Secret Acts Shall Be Revealed

These scriptures came to mind as I was thinking about my writing today:

Luke 8:17  For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.

Luke 12:3  Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

Doctrine & Covenants 1:3 And the rebellious shall be pierced with much sorrow; for their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops, and their secret acts shall be revealed.

I’m pleased when the truth comes out. That is happening, at last, in a couple of places. One is a news story beginning to have the name Obamagate attached to it; I’m going to wait for another day for that.

Instead, I’ll start with a more local story, related to ballot security here in Texas—with lessons, hopefully, to help voters everywhere.

Last Saturday, mid-afternoon, I started seeing notices that our County Clerk, here in Harris County (where Houston is) had resigned. Diane Trautman, who was elected in November 2018, has the main responsibility of handling elections.

Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk, until May 31, 2020
image from the HarrisVotes.org website

During her relatively short time in office, she made a number of missteps—some from inexperience, some from attitude.

There had been a lawsuit, from 2016, against the county regarding disability accessibility, which had been held off indefinitely by the previous county clerk, Stan Stanart—because there was not a single case of discrimination brought as evidence. No individual had been affected; some activists just went around and speculated where a problem might have been possible, and sued based on that. County Clerk Trautman decided to settle the lawsuit—costing the county taxpayers about a couple million dollars, and requiring hours and hours of tedious training for absolutely every poll worker, regardless of previous experience, regardless of lack of issues at their polling places—but the poll workers were paid for this training, again at county taxpayer expense.

The training could have been done in five minutes: “Remember to treat everyone with respect and courtesy. And if your polling place has issues that need remediation, we provide materials and instructions when you pick up your voting materials.” Done.

The hours and hours of training didn’t totally replace voting judge training, but did replace other poll worker training, including bilingual training.

Also, even though there was an election in November, we were required to get training again (this time shorter and online) before the primary election—after which we learned that we only need the training no more than annually. So, another error at county expense and poll worker inconvenience.

The only change at our polling place was the use of a call buzzer for curbside voting. In November it didn’t work, so we just went back to the usual protocol, having a poll worker watching outside to address needs. While I have seen curbside voting used at a location where I was a poll watcher, we have never, in all our years of running elections at our precinct’s polling place, had a request for curbside. But we were provided a temperamental machine, just in case—plus a technician to make sure it works, or to pack it away if it doesn’t—paid for by the county taxpayers.

Trautman changed the county website quite drastically, from one that worked well and was easy to navigate to one that was quite glorifying of her but was difficult to use. I had occasion to help a friend update her voter registration after a move to a nursing home, which also included needing to change the address on her ID. This involved a phonecall to someone in a state office to help us iron out some detail—because we hadn’t been able to get what we needed on the county website. He tried using the site himself and said, “What have they done to this website? It didn’t used to be this difficult.” So, it’s not just me.

She instituted countywide voting—which has been quite popular for voters, but less so for poll workers, who tend to be people from their own precinct. She tried to cut out precinct chairs from their role of providing judges and workers, so that all would be hired directly by the county for their personal list. They also tried (mostly unsuccessfully because of Republican Party intervention) to eliminate polling places, further cutting off precinct chairs from their ability to reach their voters. And she vowed to throw out the very safe and successful Hart e-Slate voting system, with the new and more secure e-poll books (a tablet dedicated to the purpose), and return to paper only—at the expense of several million dollars and reintroducing many old fraud practices inherent in paper only ballots. So far she hasn’t been successful at this. Also, her system has failed repeatedly to meet requirements for updating in time to prevent a second vote by the same voter, which means it makes in-person voter fraud possible in ways it wasn't before.

Her first night of polling, returning tallies was disastrous. It took more than all night to tally, because she had failed to follow the practices of her predecessor, and thought she’d just send results over an insecure internet line—even though the state had warned her repeatedly that this would not be allowed. So she gathered the tallies from the various locations in person, rather than give an unofficial count by phone followed by a (hopefully matching) official count after everything arrived at the central location and was verified.

