citizen. And actually electronic voting intimidates me. And every time I vote electronically, I feel like, well, did I vote correctly. But I've talked to other friend and they say the same thing. But since I'm 65 or older, my solution is easy. I vote by -- I volt ballot by mail. That way I get my paper ballot, I'm in my own home and I just vote away. And the one thing that's always scared me about electronic voting is there is no audit trail. No audit trail. You know, how can you have a bean counter or accounting system and not have an audit trail? And these vendors are making tons of money and they've actually privatized our voting system by going electronic. And personally I would definitely like to go back to the paper ballots because they are more -- they are more cost effective. And I don't agree with lou dobbs, the newscaster, maybe some of you have seen him, he comes on cnn, but I happened to turn cnn on one day and he was railing about electronic voting and saying it was a threat to democracy. In that case I agreed with him. Thank you so much and please consider returning to paper ballots.
>> yes, sir. Ma'am? Are you ready.
>> my name is katy brewer. Thanks for hearing us out today. I'd like to say that I came and spoke with you guys a few months ago, and what I had challenged you -- because then you had said, okay, it's the same thing, what can I do, what do you want us to do, that was your comment, and I had said actually read the documents that they gave you. And I had asked you to actually watch the documentaries that they have given you. En a from the responses and the questions can you prove they are hackable or have you ever seen tonight Travis County, well, if you watched the documentaries and you've read the information, it's electronic voting machines in general. You cannot have the mind set that it won't happen in my house, it won't happen -- it will only happen there in california and ohio and every other place that has found issues. But it won't happen in Travis County because we're all good people here. You know, if you've read the information and you watched the documentaries, we wouldn't be having this problem because you would be wanting to go to paper ballots. When I look back on this issue and how we have electronic voting machines, in theory it is awesome and I would love electron being voting machines if they worked because nobody wants to stay until midnight or two days or 18 days or whatever it is to count the ballots. Nobody does want to do that. So in theory electronic voting machines sound great. And since 2002, I believe, we've been using hart systems. But we have other documentation for the otherwise. They are not good. They don't work. And if you all use the computers in general, you know that they break or let's say -- not even like they are hackable so they don't work so you are talking about long lines. Even this past primaries where the computers weren't up and running or the voting people that were volunteering didn't know how to work it or turn it on correctly or whatever so the people couldn't vote at all. So who says that one day the electricity goes out in that building or, you know, the machine just dies, and they can't vote. Well, paper ballots would cause them to go in, vote, go out. How quickly it would be at a table like this where people could vote have a petition in between so quickly. What it brings to mind is the story of the lottery. I don't know if you are familiar with this, but I read it in high school n high school they were talking about the lottery, they always did it, it was tradition, they always did it. So since we've already spent the money and we already have all the investment into this and we're already doing it, we have to continue to do it? But that's not the case. Because we -- so the lottery what they end up doing, they pick someone's name, it's someone who is stoned to death but you never know that during the story. Because they've always done it and that's the way it's always been, somebody every year gets picked to be killed. Because we've always done it or we're always doing it, we've invested the money that we always have to continue? That's not the case. We can change. Just like a doctor that's a person comes in as a patient and says, you know, based on these things I think this is what the cure should be. We should start these things. And then come to find out that it wasn't the case, that there was something else that was causing the problem. Well, do you continue with the same cure? Because it was something else? You change and do something else. It's time for that change. As elected officials, I know this is not easy and I know to buck the system and go against big corporations and lots of money is not an easy thing to do.
>> [applause] okay? I know it's not easy. But the people who are not informed on this issue are relying on you to make the tough decisions. To have the guts to say no, it is time for a change. That's what we elect you to do because that's -- it's hard, the average citizen can't do that. We rely on you to make those decisions for us. And it's not an easy call. Who is going to have the guts? It sounds that possibly Daugherty, which I did not know, has actually read and done the information and research, which I asked you to do two months ago.
>> I have the book -- I have viewed the documentaries. And let me tell you, you know, I am trying to hold my tongue here, but I -- I'm having a difficult time with the idea of saying that I don't have the guts to buck the system and I'm in favor of corporate hedgemony and fascism. That is so far from the truth. I share your desire to have the most credible and efficient system that promotes the highest turnout possible, and I don't think anyone up here on this dais disagrees with that ultimate goal.
>> so I don't understand the problem then.
