Greetings!
Today's message is a before-and-after look at election transparency in one of the more opaque counties in the country: Riverside, California -- and the improved visibility that can result when local citizens get serious about monitoring their elections.
In this message, we reprise "Missing Pieces,"
a devastating citizen review of the 2008 presidential election
conducted in Riverside County, CA, conducted by the Save R Vote
election integrity volunteers and authored by Save R Vote founder and
EDA Election Monitoring Coordinator, Tom Courbat.
We invite you to compare the Missing Pieces report to a more recent review of Riverside election procedures currently featured on the EDA website.
In a
series of annotated photographs, Tom Courbat documents improved
election procedures that were instituted by the Riverside County
Supervisors in response to the "Missing Pieces" report and recommendations.
There's still a long way to go for transparency and public
accountability in elections, but groups like Save R Vote are showing
that citizens acting locally can bring about needed change for the
better.
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The
Missing Pieces report, prepared by Courbat and the citizen volunteers of the Save R Vote election monitoring organization, documents violations of election
law and egregious failures by the Riverside County Registrar of Voters,
Barbara Dunmore, and her departmental staff, to secure, track, or even
properly count the ballots in the November 2008 presidential election.
Save R Vote volunteers on election day and night photographed evidence of election violations,
logged missing memory cards ("electronic ballot boxes"), and in their
subsequent 5-month examination of Riverside County election records,
found vote counting and ballot auditing errors in official county
election reports numbering in the tens and even hundreds of thousands.
The
exhaustively documented Missing Pieces report, presented in its
entirety on the Election Defense Alliance website, consists of an
executive summary, findings and recommendations, a slideshow of photographic evidence, and a spreadsheet analysis of oversized precincts exceeding legal limits.
Save R Vote concluded its report urging the Riverside County Board of Supervisors to commission an independent auditing firm to conduct a true forensic audit of the county's election canvass process, as well as a computer systems security audit of the county's Sequoia voting system by independent qualified experts.
(The Riverside Supervisors in fact commissioned a 3-month, $300,000 stem-to-stern audit of the elections department by an independent firm, in response to the serious problems identified by Save R Vote).
More
than 120 citizen volunteers with Save R Vote examined 20,000 election
documents in what is believed to be the most comprehensive forensic
review ever performed on a single county election system.
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