Debra Bowen’s Big, Bad-Ass, Fabulously Gutsy Choice (UPDATED)

Last year, a lot of California residents—myself among them— voted for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State for one central reason, and one reason only: she promised to take a long, hard look at the safety and efficacy of the various kinds of electronic voting machines being used—or slated for use—in California’s counties. These were all the machines that then, Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson had already certified—over the protest of activists who worried about the machines’ security. But McPherson, a likable-seeming and genial fellow, assured us they were fine and dandy and certainly not hackable, God forbid!

Bowen professed not to be so sure. If need be, she said during her campaign, she’d decertify the things.

After Bowen was elected, a lot of us wondered rather cynically if she would really do what she promised. Or was she—as we figured was more likely the case— just blowing a bunch of campaign smoke? (Not that we don’t TRUST the word of public officials or anything.) In other words, when push came to shove, if she found the machines weren’t up to snuff, would she have the backbone to take responsibility for the huge financial hit—and the Tsunami of criticism—that pulling the machines might mean?

This past Friday night, August 3, at exactly nine minutes to midnight, we got our answer.

Miz David, stood up to Goliath.

To have a full understanding of what occurred, let’s backtrack a little:

After being sworn into office in January of 2007, Bowen immediately set in motion an investigation into the methods and efficacy of the way California votes.

(Here’s a link to the voting methods used county by county.)

In February, Bowen and her SoS team asked for certain pertinent pieces of information from all the companies that made the various voting contraptions used by California’s counties, so that she could do a thoroughly informed assessment. She gave the companies a deadline by which time they were supposed to fork over the info and they….
…STONEWALLED.

They were busy, they said. They were still hung over from New Year’s Eve. They’re weren’t in the mood. They had a headache. They needed to wash their hair. The dog ate their ability to find their paperwork. Debra Bowen didn’t use the right words when she asked. Whatever.

Eventually, after much persistent nudging and a teensy bit of threatening, Bowen got the required information from three companies, Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems.

A fourth company, Elections Systems & Software—which makes the Inkavote system used in LA County, plus another system used in 10 California counties—still dragged their corporate feet. (They finally provided the info in late June.)

Nonetheless, in early March, Bowen triggered what she described as a “top-to-bottom” review of the voting systems with the info she had. She requested that teams of researchers be assembled by the University of California to take a look at the machines to determine if they could reliably safeguard the integrity of the votes cast by the citizens of the State of California.

For the next two months, the teams did just that. They evaluated the security, accessibility and manufacturer documentation of various voting machines. In the case of each type of machine, a “red team” of “penetration testers” tried to hack into the voting systems to see if they could disrupt an election or alter the results. Another team examined the source code to the machines.

On July 27, Bowen released the results of the study.

The results came down to this: Question: Were the machines secure? Answer: A big fat NO. Hackers hacked into all of ’em with no problem.

Here are a few of the details as reported by the Sacramento Bee.

Teams of hackers, led by computer scientists at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, determined that the machines are vulnerable to various levels of security breaches ranging from using small mechanical tools to break into a voting machine to deploying a computer virus to change a vote tally.

Matthew Bishop, a UC Davis researcher who led the “Red Team” that hacked into the machines, testified Monday at a hearing that his researchers were able to change vote totals and override the software on electronic voting machines.

A report released Thursday by UC Berkeley researcher David Wagner determined that hackers could install viruses that spread throughout a county’s voting network when ballots are being tabulated by a central computer.

Critics assailed the teams’ results saying:

…the tests were unrealistic because Bowen did not have the computer scientists consider the layers of security deployed by local officials on Election Day. Voting machine companies also took issue with the fact that Bowen gave researchers complete access to proprietary cards and codes that would otherwise have to be stolen from elections offices.

Oh. Right. Like that could never happen.

Bowen now had a hardcore, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t choice to make: Given the results of the reports, should she decertify the machines, which meant costing a bunch of California counties a whole lot of money? Or should she avoid the ghastly extra cost and inconvenience and try to make do with the existing machines using some kind of temporary band aid fixes—in other words, the engineering equivalent of duct tape and bailing wire.

State of California regulations say that the Secretary of State must give counties at least six months’ notice if machines are to be decertified. That meant Bowen had until midnight on Friday, August 3, to make up her mind.

