☆ Is there fraud afoot in the Prop 50 special election?
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Cybersecurity and voting expert Harry Haury worries that ballots are mishandled in California. He says regions like the Bay Area could be worse than Orange County, which itself has “tremendous problems” with provenance, chain of custody, oversight, and clean voter rolls. Even if it passes legitimately, Prop 50’s redistricting will suppress representation for certain voters: he calls it “political oppression.” An Opportunity Now exclusive Q&A.
Opportunity Now: What are the biggest issues that threaten the integrity of the special election on Prop 50, the redistricting bill?
Harry Haury: The biggest issue is the complete lack of provenance or chain of custody of ballots, the mail-in ballots, the way they’re handled. When they’re mailed out to everybody that’s listed, 15, 20, 30 percent of those are not real people. Maybe they moved away, maybe they died, maybe they are fake registrations.
You allow everybody to vote without ID or determination that they’re real people. So you have no provenance. You don’t know if those are legal ballots.
The second thing is the oversight. We have an entrenched bureaucracy in elections all across the country, Republican and Democrat. Bureaucracies do not want people looking over their shoulders. There’s a lack of transparency, particularly in California, where people decided they had to leave the counting process open for a month. Nobody else does that. By forcing people to count quickly, you limit manipulation.
The third issue is that whatever laws exist need to be enforced. California has a rule that says you can’t clean people off the voter rolls for ten years. The federal law says you have to have accurate voter rolls, but California redeploys that to within ten years. Many people die within a ten-year period.
We have to have the rule of law, transparency, and provability. Until we obey our own rules, we’re not going to have trustworthy elections.
ON: Do you see any problems in any regions in the Bay Area, in the South Bay, Silicon Valley, any problem zones?
HH: Well, if there are tremendous problems in Orange County, it just says that you can’t depend on elections anywhere.
We just completed a statewide study doing the same thing we did in Orange County, and the data on average across the state is worse than it was in Orange County. It stirred up a hornet’s nest, that report.
And when you look at it holistically, it would suggest that the entire state is running elections that are, at a minimum, fraught with error.
Is this apathy on the part of the bureaucrats, is it ignorance of the law, or is it malice? We don’t really know. We’re not trying to ascribe motive. All we’re trying to do is talk about the fact that they’re not abiding by the legal requirements for elections.
ON: These concerns have to do with the mechanics of voting on Prop 50. What about the content of Prop 50, the redistricting. If it legitimately passes, how will it affect election integrity in California?
HH: This is a direct attempt to suppress the representation of certain subgroups of the population. It may not be racial, it may not be religious, but it’s certainly political oppression.
If you have a big state like California, and 35 or 45 or 52 percent are Republican, the representatives ought to follow that path. To do anything else like they’re planning to do under Prop 50 is actual political oppression through the force of law. It’s taking authority away from the people that’s guaranteed to them in the U.S. Constitution, by manipulating the districts.
It’s not directly election fraud, but it shows that the politicians don’t care about repressing or oppressing the voice of the people. They’re oppressing conservatives in the state by redistricting them out of existence.
ON: Prop 50 looks like it’s ahead in the polls and it wouldn’t be a surprise if it wins. Are people going to take you seriously if you dispute the results?
HH: The government has a responsibility to ensure domestic tranquility so that people can live in peace and accept what has happened.
If you have clear indications of manipulation, a lack of integrity, or apathy in administering elections, it leaves everybody with uncertainty.
Domestic tranquility, by not running elections properly, is a basic infringement of our right to be satisfied with how our government is running.
If we set the precedent that it’s okay to allow malice, ignorance, and apathy to run our elections, what happens when it’s important?
Not caring about whether or not it passes legitimately is a destination for tyranny.
ON: And for people who don’t know your background, how did you begin working in election integrity?
HH: I’ve been involved from the late 1990s in St. Louis County, Missouri.
In 2000 John Ashcroft and Paul De Gregorio, who was director of elections in St. Louis County, was part of the litigation that became Bush v. Gore. I was the technical advisor to the two of them about what’s possible with election equipment.
After Bush v. Gore was decided, there was a Senate compromise that became the Help America Vote Act. I consulted on that, because at the time I was leading a software company dealing with the highest-volume electronic scanning equipment in the country.
They decide they’re going to do high-speed imaging technology, which evolves into the system that we have today.
I’ve also done several software companies, technology consulting, and because of my banking software we end up helping the national-security complex with anti-money-laundering systems internationally.
I basically find myself working more and more with the federal government on cybersecurity issues—NSA, DoD, Sandia, Livermore—all these people trying to tell them how to keep things secure.
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