For the Primary, the parties gave her estimates for voting machine needs at the various polling places, based on previous elections. But she decided that every polling location needed the same number for each party. So in some heavily Democrat areas, Republicans were given far more machines than they had requested, and Democrats had extremely long lines. Because of countywide voting, locations were harder to predict, and she was afraid of backlash for not being equitable to both parties. Instead, the backlash was from angry mostly Democrats, with Republicans rolling their eyes and trying not to speak aloud, “I told you so.”

Anyway, all of this is to say—hurray! She’s stepping down.

Why is she stepping down just a little over a year into a 4-year term? She says it’s because of her age and the Covid-19 threat. From her statement:

After much deliberation and discussion with my family and physician, I am resigning from my position as Harris County Clerk due to personal health concerns. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my age, and underlying health issues, I do not feel I can safely continue to carry out my duties as Harris County Clerk.

I was surprised to learn she is 70; she appears younger. But this comes among more than a pandemic.

She has been pushing for mail-in ballots for all upcoming elections—particularly the primary runoff election, which was postponed until July, and then the presidential general election in November.

There’s a problem with mail-in ballots: getting proof that the person voting is the person entitled to the ballot. The only security Texas has so far is a signature comparison between the application for mail-in ballot and the signature attached to the ballot when it comes in. Someone (of both parties?) has to visually examine each signature to determine if it appears likely that the same person signed both. If there’s a question, then signatures going back several years can be compared. But this is often difficult to determine. And, unless there’s an additional reason to question a ballot, it’s usually just accepted and counted. Once the paper ballot is separated from the envelope it came from, there is no retrieving it. And, as with other paper ballot systems, this is how an additional couple hundred ballots just happen to get added to the stack.

Trautman planned to send ballots, unrequested, to every voter age 65+ in the county. That would mean no original signature to compare to when the ballot was returned. The only security measure would be eliminated.

There’s been a particular problem with ballot harvesting in nursing homes. Activists request ballots for voters at nursing homes—with or without permission of the residents—and they can receive, fill out, and return those ballots sometimes without the residents even seeing their own ballot, possibly not even knowing it was being done in their name. The only way to prevent this fraud is to compare signatures—but, beyond that, to compare multiple signatures from the same place, because, examined individually, since the deceptive activist would have signed both, application and ballot signatures would technically match.

If the same writing style happens to appear on many at the same location, that’s an indicator of fraud.

But who’s going to do that work?

It turns out Colleen Vera is the person.

Colleen Vera's blog, where she detailed her findings
April 22, 2020

She has spent the last two years digging into ballot harvesting in the Harris County. That was her goal, and she was finding it. But she found much more.

She found, for example, a location where it was being done, and the persons requesting the ballots were from a particular consulting company—in other words a name to hide the harvesters names— paid out of campaign funds by, among others, Diane Trautman.

And there’s more. The ballot harvesters in at least three cases were convicted forgers. Forgers being paid to write signatures. What could go wrong?

Other officials who had paid for forgers? US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Justice of the Peace and several District Judges, a Constable, and a Harris County Board Trustee. Vera points out that, while she names names, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

She details her investigation—with plenty of visual evidence—in her blog, Texas Trash Talk, posted April 22, 2020. It’s thorough, and lays out the evidence and what it means, ready for easy prosecution.

32 handwritten applications for mail-in ballots,
all from different voters, but in the same handwriting.
One of the pieces of evidence Colleen Vera dug up
and presented in her Texas Trash Talk post April 22, 2020

She ends her piece with this:

As a citizen there isn’t much we can do. Texas does not allow us to challenge other voter’s signatures or ballots.  All we can do is:

1. Send a complaint to the Secretary of State and hope (s)he sends it on to the Attorney General for investigation. (Which I’ve already done with this research.)