>> [laughter]
>> I simply don't have the same opinion. I have not formed the same opinion that you have.
>> to me it's not opinion, it is fact that we have given you.
>> and if we go to a paper ballot, we will likely have lower voter turnout and a higher degree of inefficiency and lack of credibility.
>> give it a chance.
>> we have for hundreds of years.
>> thank you very much. Yes, sir she let's get back to you.
>> I wasn't done.
>> you were way beyond three minutes though. On the end here, would you like to give comments? The timer will be set at two and a half minutes.
>> my problem is going to be real and we've heard it all, I think. I just as a taxpayer, I don't want my money spent on these machines. I mean I -- I watch the hacking democracy video on h.b.o. That aired and I was just a regular citizen who was kicking back on the couch to watch a little t.v. I watched that and my jaw hit the ground. And I was like I cannot believe that my money that is -- well, in my opinion, taken from me by force of law to form a taxation is being used to purchase such shoddy equipment that like this lady said down here can be done on a simple pc. It just blew my mind. And so people said today we live in a democracy. It's not, it's a republic. There is a difference. Democracy is mob rule, 51% rule the country in a vote. In a republic, I get to elect my representatives. If you are misspending my money, if you are a racist, if you are a sexist, I can go to that voting booth and I can vote you out and send you packing and say bring me somebody who will represent me. That is what separates us from the third world turd dictator ships that our founding fathers fled from and tried to set up a government where my vote and his vote and her vote would all have the same weight. If we do not -- if I do not have a way as just a citizen out here, just living my life, to have the power to make that will known and to do it, then we live in a dictatorship. We live in a form of government where it's no longer a republic. Watch the star wars trilogy. If you don't get it from a textbook, watch it in that movie and watch what happens when the vote starts to get jacked around with. George lucas did a wonderful job showing what happens. Our history is replete with slaves that had to get the right to vote, they fought for it. Women who had to get the right to vote because they were denied it.
>> [buzzer sounding] please don't get equipment that takes us back. Thank you.
>> [applause]
>> this gentleman right here, please.
>> actually they are d.o.t. Not going to fore-- heck her and I live in Travis County in precinct 1. I want to enter into evidence or what have you from a previous campaign 400 other people who could not be here this morning and they've all signed a little card that says dear dana, I demand all elections be held with paper ballots hand counted in fuel public view. People should count, not machines. They've signed their names, given their addresses. Just letting you know aside from the people in this room, there are 400 and I'm sure thousands more who are echoing our -- the same sentments.
>> okay. Thank you. Whatever order you would like to go in.
>> in addressing what this court --
>> name, please.
>> I'm sorry, my name is mitchell stein. In addressing what you said is the main issue here about buying additional machines, my opinion is no, don't buy the additional machines because they are not auditable and you are not able to assure that our votes are counted correctly. It's a pretty simple thing. There's no auditable trail, period. I don't know why it gets nor complicated than that. The second --
>> [applause] the second point I would like to make, I was thinking about this and my thoughts kept coming back to one word, responsibility and what is responsibility of a elected person in Travis County. It's not pointing to someone else and saying, well, they said it was okay. In this case the secretary of state who may have certified a certain machine, it's we elect you, as the gentleman over here said a minute ago, as representatives in this representative republic. We elect you to think. I don't have time, frankly, and I'm sure most of these other people don't either to come down on every issue and give you our opinion. I mention that because I had heard that sometimes comments that may come from the Commissioners are, well, people haven't showed up in numbers to object to this. Well, people work. They don't always have time to do that. We elect you to think and act on our behalf. Electronic voting machines use what I understand to be proprietary software, which means we can't see it. How on earth do we know that it's running as intended? How do we know there hasn't been a code put in there that says on November 4th, shave off 3% of votes and give it to this other guy. Anything is possible. And I keep coming back to its not auditable. To me what auditable means is by breaking down something into its component parts you are able to reconstruct a process and determine how each component part affects the final result. That can't be done with a voting machine. There's no way to say here's a stack of papers that go in this column and a bunch of other ones that go in another column.
>> [buzzer sounding] in closing, I want you to act responsibly, act for the people of Travis County and make decisions that show you think and don't act just because the secretary of state said it was okay to use this particular machine. Your job is to ensure that our votes are counted correctly. We as Travis County people have to send out our votes from our particular precinct and say this is what we voted. And you need to assure that that's done correctly. It's not able to be done with electronic machines. Hand counted paper ballots.
