Kamala!

Kamala Harris was clearly a star when she ran for Attorney General of California. That’s when I first became aware of her. She spoke at that year’s California Democratic Convention. She was buoyant and brilliant, ready to laugh but not afraid to be as dead serious as our politics demanded—and as prosecutors must be.

At the time, too many Democrats were complacent about what I, and a small group of national activists, computer scientists, and lawyers, saw as a huge step in undermining our democracy: paperless, all-electronic voting. The two biggest voting machine companies in the US were run by Republican brothers who benefited greatly from the Bush-Cheney Help America Vote Act, which encouraged buying their machines to comply with new federal standards. Some of these machines had a paper “trail”—a curly, thermal-paper receipt shown to the voter under glass but not made to take away because that could enable vote-selling as proof that you had voted the way someone paid you to. But many had no paper record at all. Whatever the computer said, that was the answer. And the computers, as some had proven, could be easily hacked to change results.

As we tried to wake Democratic officials to the danger, and more and more national elections went “red” by squeaker margins that defied exit polls, we received sarcastic comments: “Don’t you ever sleep?” “You’re a conspiracy theorist!” “You’re the type of person who doesn’t want everyone to vote!”

Kamala made her office accessible. Her AG election had come down to the late-arriving mail ballots and provisional ballots, which in LA, in 2010, had proliferated to the tens of thousands due to an obscure rule that caught voters by surprise (and has since been eradicated with new statewide laws). With Progressive Democrats of America, I helped organize activists to go down and observe the processing and counting of these ballots. Kamala’s race would be decided by that count in LA County, and the Republicans really wanted their guy, Steve Cooley. Kamala squeaked out the victory—provably, on paper.

At a subsequent Democratic State Convention, I waited in line to shake her hand. When she got to me, I introduced myself and said, “I helped organize teams to watch the count of…” She interrupted me and said, “I know who you are—and I know exactly what you did!” She ditched the handshake and gave me a big hug.

This picture was taken later, during her Senate run. I attended an early-morning event mostly filled with local Valley officials. When she saw me sitting there, she came over, gave me a hug, and we took this selfie. That was the last time I saw her in person. But she’ll be the first President of the United States I’ve ever met in person—and I couldn’t imagine a better first.