Citizens Oversight Status Update 2018

Citizens Oversight (2019-02-09) Ray Lutz

This Page: https://copswiki.org/Common/CitizensOversightStatusUpdate2018
More Info: Ballot Access Lawsuit, California Public Utilities Commission, Coalition To Decommission San Onofre, COPs Program, Easy Voting, Earth Summit, Election Integrity, Election Team, Snapshot Protocol, Election Audit Lawsuit, Helms Proposal, Net Neutrality, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Waste, Open Ballot Initiative, San Diego Primary Contest 2016, San Onofre Settlement Federal Case, Save ECPAC, Settlement To Move San Onofre Waste, Shutdown Diablo, Shut San Onofre, Snapshot Protocol, Stop Nuke Dump, Stop The Unfair Settlement

This has been a successful year for Citizens Oversight and for everyone who has helped in our projects. Since this was an election year, the most active projects were with regard to Election Integrity, but the Stop Nuke Dump project was active as well. We thank all our members, volunteers, and donors who have stepped forward to help our agenda items.

For anyone wishing to catch up on our activites, please see

• Citizens Oversight Status Update 2018 -- This document
• Citizens Oversight Status Update 2017
• Citizens Oversight Status Update 2016

Most important events:

Election Integrity

• The Election Audit Lawsuit which we won against Michael Vu regarding not including all ballots in the 1% Manual Tally Audit went through the appeal process. You may recall that as the appeal was filed, AB-840 was amended late in the process to make Vu's acts suddenly legal. This action by scheming election officials of the California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials (CACEO) led by Los Angeles County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Dean Logan, and endorsed by Secretary of State Alex Padilla. The Appeal court went overboard and ruled that not only was the appeal now moot, but also that the original win in Superior Court was reversed and no attorney fees were granted. Outrageous!
  • Our case was subsequently appealed to the CA Supreme Court and they did not choose to consider it. (boo hoo)
  • Now, Vu and his cohorts say that the case was "frivolous" even though they did break the law as written at the time, and it was clear that the legislature intended, and all statisticians agree, that all VBM ballots should be included in the audit. (This is why it is very difficult to sue govt officials, as their friends in govt will just change the law so their actions are ok, and the courts also go along.)

• We also then attempted to access the ballots of the 2016 primary by several different approaches, largely in 2017:
  • The Ballot Access Lawsuit, based on Public Records law claims that ballots are public records, and are therefore accessible by the public (as in many other states such as NY and Fl)
    • was ruled against by the lower courts (which we expected, because statute does say that the ballots are "sealed")
    • We appealed so the law itself can be questioned. We believe the Public Records Act, passed in 1964, and the subsequent amendment to the State Constitution (2004, stating that any existing law should be interpreted narrowly, to provide maximum access the public) should override the idea that the ballots are "sealed" and therefore off limits. See the Opening Appellate Brief to read an excellent argument for the appellate court to rule in our favor.
    • The case as appealed in 2018, and as of this writing, it is still being processed by the court (keep fingers crossed).
  • The San Diego Primary Contest 2016 attempted to access the ballots through a judicial process they call a "contest."
    • This process, although unsuccessful, allowed us to discover the limits of our ability to get to ballots this way.
    • As the ballots are "sealed," the county and courts said we could not review them under a discovery request unless we could also show that Bernie Sanders would have prevailed in the state-wide race in California. Because our focus was in San Diego, that was not feasible. This was not appealed but the case allowed us to learn a great deal about the process, and that almost no attorneys are familiar with this niche of law.
    • Submitted to the CA state SOS but they really did not know what to do with it and so it did not progress further.

• Citizens Oversight has supported an endeavor to understand Risk Limiting Audits and similar election audits which use a small sample of the ballots to determine that the reported results are correct, within a given risk limit.
  • Pilots of Risk Limiting audits were approved for CA in AB-2125, and signed into law, so this is very important for CA, and we need to understand these audits so we can effectively provide essential oversight.
  • Our reseach is being reviewed and discussed and will be revealed soon. Essentially, we created a Monte-Carlo simulation of the audits so we could understand how each approach would pan out, and developed an alternative method called "Balanced Risk Audits with Workload Limitation (BRAWL)." Read the whitepaper
  • Involved in a number of very active email lists and working groups associated with Verified Voting, Brennan Center, Democracy Works, and other organzations that are pushing very hard to get Risk Limiting Audits introduced. No one else in those groups is as focused on keeping these transparent and overseeable, so our involvement is very important, albeit somewhat out of view of the public.
  • Have proposed a standard format for Risk Limiting audit data to facilitiate oversight of election audits. Will be continuing to formulate this as a standard as we have more chance to bounce it off other RLA pilots. Rhode Island had several different flavors of audits in their recent pilot so it will go a long way toward solidifying it.