Brad Friedman, of the California-located Texas-located BradBlog —-who has been one of the best of the online commentators on this issue—was live blogging the whole California drama that, eventually came down to an all day vigil on Friday that stretched into the night, while reporters and advocates waited for Bowen to hold her press conference and say what the hell she was going to do.

At first, reporters were told that there would be an announcement before the close of the biz day on Friday. But five o’clock came and went with no word. In the meantime, Friedman—who was not in Sacramento, but was blogging from Texas—sent increasingly fatigued and funny updates, like this one:

By the way, while we’re waiting — and as I am currently parked literally minutes from the main headquarters of Diebold Election Systems, Inc., in Plano, TX — feel free to check out their main web page. I don’t know about other browsers, but using Firefox, all kinds of HTML code is sticking out that shouldn’t be visible. These jackasses can’t even code a webpage and we’re relying on them to code our elections?! Oh, please someone save me…

[TECH NOTE: If you check the Diebold web page using Internet Explorer , and then check it again using Firefox, you’ll see what Brad means. The Diebold idiots checked their code to see if it ran on I.E., but not on Firefox (nevermind that the latter has nearly 19 percent of the browser market in the U.S., 29 percent in Europe, mutter, mutter, mutter.) In short, this should not be viewed as a confidence boosting sign.]

The hours ticked by. Finally, another announcement-about-the-announcement came: AT 11:45 pm, Friday night, fifteen minutes before midnight—the drop-dead cut-off point for any kind of decertification—Bowen would hold a press conference to tell everyone what she’d decided.

She finally came out to the microphone at nine minutes to midnight. (And she was wearing a very nice claret-colored blazer, I must say.) A very tired Bowen declared that she was going to decertify the voting machines used in 39 counties. One of them was Los Angeles County’s InkaVote system. If the various manufacturers hit certain marks, the machines would be recertified in time for the February primary elections, she said. Bowen also laid down a list of new security protections for upcoming elections. For instance, no more taking machines home for “sleep overs.”
Here’s Bowen’s official announcement.

The New York Times summarizes Bowen’s actions in simple terms:

Ms. Bowen took her toughest action against touch-screen machines, in which a voter’s ballot is generated by a computer. She said the machines made by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems could be used only in early voting and to meet voting-access requirements for the disabled.

Another touch-screen model, made by Hart InterCivic, can be used more broadly, she said. But all three of the systems can be used only under rigorous security procedures, including audits of the election results.

A lot of officials —including the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, a person named Conny McCormack— immediately screamed bloody murder saying that Bowen is creating an unnecessary panic.

News flash, dudes. We were already panicked before she ever got there. You don’t seem to get it. That’s why Bowen was elected—even though she had a much smaller campaign budget than McPherson. We wanted her to DO SOMETHING to clear up the panic.

Certain critics said that Bowen’s decision was all about politics. (In Sunday’s paper, the LA Times’ Joel Rubin has a nicely reported piece disabusing that view.)

And, speaking of politics, there has been an unsettling trend of late, in which elections officials seem to be anything but politics free, as the NY Times notes here quite succinctly.

Meanwhile, other states are using Bowen’s decision as a cue to reexamine their own voting systems—or in some cases, to stay with what they’ve got..

And, not surprisingly, the criticism continues.

Journalists, desperate to get contrary voices, have found outlier researchers who say things like: Even paper ballots aren’t safe. (And, I’m not kidding about this.) Somebody could stuff a lit cigarette into the ballot box and burn up all the votes.

Well, yes, of course. There is no perfection. Never has been. There will always be people who will try their damndest to illegally influence elections. But, at least Debra Bowen is one state official who seems to be taking genuine steps to guard against it.

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UPDATE: Smart and alert WLA commenter, “Listener on the Sidelines,” has pointed out that the next fun-filled voting-related…uh….challenge on California’s horizon is this charming initiative called the “Presidential Election Reform Act.” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg calls it accurately “an audacious power play packaged as a step forward for democratic fairness.” I STRONGLY recommend reading Hertzberg’s piece called VOTESCAM on this political-operative-created initiative that—if the California electorate doesn’t snap itself awake and comprehend its implications—could easily pass.