Bogus Audit (II)

An update on the bogus audit of the elections office that was performed in response to the County Council's request for a real audit --

The audit report has been completed but hasn't been released to the public yet. I haven't seen the report and neither have the Councilmembers. I don't know what the report contains or concludes, but I know enough about what the report does NOT contain to know that the report in its present form has to be a bunch of worthless bullshit. The auditors promised the Council

"a very specific, very nuts-and-bolts" review of "everything from A to Z" in the county Elections Office.

But among the letters they're not reviewing are "B" and "E", as in "ballot" and "envelope". One of the biggest problems with the last election was that King County counted hundreds more ballots than voters, potentially enough to have changed the outcome of the governor's race and certainly enough to have destroyed public confidence in the system. Whatever problems led to this discrepancy need to be identified and corrected in order to avoid another meltdown in the future. Nevertheless, the self-described "auditors" didn't bother to take a look at a single ballot or ballot envelope. That puts these lazy-assed clowns $300,000 ahead of, and about 20,000 ballot envelopes behind me and a handful of other unpaid volunteers who have actually looked at a bunch of absentee and provisional ballot envelopes and discovered a significant number of disturbing and hitherto unknown irregularities. (I've posted only a small sample of what we've found). When a Councilmember asked the auditors to look at these irregularities, which suggest systemic as opposed to isolated problems, the response was (I paraphrase) "It's not our job to look at ballots". You have to wonder what these slackers will do for their next engagement: Audit Worldcom without checking to see whether the books balanced?

There are some real reasons why the Elections Center might have chosen not to audit the ballot processing, which is the single most important thing that they should have audited --

a) they're mostly a bunch of current and retired election officials, who will instinctively circle the wagons to help protect the rear-end of one of their own, Dean Logan.

b) they get most of their funding from election equipment vendors, like Diebold. Diebold supplied much of the infrastructure to King County elections, including the DIMS software and PSI, the service bureau which sorted and batched all of the incoming absentee ballots. Some of the problems in absentee ballot accounting could be attributable to DIMS and PSI. I can understand why the Election Center might prefer not to audit the quality of its corporate sponsor's products.

Now, to enhance the audit report's bullshit quotient, Ron Sims and Dean Logan have received the report and were given an opportunity to comment and correct factual errors. (Like, they'll be extra vigilant to point out any errors in their favor). The Council won't receive the report until the Monday morning Council meeting when Ernie Hawkins, who led the "audit", will report his conclusions and take questions from the Councilmembers. As if the Council will be in a position to ask probing questions about a report they haven't had the opportunity to read. Meanwhile, no matter what the report actually says (and avoids saying), Ron Sims will have a head start on the Council and you know that he will have already prepared a self-congratulatory press release that will dominate the next day's news on the audit. What a sick joke.

The Councilmembers would do well on Monday to rip Hawkins apart for failing to perform an audit of adequate scope. They should refuse to accept and pay for the audit unless and until it actually audits what needs to be audited.

Finally, I also heard that the Council was contemplating hiring the Election Center for future projects, including observing the November 2005 election. I hope I heard wrong. They might as well hire a bunch of Diebold salesmen led by Dean Logan's brother-in-law, who would probably offer the same quality of oversight for a lot less money.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 01, 2005 04:44 PM | Email This