>> thank you.
>> full public view.
>> thank you.
>> yes, sir.
>> joe burrwell, a self-employed patented attorney. I have an undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering from rice and law degree from university of houston. And I wanted to speak on some policy issues. I understand that you are here to allocate additional funds, but I want to help place those seeds of doubt into helping you think that what you are doing is -- is with reluctance in ensuring everybody's vote gets counted in the electronic system this go round, but you give further thought to providing a forum for people to express their doubts about the electronic system and to help these other organizations. So I just wanted to say from -- as a patent attorney from, like, a intellectual property perspective, I can speak to computer incryption, I understand that, I can speak to election code. I'm not an expert in the machines. These specific machines. And I'm not an expert in election code. But I wasn't aware of what was going on, the problem with paper ballots before 2000, and I think most people weren't. And I think that what you are seeing is a time line of where there were -- there was the effort to move to electronic machines with the recognition of what problems there were on paper ballots. But the population as a whole weren't aware of what problems there were with paper ballots. And now what you are seeing is problems coming up with the people are finding evidence of problems with the electronic machines. And that I don't want, you know, the standard deference given to the corporations in how they seem to have convinced public officials of how secure those machines are. And I think that part of what they are doing is they sometimes claim proprietary software and trade secret. They have taken advantage of the patent system to some extent to open up exactly what their technology is. But when they say that, well, other things we can't show you because --
>> [buzzer sounding] -- of their trade secret or we were afraid because it might make them more hackable or vulnerable to attack that should raise red flags. That in helping you see this time line, we've tried paper ballots, we're trying electronic battle. But there's more going on here than you may have realized.
>> thank you. Yes.
>> hi, my name is lisa orr. And I am a citizen of Austin. If I need to say. That and I guess what got me started on this is my husband and I voted together at the same time on electronic machines and it turned out when we got out, we realized we had voted in separate races, and we live together at the same house. There was -- we went back in and said this to the person in charge and they were like oh, well no record of anything, nothing we can do about it. So, you know, I hope you enjoyed your voting. And more recently I watched the documentary "uncounted," which is basically it's a documentary on voting in 2000 elections, 2004 and 2006. And what it very clearly shows there are whistle blowers who showed how they designed software to hack these machines, which are very easily hackable. Where the man who designed the software was a republican, it doesn't matter, it could have been a democrat, it doesn't matter, and he happened to -- he thought he was doing it to keep democrats from cheating. He showed clearly how he pushed a couple of buttons on the tally screen and the votes flipped. It was abundantly clear in a situation like. That somebody can just be hired to work, you know, working for a corporation which happened to be china which was programming our american voting machines and with their proprietary software making so they can skew our elections. In germany, my husband lived there for a year, and he noticed on their elections they took four days to count the paper ballots, very, very slowly and painstakingly carefully. And to me that is the foundation of a true democracy. It is the actual counting of the actual votes. And so we don't need to have it really fast, we don't need to have it on electronic machines, we don't need super fast counting, but with all the problems we've had in our last several elections, I would urge you not to purchase electronic machines and instead move to electronic machines that with an audible trail and paper ballots.
>> [buzzer sounding] and open code. Absolutely open source code. Thank you.
>> thank you, ms. Orr. Yes.
>> is this mic okay to use?
>> I believe it is.
>> kathleen bokras from precinct 377 in Travis County. And I also have always felt uncomfortable about the electronic voting machines because I feel like after I push that button at the end, I don't know who processes that information, where it's recorded, how it's counted. It's just gone. And I have to trust that my vote is counted accurately with everyone else's, and I don't think that's right. And I think that in light of all of the documentation and the documentaries and the testimony and evidence that you've been given, I would urge you to -- that it's -- it would not be responsible to spend another $160,000 on -- or any amount on more voting machines until you've done more due diligence, like you suggested, mr. Business company. And I really appreciate it. I wanted to mention that regarding public outcry, I've done exit polls with vote rescue in a couple of local elections, and when people ask, well, who are you with and I say vote rescue and one of the things we're god interested in is going back to hand counted paper ballots in public view and having the tallies posted at the precinct level, and the majority of people say wow, sign me up. I want to do that too. But just like all of us here today, we either have the day off or had to take the day off or have a job where we were able to be here. It's very difficult to show up actually to things like that on a workday. So I just wanted to point that out. Again too. Thank you for listening.
