Noel Runyan is an electrical engineer and computer scientist with over 30 years experience in design and manufacturing of access technology systems for people with disabilities. He served as an accessibility reviewer for the Secretary of State of California's Top-to-Bottom Review of Voting Systems.


Prior to this November's election, I've tried to vote on my county's Sequoia "accessible" voting machines in seven elections.  In five elections, the pollworkers were unable to get the systems working themselves.  In two of the elections, the Sequoia machines were clearly just broken. In an effort to try to make sure that the voting machines in my neighborhood polling place, as well as others in the county, were properly set up and working for voters with disabilities, I told county officials at our last public VAAC meeting that I was willing to volunteer to ride around with and help the county's roving elections field officers on election day.  However, instead of signing me up for rover support, the county signed my wife and me up to be pollworkers.  My wife hadn't volunteered to help at all and pollworking really wasn't what either of us had been expecting or wanted.

Although not enthusiastic about accepting the assignment, my wife and I figured that pollworking would be a useful learning experience, and we were inspired by the fine examples of Avi, Joe, Barbara, Alison, and others on the Quixote List who have been willing to help out as pollworkers.

Also, when testifying publicly, I've felt very uncomfortable when experts like Andy Appel were quizzed, "have you ever been a pollworker?", and "No, then you don't know anything about how polling place procedures guarantee good security and accuracy, do you?"

We've been told repeatedly by elections officials and vendors that our worries about election security, reliability, and accuracy would be allayed, if we only had first hand experience as pollworkers in real elections. Unfortunately, now that we've completed the pollworking courses, done additional studying of the training materials, and experienced a major election as pollworkers, we do not feel better about polling place procedures.  Quite to the contrary, we are now truly concerned about the use of irresponsible sleep overs, as well as the reliance on tamper seals that gives elections officials a false sense of security.

Our Pollworker Training

The first part of our training to become pollworkers was an on-line training course that was supposed to take "a couple of hours". The Santa Clara County's on-line training program was so inaccessible that my wife had to copy and paste large portions for me and transcribe others into text files. The Election Officers Training manual was supposed to be available on the on-line training site, but it was a dead link. By the time we finished the on-line training, it was 2:30 in the morning, after 7.5 frustrating hours of fighting with a terrible training program interface and non-accessible web site.

On October 6th, we went to the required hands-on training class, 90 minutes for those who had successfully finished the on-line training course. Since the class was so short, only a couple of the students actually got their hands on the equipment, mostly as demonstrators.  To get my own hands on, I went up after class and asked for a chance.  The instructor was cooperative and willing to take the time to make sure I knew how to pack and unpack the Sequoia Edge machine. At our Santa Clara County VAAC (Voter Access Advisory Committee) public meeting about a year ago, our assistant ROV specifically told me that zippered bank deposit type bags were not used in our county elections, so I was anxious to find out just what kind of zippered bags were being used. When the instructor handed me the results cartridge zippered bag with the cartridge "safely sealed inside" with a tamper-evident seal on the zipper, I was shocked to discover that it was just like the old flexible zippered bank deposit bags. When I expressed my amazement that it was not a secure bag, the instructor said that he didn't think I could get the card out.  In seconds, I pulled the cartridge out of the bag and handed it to the surprised instructor.  Then I popped it back in the bag and handed him back the closed bag, still sealed and with no evidence of tampering. His response was, "Well of course no one would do that, because it is against the law!"

The technique I used is sometimes called the "zipper loop holes" or "zipper butterfly" method and it was published about 15 or 20 years ago in Scientific American, in an attempt to get banks and other security concerned organizations to stop using bank deposit bags and other containers with flexible zippers.  The hope was that banks would at least switch to bags that had stiffeners added along side the start of the zipper to prevent the sides of the zipper being "butterflyed" or pulled out to the sides as loop holes. When I examined the zippered roller bags the county uses to transport the Sequoia Edge voting machine and its voter card encoder, I was surprised to find that it too had flexible zippers that could be looped out to the sides in the same manner as the results cartridge bag.  It would have been less than a minute's work to quickly loop out its zipper, and remove either the voting machine or the card encoder.  The card encoder is small enough (smaller than a loaf of bread) that you could easily slip it under your coat and walk off with it.  What was that we learned in the TTB review, about the encoders having the same ROM-encoded encryption key that is used in the Sequoia Edge voting machines all across the country?  Hum, now why might anyone want to sneak off with one of those?

Election Eve Setup

On Monday the 3rd, all of the pollworkers for our polling place met at our neighborhood firehouse garage, to get acquainted and do as much of the polling place setup as we could before election day. We put up all the indoor signs, assembled and set up the six polling booths, and set out folding chairs and tables. My wife and I were floored to discover that the zippered roller bag containing the Sequoia Edge voting machine and its voter card encoder were just sitting in a corner of the garage, where the firemen said it had been since Thursday of the week before. Since the voting machine was not supposed to be set up until just before the polls opened on election day, we pointed out to the chief officer (the precinct officer) that the voting machine bag should be kept locked up securely for the night. We pointed out that the DRE needed to be kept in a locked room or closet. The precinct inspector said it was fine where it was, because "it has security seals" and because "that's where the county people decided to leave it". We could not convince the precinct inspector to take the security exposure seriously and she would not take any initiative to try to do anything about better security arrangements.  We stressed that it was supposed to be locked up, especially because it was so exposed whenever the firemen all went on calls (which happened every three or four hours).

Finally my wife talked to the firemen herself and they helped locate a more secure room for storing the voting machine.  We showed this storage area to the precinct inspector, and she begrudgingly let us put the voting machine in there for the night. The election eve set up only took us a little less than an hour. We went home and then returned to the polling place at six in the morning.  Although the precinct inspector had the night before told us that we did not need or have room for any more chairs or tables, my wife and I brought along our own set of four folding chairs and a folding card table, all of which the precinct officer later asked to use.

Election Day

As our first project, Deb and I started to set up the DRE, but had 3 extra "helpers"... definitely too many cooks. The normal setup instructions for the Sequoia voting machine are based on having a table to place it on.  However, there were not any tables available, and our attempts to install the support stand legs on the Sequoia were not working with the unit sitting on the floor.  One of the younger student "helpers" was getting quite desperate and hysterical sounding, because we were "not following the instructions".  My wife and I gave up and retrieved our card table from our car, so we could "follow the manual". When we returned with the table, the others had the legs half way attached to the voting machine.  I determined that the legs actually were flawed and not manufactured properly.  Eventually I managed to get the machine's stand stabilized and not too wobbly.

The rest of the Sequoia setup went smoothly according to the step by step instructions. It was interesting to note that, in addition to one VVPAT printer for normal use on the Sequoia voting machine, there were two more identical "backup" printers - a testimony to their reliability.  I guess the county has plenty of extra printers, since they are now only allowed to use only one Sequoia voting machine per precinct and have many more in warehouses. Although we plugged in the Sequoia's audio keypad and headphones, there was no procedure for testing the system to make sure the audio was working properly.  Our precinct inspector did not want to be bothered trying anything like starting an audio ballot and then ejecting the card without casting the ballot to test it, as that was not prescribed in the written procedures. This lack of a prescribed audio ballot test procedure is evidently why so many of the first audio voters of the election day in our county are the first who find out that the machine may not have been set up correctly. My wife, Deb, and I were the ballot and card officers, so I handled encoding the voter cards on the card encoder unit, and Deb took care of handing out the paper ballots.  There were ballots for five languages and every ballot had two pages. Deb had quite a challenge straightening out all the ballots, which were bound in unwieldy stacks of 50 and made two piles of more than a foot tall.

The precinct inspector was going to open the poll at 7:00 by her watch, until I pointed out that our training materials said that the clock on the Sequoia was supposed to be used as the master time standard.  Therefore, it was actually 7:05 when we opened the poll and greeted a line that lasted for about an hour and a half. After the initial rush, we never really had more than three voters in line at one time, although we almost always had at least one person voting in the polling booths. I was surprised to note that something like one third of the voters had to vote provisionally, despite fairly thorough attempts by the roster officers to check all the various lists for the names or alternative name spellings.  There were a variety of reasons like moved recently, got married, never did a change of address, and just mysteriously not on the list. Around 10 o'clock, one voter with a disability asked to use the electronic voting machine, at last, our first  (and last)! This blind voter did not speak English very well, but chose to vote in English anyway. Because he was confused and overwhelmed by the voting machine complexity, he chose to have his accompanying friend assist him by pressing the keys on the audio keypad. The precinct inspector did not ask for and log the name of his assistant, as required in the procedures. Five different times, while this blind voter was trying to vote on the Sequoia, he called me over to help him out of jams.  The first was because he couldn't get out of the language menu (a common problem with the Sequoia Edge). Because the voter had to tell his friend which keys to push, I felt that I couldn't stand near them and had to move off a ways, to assure them better privacy. It took about 35 minutes for this voter to complete his ballot and cast his vote electronically (without even taking time to review).