• Snapshot Protocol -- Because this was an election year, we were very active in providing oversight over these critical elections. We are still having trouble getting sufficient volunteers to provide oversight.
  • Organized overight for the November 2018 General Election and 2018 Primary Elections in various states that do conduct audits.
  • Conducted several training livestreams and Visited San Diego County Registrar to show early VBM procedures and document whiting-out of ballots.
  • Confronted San Luis Obispo county in their policy that no cameras are allowed in the random draw meeting. Ultimately, I removed the camera after they promised to provide a letter stating that it was their policy and why. Then, in their random draw, they neglected to include three precincts in the slips of paper being drawn. Many months later, I eventally got the letter from them after twisting their arm by contacting the Sheriff who witnessed the promise. Still need to respond to that letter and argue that cameras are still required and we will see if this can be progressed at all without taking it into court.
  • Discovered that Los Angeles County does just started using batch mode processing in the early VBM ballots, and they could not provide a batch-by-batch report prior to the random draw. Sent them a letter advising them of our difficultly to see if this can bear fruit without going to court.
  • Researched Same-Day-Registration to see how widespread it was used. Apparently, the election officials are not trying very hard to inform people about this new right. Still working on updating this for the November elections as of this writing.
  • Implemented an experimental software based collection of real-time election data. See Election Data Harvesting For Nov 2018
  • Worked with candidate Raji Rab who eventually submitted his case to the state supreme court.
  • Participated in oversight of San Diego County Random Draw
  • Other requests to Micheal Vu were blown off and no response was provided. They are now stonewalling.

To support this work, we have:

• Facebook group: Citizens Oversight: Election Team
• Facebook group: Election Scam Clearinghouse
• Created email list: electionteam@citizensoversight.org
• A database of election audits on the copswiki.org website.
• A set of procedures related to providing oversight: Election Team
• Created a tutorial on how to best vote: How to vote so your vote is counted -- Esp. in San Diego
• Appeared on Real progressives roundtable

Shut San Onofre and Stop Nuke Dump projects

• Mediation reopened in San Onofre Closure settlement January 5, 2018, resulting in an agreement among the parties for a $775 million adjustment in favor of ratepayers in the $3.3 billion settlement approved by the CPUC in 2014. We were one of only two parties that came out against the original settlement by petitioning for a rehearing, and prior to the revelation that CPUC Micheal Peevey had improperly orchestrated the original settlement deal to help him get a cushy "retirement" position at UC Berkeley. This mediation was hard-fought all throughout 2017 and our federal lawsuit drove this forward. The mediation was publicly discontinued at the end of August, 2017, but then at the beginning of 2018, the mediation continued and we reached settlement just before the federal court was prepared to start their hearings. The settlement was announced and put before the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). It was then briefly challenged by a CPUC-complicit intervenor, but eventually it was approved unanimously by the CPUC. This is a record for the most significant success in COPS history, and resulted in reducing the time the ratepayers would have to pay for the shuttered plant by four years, and resulted in refunds for the period between Dec 2017 and the time when the settlement was implemented.
  • Created Shutdown Settlement FAQS to answer any recurring questions as of January, 2018

• Settlement agreement to Move the Waste to a Safer Place -- Stop Nuke Dump project.
  • Throughout 2018, a secondary squabble occurred regarding the weak attempt to get approval from the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona, combined with an attempt to institute a gag-order on the statements of Ray Lutz and Citizens Oversight.
  • Four-member expert team was enlarged to six members. That expert team has not provided any status report in 2018.
  • Early in 2019, we have drafted a detailed letter to the Expert Team to get information on their status, review of the canister drop issue, broach the deep borehole option, and provide notice of the new CASTOR dual-wall cask system, which appears to be HELMS-compliant.
  • Participated in State Lands Commission Meeting
  • Met with Rep. Susan Davis about this and other issues.
  • Circulated video of Diablo Canyon Safety Committee admitting that cracking issue not know when canisters were approved
• Helms Proposal was released publicly and notice published in the Federal Register.
  • Although public comments were officially accepted by the NRC, there was no hearing on this, and it apparently just gets lost in a black hole at the NRC, but we will continue to monitor it.
  • Presented HELMS to the Diablo Canyon Safety Committee
  • COPS commented on the proposed Eddy-Lea facility in eastern New Mexico
  • Comments also on HR 3053 -- Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017
• San Onofre Canister Drop Incident -- This was the biggest single issue which arose in 2018, where a 50-ton canister was nearly dropped 18 feet into an underground vault, with no redudant systems provided to control the load.
  • SCE did not voluntarily report on the incident. Instead, it was revealed by whistleblower David Fritch during the CEP meeting public comment.
  • COPS was first in calling for a Full stop of spent fuel operations at the site
  • Sent two letters to the California Coastal Commission and to the NRC regarding this incident last year, and this year we have included requests in our request for information to the Waste Settlement Expert Team.
  • See all related information at this link: San Onofre Canister Drop Incident
    • Participated in NRC webinar on Nov 8 and NRC Webinar on Jan 24, 2019

