OpEdNews - Page 4 of Article: Utter failure of election transparency in Monterey County

I told Ms. Lane and Ms. Turner that they didn't need to risk arrest, but also asked George to stay as a witness if he felt he could do so. All present were deeply troubled but to his credit and my eternal thanks, Mr. George Riley agreed to stay.

At this point, both private security guards were ordered to watch us along with at least one other staffer. At approximately 15 minute intervals Mr. Ripley would come out and order us to leave yet again. I would refuse; George Riley said that as a Green Party official who helped convince me to come out from Arizona he felt a duty to at least observe what happened to me.

During the wait for the deputies, I called my attorney in Arizona (Bill Risner) and gave him a blow-by-blow account of events to that point. Staff and renta-cops harassed me over my phone use; I replied that I'd been threatened with arrest and that we were past a "normal rules" situation.

After some unknown time (well over an hour), sheriff's deputies finally arrived. I was able to observe them near Ms. Tulett's office; one was on the phone for at least five minutes. Ms. Lane informed me later that county attorney Blankenship had arrived but through the back door and went directly to Ms. Tulett's office.

After at least fifteen minutes of this "high level huddle," Ms. Tulett and the rest of her upper staff came over to us and agreed to show us what software was loaded on the machines. They never responded clearly to questions as to whether or not we were still threatened with arrest, but it was clear that was off the table. Mr. Blankenship left the building without talking to any member of our team or answering any legal challenges. Valerie Lane and Jeanne Turner rejoined us. Claudio Valenzuela and Frank Foley went into the room to type in commands; Linda Tulett was at the door passing instructions from me to Mr. Valenzuela and Mr. Foley.

EXAMINATION REVEALS ILLICIT PROGRAMS

Examining the installed software was an annoying process as Mr. Valenzuela pretended not to know how to run MS-Windows. We got past that and established that Microsoft Access 2003 (and the rest of the MS-Office 2003 suite) were present on the "Tally1" and "Tally2" systems.

I then asked that an additional command be typed into the command line window:

ping www.google.com

This would have established whether or not they had cross-connected their systems to the Internet in less than 20 seconds. All elections staff categorically refused to do this; Mr. Valenzuela and Mr. Foley walked out of the room to the back and Ms. Tulett declared all "testing" done, noting that this whole process had already taken hours. I asked her whose fault she thought that was. She asked me why I was accusing her of misconduct, I asked her why she was sneaking around her own building like a cat burglar.

The discussion petered out at that point and we left the building. Please note that at no time was there any report back from attorney Blankenship as to what Election Code 15004 is all about.

I returned later that evening as the post-polls-close started back up after 8:00pm. I was allowed in as an observer. That evening I spent some time educating the rest of the election integrity people on problems within the room and transparency issues in general, which led to verbal harassment by elections staff.

SECRECY

The elections staff was highly secretive in the operation of the election. Two points stand out:

a) Information was transferred from machine to machine on USB memory sticks. This was not a transparent process. At one point the memory stick (a very small one of yellow translucent plastic) was carried out of the room in Mr. Foley's closed fist while he attempted to conceal his having done so. Questions about whether the memory stick was being carried in or out were ignored. Only by carefully observing Mr. Foley hands could I tell that it was being transported.

b) The first set of printouts of the elections results based on the pre-scanned mail-in votes (just before 9:30pm) failed for some reason. Copies of these "aborted" sheets were carried away from the observers over 60 feet away to Mr. Tulett's office, where a heated discussion ensued away from observers. My attempts to watch this by prairie-dogging my head over the cubicle were met by harassment by staff. A second set of results printouts were made and again carried over there; this time we saw a "thumbs up" and those results were released. What was different is impossible to say. The memory card was also carried over there during this time; that may have been harmless (uploading results to the Internet?) or malicious (altering vote totals reporting on the memory card). My point isn't to accuse them of tampering without having any evidence of same; I do accuse them of running an illegally secretive process.

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