California can avoid scandal, bias while counting votes

By Trent Lange, especially for CalMatters

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Founding Father John Adams grimly warned, “There never was a democracy that did not kill itself.”

Two scandals exposing the cozy relationship between multinational voting machine corporations and the unknown officials who decide how our votes are counted may prove him right. If ever there was a place where faith in the legitimacy of our vote could explode, this is it.

Consider the multinational voting machine corporation Smartmatic. Federal prosecutors allege that Smartmatic maintained a secret “slush fund”.” on bribing foreign officials, funded in part by the Los Angeles County Compact.

Court documents and LA Times reports also raise questions about whether Smartmatic maintained an overly close relationship with the Los Angeles County Clerk, including allegedly paying for his trips and dinners during the same period the company received large additional contracts. Even if no laws were broken, the image of an election official being wined and dined by a corporate vendor entrusted with building the county’s voting system undermines public faith in the integrity of voting.

Now consider another multinational corporation, Dominion, whose machines count more than a quarter of all ballots in the US. A former GOP representative recently bought Dominon and rebranded it with the right-wing name “Liberty Vote.” The company’s press release uses language supported by pro-Trump “election integrity” community..

There is no evidence that Liberty Vote is biased. But will Democrats trust the election results if the company behind the secret vote-counting software appears to be tied to a Republican faction? If a Democratic millionaire had bought Dominion, renamed it “Progressive Vote” and repeated the language of the Democratic Party, would Republicans have trusted his census? Unlikely.

Fortunately, there is a better way.

In contrast to the secretive inner workings of these proprietary systems, there are “open source” voting systems that are cheaper, more transparent, and more secure.

Open source voting systems use source code that is publicly available so that government jurisdictions and independent experts can verify that the software is counting votes impartially and accurately.

Public access does not mean that anyone can change the code used in the voting machines. The Secretary of State still certifies the software, and the certified version continues to be controlled by voting machine vendors and the state.

But because the code is public, independent experts can identify problems so they can be fixed.

The Defense Department said publicly available source code improves reliability and security by enabling the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized. And former CIA director James Woolsey say it clearly: for national security, election system software should follow the model used by our most sensitive government systems – it should be open source.

Open source systems also keep costs down. The proprietary supplier market is uncompetitive; there are only three main providers, and in some cases only one can serve a jurisdiction’s needs, allowing it to charge whatever it wants.

In contrast, once an open-source voting system is certified, jurisdictions can use the software for free, saving tens of millions of dollars across the state.

The nonprofit VotingWorks has an open-source voting system used in other states, but certification by the California secretary of state would cost up to $1 million. Proprietary vendors can absorb this because they recoup costs through license fees.

Open source systems, being freely available, have no such revenue stream, making certification a significant barrier without government assistance.

This is where leadership from Governor Gavin Newsom and the Legislature’s budget committees is essential. For about $1 million—a rounding error in the budget—California could save taxpayers many times that and get a more transparent, secure, public voting system.

Without this reform, California remains shackled to secretive, privately controlled software and machinery from corporations whose actions and ideology can undermine public trust.

By supporting legislation that makes it easier to certify open-source voting alternatives, Newsom can strengthen our faith in elections by protecting the vote count from even the appearance of bias or monetary influence — and thus prove John Adams wrong.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.