>> travis, precinct 4231. I had a question. Do you take an oath to the constitution when you accept your job as Commissioner? You do? It is in the constitution where votes have to be counted in open. They have to be counted publicly. By going with these machines where it's not counted openly, you are going against the constitution, you are going against the vote that you pledged when you took your job. With these machines I don't think -- we know politics get ugly and I don't think it's conspirator ial to think these machines would be used in the wrong way. The fact it's not counted in the open, I don't think it's conspirator ial, to me it's expected, I would be surprised if they weren't used for their correct purposes in order to get the candidate the powers that be want to get into the political position. And also just an example of things that did happen, in the documentary "uncounted" that I watched, in pennsylvania there's a county where more voters rotunda for george w. Bush than toe the tall amount of voters total in that county. Obviously they know something went wrong, but there's no way to recount it when that happens. There's no way to go back and find out what went wrong. If I lived in that county, I would be upset that I know that my vote was not counted. There were counties where up to 80% of the people according to the machines they said did not vote for either candidate. When he asked the election official in that documentary, usually she said it's 1% that happened and those are the people who don't like either candidate so they don't vote for anyone. 80% we know something went wrong, but there's no way to tell with these electronic voting machines. There has got to be an auditable paper trail. It is weird we have to have this debate. I think it's obvious. And I just have to say that outright what the right decision is that we should not go with these unaudittable electronic machines. And also, in these debates today, it's been asked a lot if there is any evidence that the machines have been hacked. And then, you know, that's some of your arguments for, you know, do you have evidence they've been hacked. There's never going to be any evidence they have been hacked or haven't, one way or the other.
>> [buzzer sounding] because there's no paper trail. There is never going to be any evidence whether they have been hacked or haven't. Thank you very much.
>> dana, would you like to respond to any of this after jennifer gail?
>> thank you, Travis County judge same Biscoe, eckerd and Davis our Commissioners. Our rep depends on a democratic vote, not a computer programmer manipulated vote. County clerk dana debouvier has suggested to me that Texas does not have a certified paper trail system and that paper ballots would not comply with the disabilities act and for those reasons couldn't -- the county couldn't comply if a city in Travis County opted out of the electronic system. Because of those two reasons, american disabilities act and the certified paper trail. I would like to know a little bit more about why, why those two reasons would keep the county from complying. If, say, the city of Austin wanted to back out of having electronic voter system. And I'm asking her to answer those two questions for us. If -- because I am interested as you have come before this Commissioners court for several years, I know you are never going to leave the electronic system andly ask the voters of the city of Austin to revert back to paper ballots and to have them verified after a week so we have an accurate count that all candidates can count on. Like the members of this Commissioners court when you run in your elections. So I'd like to have the answer to that question on the certified paper trail and the americans with disabilities act keeping Travis County from complying with the paper -- use of paper ballots.
>> dana, would you like to use your three minutes to respond to any of the comments given?
>> indeed, judge, Commissioners, dana debouvier, Travis County clerk and I will take about three minutes. First of all, let me just say that you've heard a lot of heartfelt testimony here today. I think we ought to thank them for coming forward. That's really great, y'all. I do appreciate you being here.
>> [applause] they deserve credit for -- they deserve credit for being in a country where they've got the right and the courage to speak what their minds -- you know, speak their fetal and I totally support. That let me first say I've been meeting with the vote rescue people for quite some time, and one of the things that we did is we pulled together a group of people and we said, okay, really and truly, if we were going to try to do a totally manual hand counted kind of system, what would it look like? How would we do it? So we did our best to lay out exactly the kinds of things that would be needed, personnel, resources, security measures, everything I could think of to try to make that happen. What I would like to do is offer you a couple of pieces of information that came out of taking their approach and putting budget numbers to it. Now -- and it's just math. But here's the idea. The timed test that we did for tallying a ballot is that it would take about six seconds for a team of counters to count a race. There are 40 races on the ballot. That would equal about 240 seconds per ballot. We are estimating that we're going to get -- seems a reasonable number, 440,000 ballots will be cast between early voting and election day. That's 29,600 hours of counting. It's just math. Now, if you make the assumption you are going the need four people per precinct with approximately 200 precincts that we have, that's about 800 who would only be doing the counting. That doesn't count the people who on process voters, handling voting, working that night, this is extra people. 800 extra people. They would spend approximately 148 hours tallying up the ballots. That is 18.5 days to do a hand tally for a jurisdiction of our size. Now, in addition to that, we also -- I would like to make a couple of distinctions. First of all, hart has a paper trail to it. It also has a summary screen to it that gives voters the chance to not make the errors that are common in optical scan voting and in punch card voting, both of which this community has used. We have here in Travis County practiced vendor independence since we started using the state -- legally state certified slate system in 2001. So we're not diebold, we're not touch screen, we are not laptop and we are not internet connected.
