CONNIE McCORMACK
~3rd Degree~
As Los Angeles' registrar-recor-der, Conny McCormack is responsible for running elections in the most populous county in the United States, with more than four million registered voters and almost 5,000 precincts covering 88 cities, 100 school districts, and every conceivable ethnicity and language. This has made her an important national figure in the growing controversy over electronic voting systems. McCormack has often championed politically unpopular positions - standing up for L.A.'s old punchcard system, which suffered from few or none of the misfortunes encountered in Florida in 2000, and then, when punchcards were phased out by order of the Secretary of State, becoming increasingly supportive of electronic touchscreens, or DREs (short for "direct recording entry" machines). Some of the country's leading voting systems experts praised her for her stance on punchcards, but strongly disagree with her about the safety and reliability of touchscreens.
For now, Los Angeles uses an InkaVote optical scan system. Diebold touchscreens are used only in early voting. Until California's Secretary of State intervened earlier this month and decertified all touchscreen machines in the wake of serious failures encountered during the March primary election, she was planning to spend more than $100 million on a countywide Diebold touchscreen network. (CityBeat erroneously reported on April 29 that the $100 million had already been spent.) McCormack spoke to CityBeat in response to our report that she had asked Diebold to make software changes in L.A. County for last October's recall election without getting the changes certified. She offered no denial of the charge that she had circumvented the legal requirement for certification; when pressed on the issue, she ended the conversation.
-Andrew Gumbel
CityBeat: How do you respond to the charge by Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation that you put 40,000 votes at risk by asking Diebold to alter the software on the eve of the recall election?
Conny McCormack: That woman has absolutely no credentials in elections. It's almost laughable. She says I put 40,000 votes at risk. I would never do that. I wouldn't have a job if I did that.
Isn't proper certification of election software an issue?
We have been using and patching software in L.A. County for over 30 years. Whenever changes are made, an incredible amount of testing is done - literally thousands of checks. Now, there have been infractions by all vendors, including in L.A. County. We have not been dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" to certify all the software. But it would be the biggest irony, to me, to have someone say that because we hadn't done it by such-and-such a date we couldn't do it. We saw a similar situation in Maryland when they had their primary on March 2. They wanted to put in some security enhancements which hadn't gone through all of the testing labs, so they decided they were going to waive [the certification process], because it was more important to have the security enhancements than to have finalization of the process.
Here in California, one part of the election code all of us have been following is the section that requires every county to mail our software to the Secretary of State seven days before the election. That way, if there are any challenges to the election, it's there and in escrow and can be looked at.
Isn't there a problem with the software being proprietary, making it almost impossible for the Secretary of State's office to examine it?
They have the authority to examine it, or they can go to court and ask a judge if they can examine it. Proprietary software has always been used in elections in this country. That doesn't mean it is evil, or that there is anything wrong with it. It is just a way of preventing competitors from coming in and stealing it.
Weren't you initially skeptical of touchscreen machines?
We had punchcards for 35 years, and they worked well as long as the equipment was clean. The irony in 2000 was that we had the cleanest election ever. I was the one who argued in August 2002 that we were seeing a rush to put in DREs before they were quite ready for prime time. That was substantiated a month later in the Florida primary when machines in two counties, Broward and Miami-Dade, melted down. When we were presented with decertification of punchcards and a legal deadline to replace them by March 2, 2004, I felt that was insufficient time for a large jurisdiction [to introduce touchscreens]. We spent $3 million on InkaVote, which was an interim decision, and in retrospect I'm happy I haven't spent the kind of money San Diego and Orange did.
Our goal was to introduce DREs in time to meet the 2006 deadline [for federal funding]. But when the Secretary of State introduced a mandate for a voter-verified paper audit trail last November, it completely derailed our timetable. Now we're between a rock and a hard place because we're still facing a seemingly immutable deadline of January 2006. The last thing we need in this country is to be worrying about a deadline instead of getting a system that will count the votes right. That's something we'll need to work on beyond this election with whatever president we have that has been selected.
We have all the ingredients for a perfect storm - built-up angst, another predicted close election, and equipment that is under challenge. That is not an election that officials such as myself want to run. I want an election that runs well and has legitimacy.
You are friends with Deborah Seiler, Diebold's chief sales representative in California, and L.A. County is now buying equipment from Diebold. Is the friendship appropriate?
I've had a long-term friendship with her. There's nothing wrong with a friendship. Has it influenced my judgment? Of course not. In terms of the Diebold contract for L.A. County, I was not on the evaluation committee. I removed myself from that. But Diebold was the only vendor that met all the requirements for L.A. County. Sequoia wrote a letter saying it could not meet the requirements. And ES&S failed the demonstration, because it couldn't handle seven languages.
Why are you against introducing a voter-verified paper trail?
It's a concept that hasn't been tested, with the exception of two pilot projects in Sacramento and Wilton, Connecticut, both of which were appalling failures. The paper jammed, and the operators had to use coat hangers to try to unjam the equipment. It's a concept that hasn't been thought out thoroughly or tested thoroughly. If it could be proven to work, every registrar in the country would be fine with it. But our opinions are being discarded in favor of people like Kim Alexander. It's a case of ready, fire, aim. It's the wrong sequence for adopting a new process.
What about having the possibility of recounts? Aren't they fundamental?
The recount question is a matter of interpretation. Lever machines have no redundant back-up either, and they fail all the time. Touchscreens have a triple redundancy - the hard drive, the flash disk, and the paper accumulating the totals. If the flash card goes buggy, you can look at the paper to see what's missing, then look at the hard drive and pull them off. The standard is so much higher than any other equipment, and yet it is what is being bashed. DREs are 100 percent accurate.
After the secretary of state decertified electronic voting machines, four major urban counties - including L.A. - are now being sued to make DREs obligatory for November's presidential election. One of the plaintiffs is Riverside County, whose registrar, Mischelle Townsend, is a die-hard defender of her county's Sequoia touchscreen system. What's your reaction?
This is what the process has done to us. It has set us all up against each other. I'm leading this schizophrenic life where I want to get to full touchscreen voting but want to do it deliberately. To have a court say we have to do it quickly - there's lunacy going on here.Published: 05/27/2004
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