Legislative Agenda For Election Integrity

With AB-840 behind us, we have lost ground on our legislative agenda, however, in our work to block that, a number of papers were written as comments that can be used to push forward. Here is our list from last year, still largely unchanged, although with the new item at the end to respond to AB-840,

Another angle we are working on is to push for legislative changes, particularly in California to:

• Clearly state that physical ballots are public records, and therefore accessible to the public for review.
• Make sure ballot images are also available.
• clean up audits
  • frozen (snapshot) results before random selection in a machine-processable format.
  • open random selection using random number generators (like dice) and a list (rather than the easier to hack raffle method).
  • No re-scanning ballots (to generate a new report) when variance are reported (as they do in LA and many other counties which does more to cover up fraud rather than expose it).
  • Improved audit reports, including disclosure of what ballots are covered by the audit.
• Provide for better citizen involvement
  • Random selection meeting must be able to be video recorded by anyone.
  • Loosen rules on video recording/photographing ballots if the identity of the voter is impossible to determine.
• Support Open Ballot Initiative
  • Future election management equipment must produce ballot images, and create standard Cast Vote Record.
  • Use cryptographic mechanisms to secure the ballots such as SHA digest of each image and Block-Chain digest of ballot set.
  • Ballot images data and CVR data shall be made available to the public prior to certification.
  • Since use of this approach supports 100% independent audits of the election, 1% manual tally is not necessary, but can be replaced by statistical checks that image data accurately represents the physical ballots.
• Respond to AB-840 -- such late-stage amendments should be outlawed.
• "Honestly in reporting" bill, to include
  • better reports by districts, so news media knows that 100% precincts reporting does not mean all the ballots have been reported.
  • Redefinition of the semi-final canvass so it does include Late VBM ballots. This can undo the damage done by AB-840.

Easy Voting

We started a new projected called "EasyVoting" to deal with voter suppression issues. Volunteer Susan Schneider did a great job researching the status of same-day registration, which is now finally going to be implemented in California. It will undo much of the rigging by groups with the agenda to suppress voting. This will be announced and will have a larger profile in the next year.

Earth Summit

Citizens Oversight is sponsoring a great new event called Earth Summit, to occur on May 25, 2019 at the Balboa Park Club Ballroom. This event is a morph of the March Against Monsanto, which we helped to produce for five years, but did not have one at all for 2017 or 2018. We felt that we needed an event that was more positive, broader in scope, and able to include the San Onofre waste issue as well as most other issues. The primary theme of the event will be the GREEN NEW DEAL. Please mark your calendars for this important event!

• Official Website: http://www.Earth-Summit.org
• COPS Project: Earth Summit
• COPS Event for Earth Summit

Other projects

Citizens Oversight has been involved in a number of additional projects, such as:

• Save ECPAC - Big news, the City of El Cajon has inked an agreement with Live Nation, the largest corporate live performance management company. This will revitalize the East County area. They are to have at least 50 live shows each year. The remodeling of the theater is being monitored and it should reopen in 2019.
• Grossmont Healthcare District -- COPs member Allan Goetz, and now Ed Martinez has been doing a great job providing citizens oversight of this local governmental organization. They have sort of come around a lot from the early days. Many of my proposals are now being embraced and we have a good reputation with them whereas in the past, I was a pariah.
• Organized Protest against governmental shutdown -- had every media in town at our event and it was the first such protest in town, and forced the hand of the unions and other people to create their own, which happened later at the airport. Their event was actually a little bit late as the shutdown was already announced to be ended at that point.
• A protest against child imprisonment was intially planned and then scuttled due to objections from the local border activist community.
• Wrote a letter to the City of El Cajon regarding the food sharing ban.

Fundraising, etc.

Our work on Election Integrity, our Election Audit Lawsuit and the Snapshot Protocol have been supported by our fundraising efforts which have done reasonably well this year. As we have been keeping our costs to a minimum, our fundraising thus far has been used only for out-of-pocket costs for the lawsuits, travel, and events. We have been fortunate to have some very generous donors this year which should enable us to continue the pursuit of our agenda.

TIME TO DONATE

Please consider donating to Citizens Oversight! Please visit this page: Donate To Citizens Oversight

Thank you! --Ray Lutz