This successful audio voter represents only the third of eight elections in which the audio ballot of the Sequoia voting machines worked in my neighborhood polling place.  Although making sure the "accessible" voting machine was working properly on Election Day in my precinct was my original goal, I'm not sure I should say, "Mission accomplished".

Before this voter asked to vote on the voting machine, the precinct inspector did not want any of the pollworkers to encourage anyone to use the voting machine.  After we had one voter use the machine, other voters were encouraged to use the machine until we had a total of five voters use it.  This "If one, then at least five" policy is recommended in California to assure better privacy of ballots for voters using the machine.

While I was on my lunch break, there was one provisional voter who wanted to vote on the Sequoia machine, but who gave up and voted on paper ballot, because the polling staff's repeated effort to encode a provisional card on the card encoder kept failing. Joe Hall said that his precinct was warned to never try to encode a Sequoia Edge voter card for a provisional voter.  I wonder if the card encoders really can make provisional voter cards.

After our fifth voter on the Sequoia Edge finished around 11:30, we didn't have any more electronic voters for the rest of the day.  That meant I had nothing to do all afternoon and evening, until we closed the polls.  Because of the very sparse turnout (only about 360 voters signed in), I found it to be more than a little boring and uncomfortable just sitting at the card encoder, in a unpadded folding chair for eight and a half more hours, until the close of polls at 8:00. After close of polls, I had only one main job, print result tapes on the Sequoia Edge, then pack up the system (with the card encoder) in its zippered roller bag and stand around holding the results memory cartridge and its zipper bag, until the precinct inspector was ready to seal it. Despite written procedures to the contrary, our precinct inspector decided to wait as long as possible to actually seal any of the packages that required tamper-evident security seals.  This presented a problem in that we had to go back later to find the points we had skipped in the procedures, to seal packages and obtain signatures. It also meant that someone like me had over an hour of time in which to switch items like the results cartridge, while everyone else was busy with other activities. When it finally came time to seal the results cartridge in its bag and seal that bag in the inspector's main bag, I asked the precinct inspector to witness that the results cartridge could be removed from the zippered bag without breaking the tamper-evident security seal.  She didn't even want to hear my recommended solution for the problem. She just got mad and said, "I'm trying to close the polls.  I don't have time to deal with this."

Similarly, our precinct inspector had no patience when she was ready to walk out of the firehouse garage and I pointed out that we should not leave the Sequoia voting machine and card encoder bag just sitting out right out in the open in an unlocked firehouse garage! She refused to let us have the firemen put the voting system in a safer room.  "Because the county people might not be able to find it there, when they came to pick it up, and the firemen might be out on a call."  How many supposed county people might have the opportunity to stop in and walk off with the voting machine from the firehouse garage?  No wonder Georgia had two Diebold voting machines stolen.  If their "chain of custody" was being as irresponsibly handled as they are in Santa Clara County, I am not at all surprised and expect that there are many other voting machines gone missing but not reported!

At 9:30, the precinct inspector rushed out the firehouse garage door, with the polling place closed and leaving the voting machine just sitting on the floor in the garage. According to the firemen, the voting machine was not scheduled for pick up until Friday, three days later. Immediately after our training on October 6th, I was tempted to share the zipper loop holes security exposure with the list, but was encouraged to wait until after the election, as there was basically no time for the average elections officials to change any of their procedures or equipment before the election less than a month away. In order to convince elections officials that they have to stop using flexible zippered bags to hold sensitive materials, I feel that sometime soon, like a little more than 28 days after the election, and counting is over, this zipper loop holes issue and chain-of-custody exposures should be aired publicly.  The most desired reaction may be to have elections officials (and any slow bankers) either replace the flexible zippered bags with secure bags or have stiffener rods or materials added to the zippers of their current stock of zippered bags.  In some cases, eyelets can be added a short distance down the zipper and used to lock the zipper so it cannot be spread into loops.  I'm sure there are many other simple and inexpensive methods to make these containers more secure from unauthorized opening and I'd like to hear from anyone with good ideas (maybe best off list).

 However, I think it is most important to convince elections officials to drop the false sense of security they get from these security seals.  Tamper seals and much of the other "security theatre" should not be used to absolve or excuse irresponsible sleep over practices and other chain-of-custody security exposures. I apologize that this pollworker experience does not sound as positive as others posted on this list.  Although my experience was disturbing and worrisome, I felt much better after I arrived home from the polls and began reading web posts that have shown how well the voting integrity community's efforts over the last several years has helped to keep this election from becoming the democracy train wreck many of us feared.  Thanks to every one of you for all the great over-the-top effort to protect the voting foundation of our democracy!