2. Contact our legislators and insist they tighten security for ballot by mail.

3.  Pray the Democrats don’t succeed in using the courts to expand our currently flawed vote by mail system.

Colleen’s husband, Alan Vera, is our Harris County Republican Party ballot security expert. He helped found True the Vote, and has trained people across the country so other states can improve their ballot security. (He trained me as a poll watcher almost a decade ago.) And he lobbies our legislature for improvements. They’re a handy couple to have on our side.

After Trautman’s resignation the other day, Alan posted this timeline on Facebook:

4/15/20: Colleen Vera files a complaint with the Texas Secretary of State regarding mail ballot harvesting in Harris County. Among the evidence submitted are payments by Dr. Trautman’s campaign directly to a convicted forger.

4/22/20: Colleen Vera publishes her evidence of Harris County ballot harvesting in her blog Texas Trash Talk (www.texastrashtalk.com) The Trautman evidence is included.

4/28/20: Commissioners Court approves $12 Million for Dr Trautman to use to expand mail ballot voting in both the Primary Runoff and the November general election. The budget includes money to send mail ballot applications to every 65+ voter in Harris County.

5/1/20: Texas Attorney General Paxton sends a letter to all Texas county judges and election authorities warning them not to mislead voters about using fear of Covid-19 as a “disability” to vote by mail[i]. His press release on that letter calls out Dr. Trautman and Judge Hidalgo specifically for crossing that line. AG Paxton states that criminal charges could result.

5/4/20 to 5/7/20: Dr. Trautman tries to get “guidance” from the Texas Secretary of State on how to carry out the mass mailing of mail ballot applications without crossing the line laid down by AG Paxton. Reportedly, the SOS does not respond to Dr. Trautman’s requests.

5/7/20: The Texas SOS notifies Colleen Vera that he has found sufficient merit in her ballot harvesting complaint to forward it to the Texas Attorney General with a recommendation to investigate the allegations.

5/7/20: Reporting that she has not received a response from the SOS, in a Zoom conference planning the 7/14/20 Primary Runoff election, Dr. Trautman announces that she will NOT mail absentee ballot applications to every 65+ voter in Harris County. Harris County Democrat Party representatives in the conference demand to know why. Dr. Trautman says she won’t do it in the current environment.

5/9/20: Dr. Trautman resigns for health reasons related to Covid-19 concerns.

So, was the reason for Trautman's resignation worry about getting the virus? Maybe that played into it. But maybe it’s just thinking, at age 70, there might be better ways of using your remaining healthy days (at least those not spent in prison) than doing all you can to manipulate elections for a particular party while you’re being paid to provide free and fair elections.

Alan Vera explained what happens from here. The Commissioners Court will appoint a replacement—which means it will be a Democrat. The office will be on the ballot in November to fill the remainder of the 4-year term. Then it will be on the ballot again in 2022, when the term ends. That means we could get someone with experience and a will to provide free and fair elections by January 2021. I don’t know how this election will be done, since our primaries are already over. Is it done with all comers and then a runoff? Not sure. But I’m so glad we don’t have to spend yet another 2 ½ years trying to block this woman’s attempts to make voter fraud easier for people like herself.

Here's to hoping all the guilty parties get justice.

Thanks go to Colleen Vera for the digging. Our freedoms depend on people like her who take good citizenship to another level.

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[i] You can read about that here.  The actual letter is found here. 

Electronic Ballot Security

There’s good news and bad news concerning ballot security—which can, unfortunately, affect the outcome of our elections.

But in Harris County, here in Houston, we can feel pretty good about certain aspects of election integrity. 

This past Saturday, at our local Tea Party meeting, we heard from Ed Johnson of the County Clerk’s Office concerning ballot security here. Specifically, he was talking about the eSlate machine used here, and how they protect its integrity.

Ed Johnson, Harris County Clerk's Office
photo: Cypress Texas Tea Party

Can it be hacked? If everyone involved colluded, then possibly. But with the bipartisan safeguards in place, no.

How did he convince us? He began with a story.

