SOURCE: The Californian

Voter activist struggles against the machines

By: CHRIS BAGLEY - Staff Writer

Tom Courbat believes that electoral democracy is at risk in Riverside County, and he is going to great lengths to convince others.

Courbat leads a group of several dozen Southwest County activists who have crisscrossed the county in the last year, monitoring polls and criticizing the county's touch-screen voting machines as being open to manipulation by rogue computer experts.

In numerous e-mails, impromptu visits and a cable-television appearance, he has dogged county officials with complaints of skirted election laws, lax security and fiscal irresponsibility.

It has become virtually a full-time occupation for Courbat, who is 60 and retired. After two years of Army service, and a career in government finance, he didn't expect to spend 30- and 40-hour weeks as a voting activist. But the alternative, as he sees it, is very risky -- both for himself and for millions of other voters.

Courbat believes that touch-screen voting machines -- including the Sequoia Edge II used in Riverside County -- are vulnerable to manipulation on a much larger scale than any voting system previously used in the United States, though he concedes that this sort of fraud hasn't been documented in an actual election.

And in the last year, members of Courbat's group, Save R Vote, have spent a lot of time trying to alert voters and county officials to the perceived problem. At a minimum, they say, the electronic systems should be open to scrutiny by everyday citizens, who can then help to patch potential security gaps and block potential hacking attempts.

The stakes are high, they say. While a member of one political party can theoretically destroy or hide a box full of paper ballots in a precinct that leans toward another party, a politically motivated computer hacker now can conceivably alter results across hundreds of precincts, spreading the fraud thinly to escape detection, they say.

Since Save R Vote's formation a year ago, the group has grown to about 100 participants. A dozen of them appeared before the county's governing board one Tuesday in September to argue that Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore and her staff had conducted the June 2006 election without the full range of legally required security measures.

They wore bright orange scarves, a nod to Ukrainian protesters who took to the streets of their capital city in November 2004, thus helping to force a revote in what they considered a rigged election.

'Resistance'

At the very least, Courbat and his group have gotten the county officials' attention.

During one appearance before the board, Courbat understood the county's senior executive to call him "insane." One member of the board publicly derided the group, Save R Vote, as "self-selected champions of democracy." Another called them "a mockery of democracy" after the group protested a board decision to spend $38,000 on video equipment to record one aspect of the vote-counting process.

Courbat and Save R Vote -- an acronym for Secure and Verifiable Elections Require Voter Observation of Touchscreen Equipment -- had urged the board to spend the money on cameras to monitor the warehouse where electronic voting equipment is stored.

In a newspaper commentary last year, Dunmore condemned what she called Courbat's "habit of shading the truth so much it is obscured by darkness." Dunmore cited criticism and questions as the reason she now consistently attends the Tuesday morning meetings of the county Board of Supervisors in downtown Riverside. The habit is somewhat uncommon among department heads and time-consuming for Dunmore, whose office is several miles east on crowded Highway 60.

Dunmore has responded that much of Courbat's criticism is alarmism with the potential to undermine voters' confidence. The voting machines are tested and certified by state officials, and further security measures could do more harm than good, she said.

Police officers once escorted Courbat from the registrar's office when he persisted in attempting to record the counting of absentee ballots from the November election. Television stations and newspapers had sent representatives, he reasoned, so his elections-monitoring group should be able to do the same.

Progress

Bluster and fracas notwithstanding, Courbat and his group have successfully pushed the county to make several changes in election procedures. State law, for example, requires each local election official to appoint a panel of election observers, a practice that had lapsed in recent years. Following requests from Save R Vote, Dunmore put together a panel with members from political parties and community organizations.

"We've bent over backward to present solutions to the problems," Courbat said March 30 in an appearance before a separate, advisory panel. "There has been a lot of resistance. Part of that may be my personality. For that, I apologize."

Courbat's biggest victory to date came in November, when Dunmore directed poll workers to print out precinct-level results and to post those results outside each polling place. State law appears to require the practice, first mandated for an earlier generation of voting equipment. Elections officials in more than half of California's counties have suspended it, saying the 40-year-old law refers to lever-style voting machines that were used in the 1960s.

Save R Vote had demanded that the county resume the practice, saying it would allow group members and other concerned citizens to write down the vote tallies at each polling place and compare them to the numbers that a central tabulator produced for the polling station.

But a much larger opportunity, Courbat believes, has come in recent weeks. The five-member advisory panel, created by the Board of Supervisors in December, is in the midst of a comprehensive review of the county's election methods.