>> [buzzer sounding] Travis County has received the election center award for having the best security in the state. It's what we consider the gold standard. We do believe that if we do hash code test, parallel monitoring and logic and accuracy testing, those three tests together along with the after election audits on paper that we do do prove that the system works well and we're always looking for ways to make sure our security carries forward, including plans for the future to work with cyber on improving our -- excuse me, parallel monitoring aspects. Just to say that, I don't -- I appreciate what these folks are saying and it will -- there will come a time in the next couple of years, judge, as you suggested, where we will need another citizens panel very like the first one we used to purchase this system as opposed to some of the others on the market. We'll need another panel discussion to think about future elections in Travis County and perhaps we can consider then what is legally certified with the state of Texas?
>> what is the state of Texas doing?
>> the --
>> regarding electronic voting equipment?
>> there are -- in August and I think January the secretary of state does their procedural and certification program that is equipment then eligible to be purchased by the state of Texas. And they, you know, twice a year run products and developments through both the federal government and state level to make sure they are certified to meet both federal and Texas law. So we periodically see new products coming out.
>> was that committee supposed to receive testimony with an eye to deciding whether or not legislation should be offered? In this area?
>> committee, there's a -- the secretary of state certification panel consists of at least three computer security scientists. All of them with ph.d.s, most of them teaching with universities. And their panel reviews each and every submission that a particular company makes and, of course, there are multiple companies for election systems. I'm sorry, I don't know exactly --
>> the question that met recently that ms. Reasonnic mentioned, that was a state committee, wasn't it?
>> [inaudible].
>> are they trying to decide whether or not to offer legislation?
>> it wouldn't be that committee, no, it would be the secretary and state, and yes, and the county clerk's association of which I am chair of elections is currently working with the secretary of state to look at a lot of different election issues. That is one of them, yes. It is under discussion.
>> okay. Any other questions for dana?
>> I have two. I'd like to know whether these two specific issues are on the burner and what's happening with them. One would be concurrent paper ballots produced by the machine so you could list the error rates. And second, is there any news on looking into open source code products rather than the proprietary code?
>> first let's take the vert verified paper audit trail. I'm going to have to give you my opinion on this, but it does seem that for the communities, there are about 26 states that have tried this and there's all different kinds of ways to do it. There have been some that have been successes in some places where it has failed. There's a mixed review on whether or not v-pat is worth quite a few millions that it costs you to do that. And I think what we're going to have to do is wait more more studies to determine are there ways to make it worth the money and do what it's supposed to do. At this point it's very mixed. Now, in terms of open source code, you as a Commissioners court, me as a county clerk, even the secretary of state of the state of Texas would have no say so in a free market to a vendor of election equipment directing them how they need to build their systems. The federal government sets standard for how these systems must perform as does the state. But directing a company that they could have a proprietary software system, which does have some advantages, or an open microsoft based system, which has some advantages and disadvantages, is entirely in the purview of the private marketplace. Now, whether or not that's appropriate, that is the way it has been in this country for a long time. We believe in a competitive open marketplace and I don't believe in our roles we can dictate a change like that. Does that help? Eye guess -- is that getting to the idea that -- I mean it's the government in power controlled the code -- I mean which -- which is more frightening at an idea, that the government in power owns the code or the private sector in competitive market.
>> precisely. What the computer scientists would tell you is there are pros and cons in each one. You know, one of the things I actually like about the hart system is that it doesn't have any of the microsoft issues we read about in the paper. It's not a microsoft system so at least we are spared some of those problems.
>> okay.
>> what's before us today is whether or not to purchase 35 e-slates at a cost of $102,000.
>> yes, sir, and directing p.b.o. To take the necessary ax to make the transfer.
