Call to Action: Responses to Replies from County Election Officials

Many of our election integrity supporters have written their county clerks to express concern about the use of electronic equipment to read paper ballots and count votes in Oregon elections. Many have also gotten responses back from those officials. It is clear from the responses that we have a lot of work to do yet to educate these public officials.

The Oregon VRC has put together a short document with some typical county clerk responses and our corresponding reactions -- click here for the document (PDF). Please use this information to respond back to your county election clerks.

The bottom line is that the state of Oregon currently does not require that actual machine tallies be verified before the election results are certified. None of the points made by county election officials, as described in the attached document, address the fact that Oregonians have no way of knowing whether machine-tallied election results are accurate.

When responding to your county clerks, an excellent report to refer to is a June 27, 2006 report, "The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World," published by the Brennan Center for Justice (http://www.brennancenter.org/). The study examined each of the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems: electronic machines (“DREs”) with — and without — a voter-verified paper trail, and precinct-count optical scan systems (“PCOS”). This report provides the first-ever systematic analysis of security vulnerabilities in electronic election systems. The findings relevant to Oregon's election system include:

• All of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. All three systems are equally vulnerable to an attack involving the insertion of corrupt software or other software attack programs designed to take over a voting machine.

• Automatic audits, done randomly and transparently, are necessary if paper records are to enhance security. The report called into question basic assumptions of many election officials by finding that the systems in 14 states using voter-verified paper records but doing so without requiring automatic audits are of “questionable security value.”
• The vast majority of states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect a software attack even though the most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied.