E-Vote: Arizona Secretary of State Raises Concerns About Pima County Election Proposals

Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer yesterday sent a letter to Pima County addressing her concerns about the county's recent election procedure report which was released this past April. She noted that over the past six years, her administration has established a rigorous end-to-end election process with procedures that are among the tightest and most secure in the nation.

"Although some of your recommendations make sense, most are problematic, unnecessary, and/or unjustifiable, and nearly all establish a protocol for Pima County that is vastly different and unworkable for every other county," said Brewer, "It is simply bad policy for one county to push its agenda -- which appears to be largely driven by local politics and not on reasoned analysis -- on every other county."

In her 11-page response letter to Pima County, Brewer also listed several major security vulnerabilities, including Pima's unilateral decision to discontinue the modem transmission of election results from polling places on election night. Brewer noted this specific practice provides no independent method for memorializing the results from a given precinct.

"Not only will discontinuing the modem transmission of results substantially delay the reporting of unofficial results on election night, it actually introduces a major security vulnerability into the election process," stated Brewer, "Your supposed ‘security procedure' apparently does not even consider that something could happen to the machines and ballots in route to the election headquarters, in which case the results at that precinct would be lost forever. Certainly the odds of some event happening during the transportation of the ballots are low, but they are no doubt far greater than the remote possibility of some hacker intercepting the results, which again would be quickly caught during the post-election audit."

Brewer also took issue with Pima County 's proposal to discontinue the use of its accessible voting devices for disabled voters noting that this proposal "violate[s] federal and state law and would unnecessarily disenfranchise Pima County voters with disabilities." Brewer further admonished Pima County for failing to use the federal funds available to the county to assist voters with disabilities and specifically noted a recent complaint from a disability group regarding Pima County 's failure to accommodate voters with disabilities. "I am disappointed that Pima County has not requested the maximum amount available to it and that $63,688.89 of the money that it has received has not been spent," Brewer said.

Finally, Brewer was critical of Pima County officials for releasing all past election databases to the Pima County Democratic Party after they spent money and time fighting in court for over a year against the release.

"I am at a loss as to why Pima County would argue in court against the release of election databases and then turn around and immediately release more databases than ordered by the court," said Brewer. "It is no surprise that the court reversed itself in the post-judgment proceedings and ordered the release of this information given the actions by the Board."

"The bulk of your recommendations seem to minimize the significance of our existing security protocol and imply that serious problems exist when nothing could be further from the truth," said Brewer.

"I must reemphasize the point I made in my earlier letter to you about the importance of following the existing physical security protocol for election equipment in your county to prevent any unauthorized person from having access to electronic voting equipment and ballots. The procedures in Arizona go above and beyond what is necessary to secure an election and it is for this reason that we have never had an election security breach in our state."