For one thing, the county uses
"centralized tabulation"--the least secure system (as opposed to
"precinct-based tabulation," with required posting of the results at the precinct--there is no local posting with "centralized tabulation"). "Centralized tabulation" greatly enhances opportunity for fraud. Your voting card, and 4 million others, are trucked to pickup locations, and all then go on to one location, Norwalk, and are shunted by the vat load into an ELECTRONIC tabulator, which is run on "trade secret," proprietary code, and which the county calls MTS (Micro Tally System), but local election reform activists suspect is a Diebold GEMS tabulator (very bad). (The county has been secretive about it.) And out come the magic numbers, with only a 1% check (very, very inadequate) of the actual vote cards against the machine tally.
Secondly, L.A. county has had one of the most corrupt, pro-corporate, anti-reform Registrars of Voters in the entire state for over a decade--Conny McCormack--who just resigned (Dec 07) amidst a storm of controversy about her coziness with the corporate vendors--and the person running your elections is her hand-picked successor, Dean Logan (who has a very dubious record in his previous venue, Washington State).
McCormack tried to bring
Diebold early voting touchscreens to L.A. The new reforming Sec of State, Debra Bowen, stopped that. McCormack gave
Diebold the entire Absent Ballot concession in L.A. And she larded the equally bad
ES&S (closely tied to Diebold) with a $25 million contract for the completely unnecessary InkaVote-Plus scanners, which do nothing but check for overvotes (the voters can do that), and provide "snap tallies" (unofficial results) for corporate exit pollsters in 20 (out of 4,000) precincts. And now McCormack is in the newspapers criticizing Bowen for her reforms, and likely scheming with other "bad actor" registrars to reverse those reforms, and prevent any more. (San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino county registrars recently sued SoS Bowen to stop her improved auditing rules. McCormack is best friends with the San Diego county registrar, Deborah Seiler, who was formerly Diebold's chief salesperson in California, and has ganged up with these county registrars, and a few others, in the past, to prevent badly needed reforms.)
Please see "California Election Integrity Assessment 2008" for more detail, on L.A. and other CA county election systems. And see Comment 2 for more on McCormack.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4380748 Frankly, I'd rather have a bunch of people messing around with punchcards and trying to decipher "hanging chads"--
out where we can see them--that any electronic machine, Diebold or otherwise, run on "trade secret" code, doing
its own, or rather its corporate programmers', interpretation of how 4 million people voted.
Best solution: 100% hand-counted paper ballots, and posting of the results at the precinct. Next best: an open-source code electronic system, with a 55% hand-count audit (like they do in Venezuela). Third best: optiscan (with a ballot) and a 50% or more hand-count (bare minimum needed to detect fraud--10%). (Standard audit in California--1%!) And in all cases: LOCAL posting
before any "central" tabulation. (Even with a substantial audit, "central" tabulation removes the process from local observers, who would be most likely to notice weird totals, and from the people in general--it reduces observation and participation.)