Mule Train Mail: Mickey Duniho on the Attorney General’s Investigation of Election Integrity in Pima County

by Mickey Duniho:

Pima County voters
deserve to see convincing evidence that the May 2006 Regional
Transportation Authority (RTA) election was honest, not just a
half-baked investigation that raises more questions than it answers.

The concern about
possible wrongdoing arose from several anomalies: the RTA passed by a
surprisingly wide margin; there are computer audit log entries
indicating that after the first day of scanning early ballots, the
election staff printed unauthorized vote total summary reports; and
there are computer audit log entries indicating that on the second
day of scanning the staff began the day by deliberately replacing the
previous day’s backup of the election database with a new,
unnecessary backup. This replacement could not have been an accident,
as suggested by the county’s lawyers, because both GEMS and
Windows require that the user confirm the overwriting of a file.
Because the Diebold GEMS election database is known to be easily
hacked and there were apparently no outside observers, these
anomalies raise serious questions about the actions of the election
staff.

When the AG
investigator queried Michael Shamos, a nationally recognized voting
systems expert at Carnegie Mellon University, Shamos responded in
email, “My suggestion would be to retabulate from the original
ballots. This should tell us very quickly whether the GEMS results
were fudged.” The AG investigator replied, “If there is
no evidence of any computer issues then the recount …will be
unnecessary.” Shamos responded, “My suspicion is that no
review by the elections division or the state purporting to claim
that no manipulation occurred or was possible will be accepted by
naysayers and will instead be viewed as a whitewash. Ultimately the
proof of the pudding is in the ballots.” The AG investigator
replied, “The most vocal local naysayers have bought into this
process.” As one of the local naysayers, I can tell you that we
had not bought into the process – we had simply been dismissed
by the AG investigator.

The AG investigator’s
description of the project sent to Michael Shamos included tests for
swapping the Yes and No vote codes in the database. The statement of
work written by the investigative contractor contained no reference
to such a test. During the investigation, the county’s IT
director suggested to the investigative contractor that they look at
the Preferences table in the database to see if the programming had
changed, and they found no evidence of changes to the Preferences
table. But the simplest manipulation of the election database,
swapping the codes that identified the Yes and No votes, would have
been done in the Candidate table, which they apparently did not
examine.

This investigation
looks very much like a whitewash. The AG investigator refused to take
advice from a nationally renowned voting systems expert about looking
at the ballots. We can only be confident that the election results
were honest if the ballots confirm the machine total. Arizona’s
Attorney General needs to assign an investigator who will publicly
recount the RTA ballots.