Citizens Oversight OPPOSES AB-840, the bill to gut CA election audits

Citizens Oversight (2017-08-31) Ray Lutz

This Page: https://copswiki.org/Common/M1785
Media Link: https://www.facebook.com/raylutz/videos/10213189524480157/%3fpermPage%3d1
More Info: Election Integrity

* Link to the Bill as amended: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB840

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ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT

• Signed into law by Governor Brown on 2017-10-15.
• Now we need to take action see if we can undo this!

ACTION REQUEST

I think we need to turn our sights on CACEO, the California Assn of Clerks and Election Officials. See their website here: https://caceo.memberclicks.net/home-page

We need to start complaining about how they handled this sleight of hand and did not include the public in the process. We can contact the election officials of all 58 counties in california as they are probably members and should not allow this sort of thing to occur. We need to push for a change in the chair of the legislative committee in CACEO, who has been Jill La Vine of Sacramento for probably 10 years.

You are now reading the campaign page! Please step forward and help!!

• Step 1: If you have not done so already, please sign up as a volunteer: Sign Up
• Step 2: Please send an email to Yvette and let hew know you are starting your work: ymso@juno.com
• Step 3: Contact your own county election official (see list below), and ask the following questions, writing down their answers in a text file. It may be easiest to contact them by EMAIL and ask for their answers in writing, returning the answers to you. They are required under Election Code Section 2300, Paragraph 9A&B to answer your questions and if they can't answer them, find someone who can.
  • Is this county a member of CACEO?
  • Were they aware of how CACEO is slipping these changes (AB-840) under the radar?
  • Do they support last-minute revisions to the election code with no opportunity for hearings and testimony by members of the public?
  • Do they support short-cutting the audit so it may not include about 40% of the ballots, and in such a way that a hacker can predict which ballots are not audited?
  • Are they planning on including those in the audit anyway, in future elections, since they do have discretion to do so?
  • Are they on the CACEO legislative Committee? If so, do they go to the meetings?
  • Did they vote on and approve this position of CACEO?
  • Do they approve of the fact that CACEO runs their legislative committee meetings with no opportunity to participate by phone and with no minutes of the meetings produced?
  • Do that agree that Jill La Vine, Sacramento Registrar and CACEO legislative committee chair should be replaced in this position after this fiasco?
  • Would you be willing to work with Citizens' Oversight and other election integrity groups to craft a better audit law?
• Step 4: Contact other county election officials with the same questions.
• Step 5: Would you be willing to be on an oversight team to carefully and intensely provide oversight of election audits in the future?
  • Please join this Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/COPSElectionTeam/
• Step 6: Please consider a donation here: Donate To Citizens Oversight

We want a lot of redundant calls to show that the voters are concerned.

Any questions or need additional direction, or have reports? Please contact the emails below. Summarize the responses and send to these email addresses, so we can track and combine the feedback!

• ymso@juno.com (Yvette) <-- main contact for campaign coordination
• report@citizensoversight.org

LIST OF ELECTION OFFICIALS IN CALIFORNIA

• Snapshot-CA-2016-06-contacts.xlsx: Election Officials in the state of California

Primary Targets

The top 24 counties comprise 92% of the voters in the state.

