Why did it take a week for press to learn of eSlate "adjustments?"

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Yesterday, the Chronicle‘s Alan Bernstein reported that in last week’s election, Harris County election officials actually had to go back and manually adjust some of the voting results because of ballot glitches. Here are some excerpts from Bernstein’s important story:

The adjustments also highlighted the fact that, with multiple election boundaries snaking through precincts to separate city voters from county voters and municipal utility districts from emergency services districts, there usually are flaws that put voters in front of the wrong ballot screens.

Which is what happened in Emergency Services District No. 9, where 293 voters went to the polls early but never got to express an opinion on the issue as they voted on state and county bonds and other items because the tax vote didn’t appear on their screens. (The tax proposal lost by 3,233 votes.)

The omission of the tax proposal on ballots in parts of three precincts was discovered thanks to an alert from a voter, and Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman’s staff was able to get the tax question on the right ballots for Election Day — but it was too late to have those votes recorded on the main computer.

Instead, they were recorded separately and later added to the totals.

Voters in the emergency district, which includes 11 fire stations serving 250,000 people, never were notified that some of them missed the referendum during early voting or that Election Day votes were segregated.

Regardless, it was up to [Johnnie] German and assistant Randy Roberts to combine the segregated totals, printed on computer paper, into the county’s final electronic vote tallies after the polls closed on Election Day.

The county Web site already showed that all precinct totals had been counted; three sheriff’s deputies who guarded the counting process on the fourth floor of the County Administration Building in downtown Houston had been sent home.

Also in the locked, glass-walled room were Republican Kaufman and John R. Behrman, a computer expert and longtime election observer representing the Democratic Party. He said he considers Kaufman’s staff the most knowledgeable election computer administrators on the continent and does not question their motives.

[snip]

A hundred percent of precincts reporting, and everything had been distributed to the press,” he said. “Then and only then did I see how they were going to do this, and frankly I never thought it was possible.

The story emphasizes concerns over the process by which results in eSlate voting can be manipulated with the right security codes (and Charles Kuffner post additional criticism by Dan Wallach that the process does not allow for proper accounting). Those are valid concerns, although it is worth noting that no election system is foolproof (back in the days of punch ballots, we heard of some poll watchers being told to follow the election judge as he/she delivered election boxes to the processing facility, just to be sure no shenanigans took place), and ultimately we bestow a great deal of trust on fellow citizens to conduct honest elections.

The concern that this story raises for me is that election results seem to have been adjusted after official reporting took place, and (so far as I can tell) this is the first local press account of the matter. We have been given no reason to question the integrity of Beverly Kaufman’s operation, and it appears that partisan observers were invited to oversee this particular matter and raised no objections. However, it strikes us that the press should have been made aware of this important news immediately, and should have been included as observers.

If there is currently no mechanism in place to alert the press to these sorts of glitches (and since there is not even a mention of the “adjustments” on Kaufman’s press release page, we assume there is not), Kaufman’s office would be well advised to put one in place before the next elections.

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