Back in 1996 Duane Bohac, his friend from their college fraternity days, told him he was going to run for state representative. He was running against a 20-year incumbent. The incumbent had 15 voters registered at his home (people who didn’t live there), plus six more in his garage. This voter fraud was reportable, and those illegal voters were removed from the rolls, which is good. But it shows the propensity of that Democrat to engage in illegal voting tactics.

Early vote tallies showed Bohac up by about 1000 votes. But there were four precincts that reported very late—not until around 1:00 in the morning. After they reported, Bohac lost by 75 votes. They found hundred of over votes in those precincts—votes that have more than one candidate marked on the paper ballot, so they are not counted.

In 1998 Bohac ran again. This time he got alternate judges (Republicans, when the presiding poll judge is a Democrat) and poll watchers to watch what happened. The poll watchers followed the judges as they drove the ballot boxes to the central location for counting. As in the previous election, all but four precincts reported in a timely manner. The poll watchers followed these four as they drove around the 610 Loop (the innermost freeway circling Houston) until 1:00 AM. They watched them shaking the ballot box. Early counts showed Bohac leading. But these four precincts showed 400 overvotes, and Bohac got zero votes from these precincts. (Bohac eventually tried again and won; he is my state representative.)

Paper ballots are easy to manipulate. Remember the 2000 election with its hanging chads? Suppose someone with a moment alone takes a long sharp device—like an unbent paper clip—and pokes it through a whole stack of punchcards through the punch hole of the candidate they favor? Any ballot already voting for that candidate is left unchanged, but any ballot for another candidate is now an overvote—or possibly a confusing one with a hanging chad, which pretty much never happens when punching only one card at a time. In that election there were also entire precincts with zero counted votes for Bush, which is statistically highly unlikely, especially when you consider these "safe" areas were the ones where Gore asked for the recount. [Johnson only mentioned the hanging chads. The rest of this paragraph is from what I remember of that history.]

In 2000 County Clerk Beverly Kaufman was faced with a problem. Harris County has the longest ballot in the country (some say LA has a longer one, but Johnson says he still feels confident in making the claim). Much of this is because we vote for judges, and it’s a very large county with a lot of district courts. Anyway, Kaufman couldn’t find a ballot long enough to handle all of the races. Within two years she found the Hart System, which makes the eSlate machine we still use here.

The Hart eSlate Machine
used in Harris County

Since the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, electronic voting has been required across the country. A federal commission must certify the equipment. The Election Assistance Commission was functioning well until Obama; he has refused to appoint anyone to the post, and it has gone defunct, so there have been no updates available, so it is still a slow and burdensome process.

Nevertheless, County Clerk Stan Stanart got our eSlate system to pass the federal regulations. The EAC test takes a year to complete, and costs the company $2 million. Then the system is submitted to states, which take another year for testing. Ours has passed both. HAVA gives money to the states to buy equipment that meets standards.

Johnson spent a fair amount of time going through the type of testing done. He used a number of detailed slides, so this report will only skim the surface, from my notes.

There is HASH testing, or code testing. They check to make sure no coding has been changed.

There is BOSS testing—Ballot Originator Software System. There is no connection to the internet, at any point. Ever.

There are two encryption keys between segments of the system. One is internal. One is external—on a thumb drive. The official (County Clerk) has to take it and plug it in. This is kept in a vault.

There is the Mobile Ballot Box (MBB), the memory card upon which the ballot is backed up. Votes are also kept in three places in the system; cheating would require changing all three locations somehow, without leaving a trace. The memory card is loaded into the JBC (judge's booth controller) machine. A security code identifies the card for each machine. This is tracked throughout the process.

There is security of the election equipment. When you press “cast ballot” on the eSlate machine, your vote is saved in three locations—with the timing of that vote and other identifiers. It is virtually impossible to change votes on a memory card and the other two locations.

