Riverside County Sued Over E-Voting

A Riverside County Board of Supervisors candidate who narrowly lost in the March election sued the county and the registrar of voters Friday, alleging that they did not conduct a proper vote recount.

By failing to turn over security data that shows the votes were properly recorded and not tampered with, the county failed to conduct a meaningful recount, the suit alleges.

“The fundamental question posed by our lawsuit is, how can you detect fraud and error in the vote when you have been denied the very tools one must use, the only tools available, to detect fraud and error,” said attorney Gregory Luke, who is representing unsuccessful candidate Linda Soubirous, activist group VerifiedVoting.org and three local voters.

Soubirous missed qualifying for a runoff election against incumbent Supervisor Bob Buster by 44 votes. During the recount, Soubirous’ campaign sought but was denied data from the electronic voting machines’ internal memory, as well as audit logs produced by the machines that show any intervention in the machine’s workings, from human tinkering to power outages, and information about who had access to the machines.

Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that supports voter-verified paper trails in electronic voting, said the group hopes to set a precedent that such material be made available during future recounts.

Soubirous also hopes to examine the data from the March election. Though the deadline for challenging the recount results has passed, new information could open the door to a legal challenge, Luke said.

Attempts to reach Soubirous were unsuccessful.

The suit comes in the midst of growing scrutiny of electronic voting machines across the nation. Initially hailed as a technological breakthrough over paper ballots, critics now fear that the lack of a paper trail means mistakes or fraud could occur invisibly. But supporters say the electronic systems are far superior to paper ballots.