>> if we approve it, they will do it. If, yes, sir.
>> before voting on this particular item, it's been a lot of comments that have been brought up especially with the paper trail, paper ballot. Dana, what I would like to ask is this question: how long would it probably take -- and I guess somewhere later we'll need to address this -- to put together a team of citizens in this community who has done on a lot of other things when they become before this Commissioners court to get the necessary input and the study groups or whatever, all the involvement of maybe going back to a paper ballot, maybe not. I don't really know what the results of that will be. Leaving what we have intact. I really don't know what the results will be after -- after this particular committee has been set up. My question though is how long would that probably take to get the necessary input from the citizenry of this community to see exactly how we would like to conduct -- at least give us insight on how we would like to conduct future elections?
>> yes, sir. And thank you for the question. It's a good one. We've used the hart e-slate touch button system for seven years now. We're getting close to the predictable end of the system. I'm thinking that as soon as the presidential election is over, perhaps around the first of the year, it would be a good time to start another citizens panel to consider what's available in the marketplace for Travis County to consider for the future. If past -- the past two times when we have pulled together a citizens committee to help with this, it's typically been 20 to 30 people who contribute a lot of time, and thank them for that, and it us typically by the time of the needs assessment and reviewing what's to market an accurate count liesing what is low-to-mid to you, it takes about three years to go through that process and come back to the court with plenty of time for you'll to consider the purchase and funding which could mean federal dollars that get matched to it. I'm thinking by starting sometime around the first of the year, we could be finished in time for the next presidential election. That is a reasonable time frame to make a change in a voting system. That's been our past approach.
>> what's to keep us from putting the feasibility of returning to paper ballots in the charge to the committee?
>> well, there are -- there are a couple of constraints.
>> the answer is the court can do that.
>> not exactly, sir.
>> I mean the a.g. Has not ruled out paper ballots.
>> well, no, but federal law has said you must comply a.d.a. Compliance. And we could buy something else that does federal a.d.a. Compliance or keep what we have that does a.d.a. Compliance, but you cannot have exclusively only hand marked paper and be in compliance with federal law.
>> I understand.
>> let me just add this, I think we kind of went through this whole discussion when it first came to the court and dana brought it to us, and all of these issues were discussed at that time. The court did ask a lot of questions and we saw a lot of material. Then there was the elections commission that was created at the federal level where they reviewed as well all of the things that were important to people in this country before we made all of those decisions. Then it went through the purchasing process. And our purchasing agent is here and so -- so that's a purchasing act that is in place for all governmental entities where that process of getting bids from all of the different folks who were interested in presenting their proposal to the county goes through. And that's another process that dana nor members of the court can have any kind of undo influence on. So, you know, the corporations issue, you know, I don't think we saw any of that because the purchasing act would prohibit us from going -- having any kind of undo influence. So it's -- I think it's a pretty clean process. And it's not perfect, nothing really is. And so we have to keep working on things and I think this next citizens committee would be another view to look at this whole process again as we keep going. But we did enter into this because of the a.d.a. Issues. So people with a.d.a. Issues would have access to voting without any kind of interference whatsoever or any barriers. So that's why that decision was made to put that system in, and we realize we have to continuously look at what we have in place, let's review it again, let's see how we can better this whole process. And I think certainly whatever we've studied, judge, I think is going to have to eventually go through state review and probably federal review to make sure we're not violating anybody's rights or access to the ballot. So a little bit of a history in where we've been.
>> and if I might add, Travis County is home to the school for the blind and dyslexic and home to the school for the deaf. They are our voters too.
>> I have one question.
>> there's lots to talk about.
>> I'm sorry. I was wondering about the -- ms. Crossly suggested for those who are eligible to vote by mail, that that's one option for folks who are concerned. So just one option. We're talking about all of our options here. If you would like us to stop the discussion, we can. But I'm asking --
>>
>> [inaudible].
>> all this long-term stuff that really what we have is decision about $102,000 today. I think this deserves a comprehensive review and I don't think it ought to take three years, but we ought to take whatever time is necessary.
>> [applause]
>> is there a motion?
>>
>> [inaudible].
>> I move that --
>>
>> [inaudible].
>> the only information that's relevant today is that pertaining to whether or not we buy the 35 e-slates for the upcoming election thereby authorizing expenditure of $102,000. The rest of this seems to me we can take as long as we need to at some point.
