BREAKING: MEMBER OF PUBLIC THREATENED AND REMOVED AT PRE-ELECTION LOGIC AND ACCURACY TEST

Yesterday, I attended a logic and accuracy test in Socorro County for the voting machines that will be used in the November election. I urge you to do the same in the next week or two in a county near you. Hopefully your experience will be better than mine was.

In attendance was County Clerk Betty Saavedra, three of her staff, as many as six sheriff’s deputies who rotated in and out on shift throughout the day, three members of the public, and a representative of “Observe New Mexico” – a program being run by the Carter Center. The Carter Center was founded by former President Jimmy Carter who is now 100 years old and, according to his family, is only hoping to stay alive long enough to “vote for Kamala Harris.”

The logic and accuracy test is open to the public by law and is supposed to make us feel assured that the remote-accessible, vulnerable voting machines will work properly during the election.

This is how the test is done: Dominion Voting Systems sends each clerk several sets of pre-voted “test ballots” along with a sheet letting the clerk know what the totals were on those test ballots. The clerk and her staff spend hours dutifully running these test ballots through each tabulator and then print a “tabulator tape.” The tabulator tape supposedly reports the vote totals from the test ballots.

Obviously, comparing vendor-provided machine printouts to other vendor-provided machine printouts with no actual human verification is not a real logic and accuracy test. I politely asked the County Clerk if she hand counted the votes on the test ballots so she would know whether the vendor-provided print outs were correct. She said she didn’t. The excuses provided for not performing this simple task were that the legislature didn’t tell her she had to, and it would take too much time. I clarified that without hand counting the test ballots, there is really no way to know if the computers are accurate. She conceded the point and said if I wanted to see different procedures I needed to go to the legislature and have them force her to hand count the test ballots by putting it in the statutes.

Here’s the kicker – the legislature puts the responsibility for performing the logic and accuracy test in the hands of the clerk in NMSA 1-11-5 and following. Moreover, the legal responsibility of certifying those same machines are without defect is left to the clerk, and not the legislature. A close examination of the election code reveals there is no statutory prohibition of the clerk checking the votes on the actual test ballots. Further, most of the races on the test ballots only had 56 votes. This small number of ballots could be completely hand counted in less than an hour, so the public wouldn’t being forced to rely entirely on Dominion Voting Systems to validate their own machines without any genuine testing. But an extra hour for peace of mind of the public was too much to ask of Clerk Saavedra.

After this discussion, the clerk’s staff had finished “testing” the first set of tabulators and were locking up the ones they had finished. I asked if they were going to make sure that the “Audio Tactile Interface” (ATI) feature was working in the tabulators before they locked them up.

For those who don’t know: the ATI feature allows a visually impaired person to cast a ballot in secret without assistance. They feed a blank ballot into the tabulator, then make their vote selections by using an attached joystick and audio prompts. Then the tabulator prints the votes on the blank ballot. While in theory this is a great idea, one could certainly argue with how Dominion chose to incorporate this feature into their tabulators: the ATI ballots are filled out using an internal printer which every ballot passes through whether using the ATI feature or not. The New York State Board of Elections had previously admitted that this feature could be subverted to change voter’s intent by printing on ballots when it wasn’t supposed to.

The staff seemed confused by my request that the ATI feature be tested, but I felt it was important to press the matter since compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is why we are told we must use Dominion tabulators with internal printers in New Mexico.

Responding to my concern, the tabulator technician decided he would go ahead and try to test the feature. The feature didn’t work initially, and it required the technician to retrieve the user’s manual for the tabulator and change the ink cartridge before the feature would boot up. Even then the clerk’s staff did not fully test that the ATI feature was working on that tabulator by following through and filling out a blank ballot using the audio prompts.

But the clerk assured me that the ATI feature would certainly work during the election. I expressed my doubts on the matter since the tabulator didn’t work when they tried it in the warehouse. She said if it didn’t work, a presiding judge could assist a visually impaired person by filling out their ballot for them. I responded that in that case their right to cast a secret ballot would be violated since another person would know what their votes were. She insisted that having a stranger fill out their ballot did not violate the privacy of a visually impaired person. I believe federal law would beg to differ with Saavedra.

