The secretary of state’s office in Colorado, which oversees elections run by county clerks, is refusing to talk with them about the 2008 event, fearing its statements could be used in a lawsuit.
“You really cannot get through to anyone (with the secretary of state) to talk about voting equipment,” Adams County Clerk Karen Long told The Colorado Statesman weekly report. “The clerks and the vendors are really the ones that are caught in the middle of all this.”
The fear of another lawsuit was created by a lawsuit over the 2006 election process in the state. Attorney Paul Hultin represented 13 plaintiffs in that action to prevent the use of electronic voting systems, alleging officials in Mesa County exerted improper pressure on the state to approve its election systems vendor.
He alleged Mesa County, desperate to use equipment for which it had paid, pressured state officials to approve the equipment, and they ultimately sent a testing director who had no formal training in equipment certification to do the evaluation.
In that case Hultin offered into evidence e-mails between the state and county as well as testimony about telephone conversations.
Judge Lawrence Manzanares eventually ruled the state failed to adopt minimum standards to test machine security and had done an “abysmal” job of documenting testing. But he still permitted the machines to be used because decertifying them six weeks before an election would cause more problems than it would solve.
Thus, the recent letter from Deputy Secretary of State Bill Hobbs in response to a request from nine county clerks for information about the recertification process for the coming election. The Colorado Statesman obtained a copy.
There are, he said, “limitations … in responding to the information needs of the county clerks during the recertification process.” He said instead, information the secretary of state could offer would be posted on a website.
Hobbs told The Statesman having any direct communications with clerks could open up a legal Pandora’s box.
“There are a whole series of questions that can’t be raised [by the clerks] because they arguably could be viewed as putting pressure on us,” Hobbs told the report. “The prospect of litigation causes us to be more circumspect in our communications. Any statements that are loose and not in context can be used in a lawsuit.”
That makes it difficult, he said, to hold any one-on-one dialogues with the county clerks who must set up the local elections process in the state.
“Because of various open records requests we have received … and because of the expectation that there will be litigation again this year concerning the certification process, we have tried to make as much information as possible available via our website, while trying to avoid communications that might be viewed as compromising the integrity of our certification,” the letter said.
The issue of voting machine certification is critical because of tests that have revealed teams of computer hackers sanctioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen were able to hack without difficulty into various vendors’ touch-screen voting machines during a “top to bottom review” of every system certified by the state, according to a University of California study.
 Diebold touchscreen voting machine |
The report concluded the machines could be manipulated using “tools that can be found in a typical office and could be executed by a very low-skilled attacker.”
Voting equipment for the timed test included devices from Sequoia, Hart InterCivic and Diebold. Election Systems and Software failed to submit its equipment for the review prior to the deadline, but Bowen said she has “the legal authority to impose any condition” on use of the vendor’s equipment in the state.
The ES&S system was the one used in Colorado’s Mesa County, which officials said was approved even though it clearly had problems meeting the state requirements.
That issue hasn’t been resolved fully in Colorado and the new Colorado Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, has implemented more stringent standards that previously existed.
Coffman has chided ES&S, Sequoia, Hart InterCivic and Premier Elections Solutions for being too slow to provide hardware and documentation needed to test their systems.
The vendors had a deadline to supply such items of July 1, which was pushed back to Oct. 1, and now is set for Dec. 1.
Pamela Anderson, the Jefferson County Clerk, told The Statesman if one or more of the systems is not certified, it will create “unfunded chaos” for the county. She said there is $750,000 left to spend on voting equipment, but replacing ES&S, for example, would cost $14.5 million.
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