Public Comment by Raymond Lutz regarding lack of reports from Diebold Scanner equipment

San Diego County (2008-10-28)

This Page: https://copswiki.org/Common/M666
Media Link: http://sdcounty.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php%3fview_id%3d2%26clip_id%3d657%20%28Skip%20to%20offset%2038:00%29%20type%3d%22html%22
More Info: Election Integrity

LUTZ: Thank you very much for listening to me.

My name is Ray Lutz. I am the founder of Citizens Oversight Projects, and I happen to also be a candidate for the 77th State Assembly District in the County.

One of the most important functions in a democracy is oversight by the citizens, and this is the function of Citizens Oversight Projects.

One of our projects is to oversee the elections process, including the Registrar of Voters in the upcoming election.

To that end, we send this letter before you on October 3, hand delivered to that department, requesting confirmation that they are going to be following the law, specifically, California Elections Code section 19370, which states that they are to produce a minimum of three copies from the elections equipment, and post them outside the precinct. Back when they had these inside each precinct they did so.

Now that they have moved them inside the Registrar of Voters office, they are not longer providing those reports for our oversight project.

We have received no response from the Registrar, and we'd like to get such a response this week, because the election is next week.

I see no reason why the Registrar is not responding to this simple question as to whether they are going to be following this law.

We sent this also to the Secretary of State and to Supervisor Jacob, who is my supervisor.

We're wondering and worried that the delay means that the Registrar is planning to avoid this as they did in the last election. They said the reason they were able to avoid the law is that they had verbal confirmation from the Secretary of State that they did not need to follow the law.

We object to this.

They went through a whole law suit [with the Secretary of State] to avoid the additional scrutiny because they had no public hearing, and there was certainly no public hearing on this item.

Can we please get a response from the County on this.

Thank you very much.

CLERK: Thank you Mr. Lutz, we'll refer this to the Registrar of Voters Office.