It could hint at recommended changes on Tuesday, when it is scheduled to report back to the board. Courbat addressed panel members at public hearings in Sun City, Riverside and Palm Desert, urging them to insist on stricter security measures and, more recently, to consider getting rid of the machines altogether.

The agitation has prompted skeptical questioning from the Board of Supervisors. Courbat has said that the advisory panel has seemed more receptive, and he's cautiously optimistic that it will end up adopting some of his group's recommendations as their own.

During a four-hour meeting with the panel on Friday afternoon, Dunmore suggested that she would introduce several new security measures, including a monitoring system in the warehouse where the voting terminals are stored, Courbat said after the meeting. Dunmore couldn't be reached for comment Friday evening.

Still, the anticipation also appears to weigh on him at times. He has come away from each of the three public hearings parsing various statements and questions from the panelists, who include retired Riverside County Supervisor Kay Ceniceros and two retired judges.

A bigger forum

The March 30 appearance in Palm Desert was a climax of sorts. Save R Vote had recruited Harry Hursti, a Finnish computer-security expert who had documented security flaws in touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Corp., one of the nation's largest manufacturers of such machines.

The panel listened for 45 minutes as Hursti criticized touch-screen machines as vulnerable, and described his vision of an alternative: a system of sturdy paper ballots that would be voted at touch-screen terminals but then scanned and counted by a separate reader.

Courbat first contacted Hursti in December, following a challenge from Supervisor Jeff Stone. Addressing supervisors at a board meeting, Save R Vote member Maxine Ewig was describing perceived flaws in the county's machines, whereupon Stone challenged her group to publicly hack into one of them.

Hursti's stops in California last month included Palm Desert and Los Angeles, where he and a Los Angeles blogger discussed voting systems on a radio program.

Courbat credits the blogger, Brad Friedman, with arranging the Hursti trip. As Courbat tells it, he was outside and on his cell phone to Friedman before Ewig had returned to her seat from the dais.

Friedman has taken a lead in organizing opponents of electronic voting. Like Hursti, and now Courbat, he has called for a return to a system of paper ballots.

2-month break

"The issue is: Do you have a system that's fixable?" Courbat said, standing in the kitchen of his home, off Washington Avenue, where he has lived since the early 1990s.

It was a few minutes before 6 a.m. March 30 and Courbat was pouring coffee for Hursti, who hadn't yet descended from the guest bedroom. Courbat's wife, Debby, had also come down to see them out the door to Palm Desert.

After the November elections, Debby Courbat enforced a two-month break from her husband's work on voting systems. Courbat retired several years ago from a position as finance director in Riverside County's executive office, but his work on the voting systems has become nearly a full-time job. It has taken him back and forth across the county to monitor elections and address supervisors and the elections panel.

A few days before the November elections, it took him into a television studio to record a one-minute appearance on Lou Dobbs Tonight, the CNN program that has also been a rallying point for e-voting skeptics.

Crashing parties

Courbat said he didn't set out to be an activist, but plans changed in 2003, when he began to suffer the effects of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that he and thousands of other Vietnam-era veterans trace to the U.S. military's use of Agent Orange, an herbicide used to destroy forest cover that could shelter enemy soldiers and guerrillas.

A native of Redding, Courbat served in South Korea near the North Korean border in 1968 and 1969. Courbat puts other veterans in touch with medical resources and helps them navigate the bureaucracy of the U.S. Veterans Administration.

Voting-systems security moved to the front burner after the 2004 general election. The re-election of George W. Bush bewildered Courbat, who said he disagrees with a wide range of the president's policies.

In the months leading up to the election, Courbat said he took heart from a series of national polls showing Bush's approval ratings dipping below 50 percent. And like many people who were following exit polls and election returns on the evening of Nov. 2, 2004, Courbat believed Democratic challenger John Kerry had wrapped things up.

For many Democratic voters and election-security activists, questions remained after Republican elections officials in Ohio purged voter rosters in heavily Democratic urban centers such as Cleveland. Many still point to the involvement of Diebold's chief executive in helping to raise funds for Bush's re-election campaign that year.

Save R Vote itself is an offshoot of the Temecula Valley chapter of Democracy For America, a grass-roots organization that was sparked by the 2004 presidential bid by Democrat Howard Dean. Still, Save R Vote has gone to great lengths to avoid a partisan image, and includes members of both major political parties and several other. Courbat said he doesn't believe the group's background has become a factor in the tussle over the county's voting machines.

Stone, who has sparred with Courbat on the dais and is a registered Republican, agreed.

"Sometimes he tends to embellish information and give only one side of issues when he presents facts," Stone said in an interview. "But he makes the board cognizant of suspicions out there. As we get into the electronic age, some of these things are not as transparent to the average layperson, myself included."