>> I don't think the citizens of Travis County are going to let you take as long as you want to, I'll say that. We do not as a county, not everybody has to vote on one of these so-called hava accessible machines. None of the machines meet those requirements and that is a fact. The minimum requirement for hava is you have one accessible method that allows someone with a disability to vote independently and privately. One. The rest of the people can vote on paper. And Texas right now has an election code that spells out in incredible detail how you conduct hand counted paper ballot elections. As of 2006, there were 90 counties that were doing this. So if dana needs extra help in figuring out how to run a hand counted paper election, she can pick up the phone and call 90 people and they can tell her everything she needs to know because I guess she's forgotten or maybe she maybe never did. But the misis that we all have to vote on these machines and that is wrong.
>> okay.
>> thank you.
>> the question is whether we buy the requested 35 e-slates.
>>
>> [inaudible].
>> may I address a couple of points?
>> does it pertain to the 35 e-slates?
>> yes, sir, it does.
>> the e slates that we have in our possession that were used in the pre marry election went down not one time but two times during the election. Disenfranchising over dozens of voters, several dozens of voters, almost 50. Near 50. That's a lot of people who lost their right to vote because there weren't machines available and the county refused me permission to hand out a paper ballot. These are the same machines that you are talking about buying. When they go down, voters don't get to vote. Because the county won't follow its own s.o.p. They threatened me with jail if I broke the seal and gave out paper ballots. I fried to inform ms. Dana debouvier of this fact on election day. But she was too busy. She had a press conference to go to. I asked could I talk to her after. No, she had someplace else to be. I've tried to inform her in person about this problem that I noticed. Don't spend another $100,000 on something that isn't verifiable. We have enough machines in the county to qualify for the a.d.a. Necessity. I walk on four feet. I understand accessibility issues. I don't want anybody denied the vote not because they can't see or can't read or any other reason. We have something in place for that. Please don't spend more good money after bad. These machines are flawed. I have seen it with my own eyes.
>> okay. Why do we need 35 more?
>> yeah, why do we need 35 more when the ones that are there aren't verifiable. Give us a chance and I guarantee you as god as my witness, you will get more than 800 volunteers to count those votes. Give us a chance to show in the early voting. We'll come out in droves. We'll show you a paper hand counted election looks like. Thank you.
>> [applause]
>> why do we need 35 e-slates?
>> we are trying to avoid long lines for what we know will be a large crush of people for the -- both early voting and election day. If we can open up two mega centers, we believe that will very much help take the pressure off election day especially, but some of our smaller early voting locations that are sometimes very popular like the grocery stores. These larger locations, one north, one south, will have something like 40 to 50 e-slates in them. I need the 35 e-slates today so I can offer voters this extra capacity to be able to handle the crowd we know we're going to have.
>> how many machines do we have?
>> about 2100 and some change. A little over 2100 units. I'm only asking for 35 extras. Just --
>> some may be wondering why we don't move 35 of the 2100.
>> [applause]
>> what we're trying -- what we're trying to do is not cut back on the places where we know there's going to be big turnout in order to create this one because all that does is hurt those areas. I want to have as much penetration into our community as possible to give folks enough booths to be voting on while offering them even more opportunities to cast a vote early. If we can convince people to vote early, election day will be far less crowded and we don't want our people to have to wait in line any longer than we have to. It's a small amount for us to be able to offer a fairly sizable two mega sites to people to handle what's typically in our county, a last minute crush.
>> is there a motion?
>> I move approval of the 35 machines for the use at the mega site locations.
>> thank you, Commissioner.
>> and I second that. And let me say this along with -- will you accept this as a second, Commissioner. At we look at less than three years to come back and look. If we can do it six months to a year within that time frame, I would like to see the concerns brought up by the citizens as far as paper ballot and committee and stuff is concerned, we may not be posted per se for that, but I think the testimony --
>> we can certainly give our intention.
>> the direction.
>> I accept that intention too.
>> and I would like for it to come back in less than a year. I think 12 months is sufficient.
>> we can start with needs assessment and do that, sir.
>> so that would be the direction I think need to be a part of this motion. I really am concerned about what I've heard today. So that's why I'm bringing this less than a year.
>> this is a very complicated topic.
>> any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you all very much for coming down.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 8:37 AM