How Green Was My Ballot?

An inquiry into the use of electronic vote tracking and verification

opinion by Joyce Harrell, Tom Munsey, Janet Thomas and Tim White

In San Juan County, votes are packaged, barcoded and processed like items at the supermarket. The local Green Party has been challenging county officials to investigate the "Ballot Tracker" system, adopted a year ago, that identifies each person’s ballot with an individual barcode.

After researching how elections are supposed to be conducted in Washington state, the Greens discovered that the Washington State Constitution mandates "absolute secrecy" in the voting process and that state law prohibits "marks on the ballot cards which would distinguish an individual voter’s ballot card from other ballot cards”

Note that Ballot Tracker is officially used not to count votes but to verify that ballots have been received, processed and counted.

At the San Juan County Council meeting of June 27, the councilors acknowledged a letter from the Greens requesting further investigation. They scheduled county auditor, Si Stephens, to answer questions on the issue of ballot secrecy.

Tom Munsey of the Green Party Coordinating Council asked, "Is the bar code on the ballot, not on the envelope but on the ballot, an individual bar code that... could be used to identify the name of the person who sent the ballot in?"

Auditor Stephens replied, "The answer is 'no' under current policy or procedure. It could be, Mr. Munsey, if in fact we ran one ballot through at a time and someone wanted to take the effort to get into the computer code and determine that. The reason we donÕt do that [is that] we set a minimum ballot batch of 25. We never run fewer than 25 ballots to go, so under that scenario there is no conceivable way that you could ever know how any one individual voted...."

Stephens added, "Again, I want to thank the Green party for raising the issue, and I want to invite them to participate in the processing of ballots. As this council and this room knows, we use very little county staff in the processing of ballots. We use what we call the 'A Team', our citizens' team, and I really would encourage and invite members of the Green Party to join that team and go thru that process.

(In fact, Joyce Harrell, co-author of this article and a member of the Green Party Coordinating Council is on the "A Team" and participates in the processing of ballots.)

There are two problems here: The secrecy of the ballot and the possible manipulation of election results.

There's a serious problem when a private company (in this case VOTEHERE, a division of Dategrity Corporation) attaches identifying barcodes to voters' ballots which are then connected to computers and scanning equipment. As the testimony above indicates, individual ballots could be connected to individual names, thus violating the sanctity of ballot secrecy.

In theory, election results could be manipulated or at least thrown into doubt by either corrupt election officials or by the company providing the computer software. San Juan County is fortunate to have a verifiable paper trail with mail-in ballots that are filled out and returned to the county, so manipulation of election results is difficult.

The chilling follow-up is that Dategrity Corporation is using the endorsement of their system by San Juan County election officials to sell it as an electronic alternate to a verifiable paper trail in other areas. Once voting and verification are all- electronic, the door is wide open for undetectable election fraud.

San Juan County was the first in the state to use Ballot Tracker; subsequently, ten other counties have adopted it.

The San Juan Green Party is calling for an investigation of VOTEHERE and the Ballot Tracker system. We would like the elimination of the barcodes in order to preserve the integrity of the elections and give San Juan County voters unconditional assurance of a secret ballot.