The following editorial appeared in Monday's Eureka Times-Standard. I just saw it now and dashed off the quick letter shown beneath. Please chime in. This is the most dangerous of attitudes for media to take and it is unquestionably defiantly opposed to all the work I've done in this community to educate the public.
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http://www.times-standard.com/opinion/ci_4061752Article Launched: 07/17/2006 04:30:32 AM PDT
No surprises at the ballot box
The Times-Standard
We can trust our electoral process
We recently reported the Election Office's breakdown of how residents of Humboldt County voted in the June primary.
What the numbers showed was that the perceived cultural divide that separates residents of Northern Humboldt from those of the Eel River Valley is apparently more than just anecdotal, barbershop speculation.
Which brings to mind recent concerns expressed about the viability of our voting procedures and equipment. There were no surprises in the numbers. The votes bore up past trends. There were no anomalies. If somebody had hacked the machines, messed with the ballots, or attempted in one way or another to change the voting to favor one candidate or measure, the numbers did not indicate it.
As we have stated here before, just recently, we encourage voters and officials to be ever vigilant in watching our electoral process. This should be an exercise in every election.
But our recent elections give no evidence that our vote gathering has been anything but above board, honest and a true reflection of Humboldt County's political demographics.
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Dear Editor,
No surprises at the ballot box? What do you call memory cards failing for the first time in 10 years? How about scanners unable to remotely report precinct results to the central tabulator? You "encourage voters and officials to be ever vigilant in watching our electoral process" but you do not practice what you preach.
Humboldt votes are tallied on machines that use secret computer programming code. Our votes are counted in secret. The elections department tells you the secret and you publish it as fact without any effort to verify the information is accurate. And there is the rub - even if you wanted to verify you could not without doing a hand count of the ballots.
Your declaration that "We can trust our electoral process" misses the point that checks and balances make trust an irrelevant and inappropriate criteria in a democracy. When you print what you can't prove, you make it impossible to trust you too.
Dave Berman
Co-Founder, Voter Confidence Committee
Eureka, CA
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