County	Contact	Title	Phone	Fax	Email
Los Angeles	Dean Logan	Recorder/County Clerk	(562) 466-1310	(562) 929-4790	voterinfo@rrcc.lacounty.gov
San Diego	Michael Vu	Registrar of Voters	(858) 565-5800	(858) 694-2955	rovmail@sdcounty.ca.gov
Orange	Neal Kelley	Registrar of Voters	(714) 567-7600	(714) 567-7556	ocvoter@ocgov.com
Riverside	Rebecca Spencer	Interim Registrar of Voters	(951) 486-7200	(951) 486-7335	rovweb@co.riverside.ca.us
Alameda	Tim Dupuis	Registrar of Voters	(510) 272-6933	(510) 272-6982	candidate.services@acgov.org
Santa Clara	Shannon Bushey	Registrar of Voters	(408) 299-8683	(408) 998-7314	registrar@rov.sccgov.org
San Bernardino	Michael J. Scarpello	Registrar of Voters	(909) 387-8300	(909) 387-2022	rovwebmail@rov.sbcounty.gov
Sacramento	Jill La Vine	Registrar of Voters	(916) 875-6451	(916) 875-6228	voterinfo@saccounty.net
Contra Costa	Joseph E. Canciamilla	County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters	(925) 335-7800	(925) 335-7843	voter.services@vote.cccounty.us
San Francisco	John Arntz	Director of Elections	(415) 554-4375	(415) 554-7344	sfvote@sfgov.org
Fresno	Brandi L. Orth	County Clerk/Registrar of Voters	(559) 600-8683	(559) 488-3279	borth@co.fresno.ca.us
Ventura	Mark A. Lunn	County Clerk-Recorder-Registrar of Voters	(805) 654-2781	(805) 648-9200	ventura.elections@ventura.org
San Mateo	Mark Church	Chief Elections Officer & Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder	(650) 312-5222	(650) 312-5348	registrar@smcare.org
Kern	Mary Bedard	Auditor-Controller/County Clerk/Registrar of Voters	(661) 868-3590	(661) 868-3768	elections@co.kern.ca.us
San Joaquin	Austin Erdman	Registrar of Voters	(209) 468-2885	(209) 468-2889	vbm@sjgov.org
Sonoma	William F. Rousseau	County Clerk, Recorder, Assessor, Registrar of Voters	(707) 565-6800	(707) 565-6843	rov-voterreg@sonoma-county.org
Stanislaus	Lee Lundrigan	County Clerk-Recorder	(209) 525-5200	(209) 525-5802	stanvote@stancounty.com
Placer	Jim Mc Cauley	County Clerk-Recorder-Registrar	(530) 886-5650	(530) 886-5688	election@placer.ca.gov
Solano	Ira Rosenthal	Registrar of Voters	(707) 784-6675	(707) 784-6678	elections@solanocounty.com
Santa Barbara	Joseph E. Holland	County Clerk, Recorder and Assessor	(805) 568-2200	(805) 568-2209	electionssupport@co.santa-barbara.ca.us
Monterey	Claudio Valenzuela	Registrar of Voters	(831) 796-1499	(831) 755-5485	elections@co.monterey.ca.us
San Luis Obispo	Tommy Gong	County Clerk-Recorder	(805) 781-5228	(805) 781-1111	elections@co.slo.ca.us
Marin	Lynda Roberts	Registrar of Voters	(415) 473-6456	(415) 473-6447	elections@marincounty.org

THANK YOU!!

Background

Our legislature secretly amended AB-840, which was originally an innocuous bill cleaning up some language, to include a MAJOR CHANGE to election audits in California. They propose that the audits include ONLY the Early VBM and Polls ballots, while omitting the later VBM and provisional ballots. In other words, to make the violations by Michael Vu become legal. I am attaching my somewhat lengthy document which includes recommended changes.

For background, see the Election Audit Lawsuit, for detailed information about our lawsuit against Michael Vu, who omitted 285,000 ballots from the 2016 Primary audit process, about 40% of those cast. If this bill is signed into law, this practice will become standard throughout the state, opening up opportunities for election hacking because hackers will know which ballots will never be audited -- the last 40%.

Press Release

• COPS_Opposes_AB-840,_the_bill_to_gut_CA_election_audits.pdf: Press Release -- COPS Opposes AB-840, the bill to gut CA election audits

If the document does not display above, click here

Official Comments FIled with Assembly Committee On Aug 24 Revision

• COPS Opposes AB840, official comments to assy committee

If the document does not display above, click here

Official Comments FIled with Assembly Committee On Sept 7 Revision

• COPS_Comment_opposing_AB-840_2017-09-07_version.pdf: Letter to Assembly Committee opposing Sept 7 revision of AB-840

If the document does not display above, click here

• ex59-p105.pdf: Letter from CACEO that shows they admit the current law DOES require VBM and Provisionals to be included.