There is Login and Accuracy Testing required by law, that takes a week. It uses people of both parties. They create a spreadsheet that includes every possible combination of votes on the ballot. The testers input, physically, each of these voting combinations. The outcome must meet the spreadsheet. This shows there is no tabulating error. Harris County has always passed this test.

For early voting, supervisors set up the polls, with the machines showing zero votes on the screen. They print this zero report to start, and at the end of the day they do another report. Equipment is locked, resealed—all seals are labeled with codes, which must match, to show that there was no tampering overnight. At the end of early voting, the machine is sealed, again with a coded seal. A constable delivers the machine to the downtown office. Seals are validated, and the machines are locked in a vault with the memory card still inside it.

There’s a second Login and Accuracy Test done by members of each party. This takes three hours on election night, with a high amount of security. It is completed just prior to the polls closing. Early voting tallying begins, but no results are available—to anyone, including those involved in the counting—until after the polls have closed, so that early voting outcomes have no influence on voters who haven’t yet voted.

At the polling place, machines arrive sealed, with codes on the seals, which are recorded. The zero tape is printed, to show that there were no votes on the machine prior to the start of voting. Each voter must show eligibility (ID), sign into the polling book—plus their name is written by the clerk on a voter list. The voter is sent to the JBC machine to get a code. They take their code to the voting booth and enter their code on the eSlate machine. The machines have a dial, which prevents errors that can happen on touch screens. No helper (language assistant, for example) can touch the machine—only the voter. The voter presses “cast ballot,” and a flag on the screen indicates that the voter was successful in casting the ballot, and the voter can leave the booth.

There are some similar machines that can print cast ballots. This removes the safety of a secret ballot, and these machines have a lower accuracy rate. So Harris County does not use them.

The individual votes cast can be printed—and are printed, by a hard-to-read dot-matrix printer. Stan Stanart still uses this, although the state has recently allowed an alternative laser printer version. But, once an election process is underway, Stanart doesn’t make changes, so this election will still use the dot-matrix printer.

Every recount done in the county has come out the same as the original count; the electronic voting system has a zero% error rate.

There are seven vendors selling electronic voting equipment nationally. It is our County Clerk’s opinion—and Harris County has been ground zero in preventing election fraud—that the HART system is the best.

I have no personal expertise to know whether this is true, but I have been a poll watcher and poll worker here a number of times. And I am persuaded that electronic voting prevents fraud, and I’ve seen the security procedures followed carefully at the polling places.

Ed Johnson told us (though it wasn’t news to us) that Democrats hate electronic voting. In the national effort to “turn Harris County blue,” they have two goals: do away with photo ID, and get rid of electronic voting.

Unfortunately, electronic voting can prevent counting errors, but it can’t prevent all other versions of election fraud.

Picture a voting place with no alternate judge or poll watcher. There may be people on the rolls that haven’t voted yet. The judge can put the voter’s name on the list, print out a code, and hand it to a friend to cast a ballot. If the person comes in and signs the book later, they still get to vote, and, unless there is a recount, no one will notice that person’s name twice on the voter list.

Or the judge might print out the code and cast the extra vote without even bothering to put a name on the voter list. At the place I worked as a poll watcher in 2012, there were 20 additional votes at the end of the day that were not recorded on the voter list. The presiding judge made no attempt to reconcile the error; she just shrugged her shoulders and assumed the clerks had failed to write the names that many times. That’s possible, but I hadn’t witnessed any failures. The difference in the election nationwide was about 10 votes per precinct. 

I did file the discrepancy in my report, but voter fraud is notoriously hard to prove. In some of the most egregious cases, the only outcome is to prevent that judge from being hired again.

The best prevention is to have an alternate judge and poll watcher in every polling place. Harris County has a pretty good program to train and recruit towards this end, but it’s still a challenge. And it’s not being done in many voting places around the country.

The good news, then, is that people in favor of free and fair elections are getting better technology to accomplish that. But the bad news is that people against free and fair elections will continue to find ways to disenfranchise the voters who disagree with them.