In recent years, citizens throughout the United States have expressed concern about the legitimacy of machine counts. Voting systems that do not provide a paper audit trail require that citizens trust the company that has provided the voting system. Voting systems such as that used in Humboldt County, which use optically scanned paper ballots, do leave an audit trail of all cast ballots. This audit trail becomes far more valuable if it is actually used to verify the count.
The Humboldt County Election Transparency Project aims to provide images of each counted ballot, so that any person or organization wishing to do an independent count will have access to a complete set of ballot images.
In November 2008, we began scanning using Linux, an open-source computer operating system, using open-source code to run the scanner at the county Elections office.
Finally, the scanner itself is not special election-related hardware -- it's just a high-speed, general purpose office scanner.
The project was initiated by Humboldt County County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, former Green party Presidential candidate David Cobb, local citizens Kevin Collins and Parke Bostrom, and Tom Pinto of the Humboldt County District Attorney's office. The custom scanning and counting software, along with the technical procedure used by the project, has been developed pro bono by Humboldt-based freelance programmer Mitch Trachtenberg, who may be contacted by email to mjtrac at the site gmail.com. The scanning software uses the SANE ("Scanner Access Now Easy") protocol, and is built on top of the SANE command line program "scanimage". We are indebted to M. Allan Noah, who has modified the SANE back-ends to work with our high-end scanner. He provided us with very rapid responses to our needs, with enthusiasm and at no charge. These programs run on top of the Debian Linux Etch release, downloaded from a debian mirror in June 2008. All software used is available for download free of charge. The most recent development version as of 3/2009 is available through this page.
Our first run was on the June 2008 election. This scan was run using Microsoft Windows to drive the scanner, which captured the images at a resolution of 150 dots per inch. Those images were provided to Dr. David Dill of Stanford, Joseph Lorenzo Hall of Berkeley, and Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. The second run was during the November 2008 general election, and the collections of images from that election are now online at UC Berkeley's Election Administration Research Center for anyone to view or download. The images are also available on DVDs from the Humboldt County elections office.
An unofficial count of the November 2008 images is available from project volunteer Mitch Trachtenberg.
Scanning for the November 2008 elections was done under Linux, on a stand-alone machine, meaning the project's November tasks were done entirely using open-source software.
The project discovered a