The clerk and her staff did not perform the minimal task of making sure the ATI feature would successfully boot up on any of the other machines. Hours later before I left for the day, I asked the clerk again whether she would fully test the ATI feature on real blank ballots before she certified the machines, and she said she would not.

It is unconscionable that the ADA law is used as a pretext to force New Mexicans to use untrustworthy tabulators with internal printers, but election officials don’t actually care if the feature works during an election. It makes one wonder why we’re really using these machines.

Around this time, the Socorro County Manager, Andrew Lotrich, entered the room.

The next question for Saavadra was asked by Mike Scott, a local Socorro County resident and veteran. He had noticed that there was an “ethernet” port visible on the side of all the Dominion machines meaning they necessarily have an internal modem in the tabulator that would allow internet connectivity and remote access. This seemed to surprise Saavedra who said she was not responsible for the manufacture of the machine.

Mr. Scott then explained that having an internal modem could allow for undetectable manipulation of the machine with devices that are readily available to hackers and that the hacker wouldn’t even have to be in the building to use them. Shockingly, Saavedra stated that the presence of an internal modem was a matter of “opinion” and not her problem.

At this point, County Manager Lotrich told the members of the public that if they wanted to ask questions of the County Clerk that they’d have to step out of the room. He claimed that questions from the public about the ongoing process performed for the benefit of the public were holding up the process and would not be tolerated.

Accordingly, I asked Saavedra to step outside to discuss the recent bombshell report where it was confirmed that Dominion has no meaningful encryption security on their election system, their passwords are widely known and never changed, which leaves the entire system wide open. County Manager Lotrich and Mr. Scott joined us for this discussion. I started explaining to Saavedra about this issue and how it violates the law when Lotrich interrupted and tried to falsely claim the federal law regarding election security didn’t apply in New Mexico and other points irrelevant to the issue. Mr. Scott chimed in with his thoughts at which point Lotrich asked Scott to leave the premises.

Shocked, I told Lotrich he can’t order someone out of a public meeting, but he kept insisting Scott leave. Lotrich even directed a sheriff’s deputy standing nearby to tell Scott to leave. Scott complied and went out to his vehicle in the parking lot.

At this point I called the County Sheriff Lee Armijo and told him what just happened. The sheriff agreed there was no legal basis for Lotrich’s demands. After a discussion with the Sheriff, Lotrich apologized to Scott who was allowed to return to the public meeting.

Later I asked Scott what was going through his mind when he was being mistreated by Lotrich: “I was surprised an annoyed. He never gave me a reason I had to leave but he told the deputy to go get the sheriff. I’m not causing any harm. I’m just asking questions. We show up and there’s six deputies. They’re going to say that’s not intimidation? I think that’s exactly what that was there for. The whole thing was weird.” Scott said.

I asked him if he thought Lotrich’s apology was genuine: “In my opinion if he was making this decision on his own, I don’t think he would have apologized. I think someone told him he broke the law, and he was afraid I would go after him.”

The rest of the day didn’t go any better. The staff was hostile to the members of the public, but very conciliatory to the representative from “Observe New Mexico.” At no point was this representative asked to leave the room to ask a question of the clerk or staff when she had something to say. The clerk took several personal phone calls during the day, which somehow didn’t interrupt the process the way questions from the public did.

The “Observe New Mexico” representative was allowed to sit at the desk in the center of the room where the paperwork for the process was being kept and processed, spread her things all over it, and touch whatever was near her. However, when a member of the public stepped near the same desk to see what was going on or look over the paperwork that was being filled out, the sheriff’s deputies and the clerk’s staff acted very nervous and told the public to back away.

Overall, it was a terrible experience. I left with a feeling that not only is the logic and accuracy test a completely vendor-controlled farce, but that the local officials, even in this fairly conservative rural county, really don’t care what the public thinks. They will do the absolute minimum they can, they do not tolerate questions from the public, and at the end of the day they really don’t care whether you trust your election system.