California Voice: State can sidestep scandal, banish bias while counting votes 

Two scandals exposing the cozy relationship between multinational voting machine corporations and the obscure officials who decide how our votes are counted may prove him right. If ever there was a place where faith in the legitimacy of our voting could explode, this is it.

Consider the multinational voting machine corporation Smartmatic. Federal prosecutors have alleged that Smartmatic maintained a secret “slush fund” for bribing foreign officials, funded in part from its Los Angeles County contract.

Court filings and reporting by the Los Angeles Times also raise questions about whether Smartmatic cultivated an overly close relationship with L.A. County’s registrar, including allegedly paying for his trips and dinners during the same period the company was granted major additional contracts. Even if no laws were broken, the image of an election official being wined and dined by a corporate vendor entrusted with building the county’s voting system undermines public faith in the integrity of voting.

Now consider another multinational corporation, Dominion, whose machines count more than a quarter of all U.S. ballots. A Republican former election official recently bought Dominon and rebranded it with the right wing sounding name “Liberty Vote.” The company’s press release used language championed by the pro-Trump “election integrity” community.

There is no evidence that Liberty Vote is biased. But will Democrats trust election results if the company writing secret vote counting software appears to be aligned with a Republican faction? If a Democratic millionaire had bought Dominion, renamed it “Progressive Vote,” and echoed Democratic language, would Republicans trust its counting? Unlikely.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

Unlike the secret inner workings of these proprietary systems, there are “open source” voting systems that are cheaper, more transparent and more secure.

Open source voting systems use source code that is publicly available, so government jurisdictions and independent experts can verify that the software counts votes impartially and accurately.

Public access doesn’t mean anyone can alter the code used in voting machines. The secretary of state still certifies the software, and the certified version continues to be controlled by voting machine vendors and the state.

But because the code is public, independent experts can identify problems so they can be fixed.

The Department of Defense has said publicly available source code improves reliability and security by enabling the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized. And former CIA Director James Woolsey put it plainly: for national security, election system software should follow the model used by our most sensitive government systems — it should be open source.

Open source systems also cut costs. The proprietary vendor market is uncompetitive; only three major vendors exist, and in some cases only one can serve a jurisdiction’s needs, allowing it to charge whatever it wants.

In contrast, once an open source voting system is certified, jurisdictions can use the software for free, saving tens of millions of dollars across the state.

The nonprofit VotingWorks has an open source voting system used in other states, but certification by California’s secretary of state would cost up to $1 million. Proprietary vendors can absorb this because they recoup the cost through licensing fees.

Open source systems, being freely available, have no such revenue stream, making certification a significant barrier without help from the state.

That’s where leadership from Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature’s budget committees is essential. For about $1 million — a rounding error in the budget — California could save taxpayers many times more and gain a more transparent, secure, publicly owned voting system.

Without this reform, California remains shackled to secretive, privately controlled software and machines from corporations whose actions and ideology can erode public trust.

By supporting legislation that makes it easier to certify open source voting alternatives, Newsom can strengthen our faith in elections by protecting vote counting from even the appearance of partisanship or moneyed influence — and, in doing so, prove John Adams wrong.

Trent Lange is executive director of the California Clean Money Campaign. Distributed by CalMatters.org.