I know how you voted last summerCould local governments or a private

Published 7:00 am Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I know how you voted last summerCould local governments or a private corporation be monitoring the personal voting habits of one-third of Washington voters? Say even companies with connections to controversial data collection services, former spy agency heads, and big-time Pentagon players? That’s the allegation in a lawsuit brought this morning by four voters and the Green Party of San Juan County. They say that the bar code system used by a number of Washington counties violates the state Constitution’s guarantee to “absolute secrecy” of the ballot, and also violates federal Constitutional guarantees of equal protection (some voters are subject to the bar codes and others not). They’re asking the state Supreme Court to direct Secretary of State Sam Reed to stop the use of the codes. The “Mail-in Ballot Tracker” (or MiBT) system was created by a private company called VoteHere, with whom Reed contracted to handle mail-in ballots, and has since been sold to a Bellevue company called Election Trust. In their suit, the plaintiffs quote a manual for the system as stating that, “Voter and Ballot IDs that correspond to the barcodes are loaded into MiBT.” They’re arguing that the state hasn’t tested the process for security and that private administrators of the system or the state could potentially access the database and get a complete list of voters and how they voted. On its webpage, VoteHere says the process protects voter privacy through a technology that “permanently separates and randomizes voter names from ballots in a way that is transparent, auditable, and totally secure.”(In case you’re wondering, while King County uses the MiBT system, it passed legislation that prevents the use of identifying codes or other markers on ballots.)The State Election Division says that lawsuit misunderstand the way the system works. “It is not possible in Washington to trace any ballot back to the individual voter,” the division said in a statement. “The basic underlying premise of the lawsuit is just wrong…It’s understandable that some might be concerned when they see the markings, but, again, rest assured that those markings do not compromise the privacy of the ballot.” The bar codes are “to allow the tabulation equipment to process the ballot properly and to guard against ballots being fed through more than once.

And John Bodin of Election Trust argues that, while Election Trust has “no direct comment on the accuracy or merit of the lawsuit,” MiBT as its used in Washington involves the tracking of envelopes, not ballots; the ballots and envelopes aren’t linked in the system. Tim White is one of the petitioners, a construction worker from Orcas Island. He recounts that the group has been trying to stop the use of the bar codes for years, both in San Juan County and in the state. “Our first choice wasn’t to do a lawsuit,” he said. “We would’ve been happy with an administrative or legislative solution,” but such attempts failed, he said.Also of note: while VoteHere no longer administers the system, White talks a lot about what he sees as the connections held by the company’s former board members. He notes that VoteHere’s founder, Jim Adler, is now the Chief Privacy Officer at Intelius, a company that doesn’t have the best track record with respecting privacy; that when VoteHere got its contract, it was headed by former WA Secretary of State Ralph Munro; and that a number of high-ranking former-Pentagon types have been involved in its creation or governance, from current Secretary of Defense/former CIA head Bob Gates to retired Navy Admiral William Owens, who headed a contractor that worked with the National Security Agency (the folks responsible for the warrantless wiretaps under the Bush Administration) and who is also on the board of Intelius.The press release for the lawsuit quotes White as saying that the program is administered by a company with ties to the CIA and Pentagon; Bodin makes it clear that that company isn’t Election Trust. He notes that he has no current political affiliation but that his last affiliation was with the Green Party–he was the national media coordinator for the ’96 Nader campaign. The company’s other three registered owners, he says, include a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independent.Court filings and other documents from the petitioners can be found here.