Letter sent to Gov. Brown to request that he not sign the bill

• COPS_Comment_opposing_AB-840_to_GOV_BROWN.pdf: Letter To Governor Brown

If the document does not display above, click here

AB-840 FAQS

According to what you have said, some counties have been able to include the late ballots in the 1% manual tally. So that leads to why haven't San Diego and Los Angeles counties followed the law for the last 10 years? And why has nobody in state government made them follow the law?

They do not follow the law because they have been able to obfuscate what they are doing so no one could follow it, and then cut corners. In San Diego, we have been carefully following the audits, or at least trying to, starting in 2008. We then realized that the audits were performed on only the early VBM and polling place ballots, what they call the "semi-final canvass". That semi-final canvass used to be almost everything, but since VBM has become more popular, added do the fact that you can mail in the ballot on election day or drop off at polling places, coupled with the increase of provisional voting, means that about 40% of the ballots are NOT included in the semi-final canvass. In trying to compare the results of the manual tally with the final report, we could not as there are many thousands of ballots missing, and the numbers do not compare at all. Thus, in recent years, we started the Snapshot Protocol which is simply an oversight procedure where we ask for the SNAPSHOT of the election, that semifinal canvass, preferably prior to the random selection process (so they can't fix up the computer report if any of the selected precincts was modified by an internal compromised employee or hacker.)

It was then that we were getting pretty good at observing this and we asked San Diego Registrar Michael Vu why he was not choosing sufficient batches (or precincts) to cover all the ballots in the later VBM and provisional sets. He said he would not, and we took him to court and won. In surveying the other counties, some do it right (esp. after we informed them of the issue) such as Inyo, Orange, Alameda, and Sonoma. Others like LA and SD and many others do not.

To make it worse, we discovered in our careful review of their procedures, that some counties, like Los Angeles, rescan any precincts with variances and then compare with the new report. So if during the manual tally audit, any precincts have no variances. Of course those are reported directly as fine. And if they have a minor variance of only a vote or two, then they report that too. But if the precinct were off by say 10 votes, which is highly significant, and may indicate massive hacking has occurred, they take the stack of ballots into a separate room and all the ballot marking are emphasized by a worker, then the ballots are re-scanned, to produce a new report. The new report is compared with the manual tally and of course, it will compare perfectly, and they report that.

I hope you realize that what they are doing here will effectively COVER UP any massive hacking campaigns rather than expose it. If indeed there was such a precinct where they were initially variances and then it is proven with a rescan that the variance is indeed true, then this only proves that there are serious problems in the tabulation. Very serious problems.

We also now realize that CACEO had this legislation on their agenda from the beginning of 2017 but did not sneak it in until the transcript of our appeal was completed on August 15. They amended the bill AB-840 only 9 days later. We see that Vu was behind the change from the start.

• caceo_leg_agenda_jan_17.docx: Jan 2017 Agenda of CACEO legislative agenda discloses that Vu was behind the change.

Do San Diego and Los Angeles counties have a much higher than average percentage of provisional ballots and late absentee ballots as compared to the counties that have been including the late ballots in the 1% count?

Almost no counties include the provisionals but we see no big difference in the counts. Remember that the LA manual tally process is COMPLETELY A FRAUD.

If these 2 large counties have a much higher percentage of late ballots than the counties that followed the law then there may be an excuse. If the percentage is the same then I don't see any excuse.

It is about the same, but LA simply has a lot of precincts and many ballots as they are about 3x bigger than San Diego, the second largest county.

There could be a question of scale. Do the counties that followed the law have more election workers than the 2 big counties that haven't followed the law in terms of ballots per election worker?

There is no excuse to break the law just because you did not arrange to hire enough workers to perform the legally mandated audit.

I'm wondering if the registrars of San Diego and Los Angeles have said anything about why they did not follow the law or why the supposedly can't follow the law. Have they said anything more than the 2006 letter?

They say it is just too difficult to follow the law due to scale. However, we have found that in our observations, there is plenty of time if the registrars do it in phases, which we have recommended in our Technical Brief on the topic.

• TECHNICAL_BRIEF_-_1_manual_tally.pdf: Technical Brief Describing how to perform the 1% manual tally during the canvass period.

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