The latest poll shows Sanders pulling ahead by a huge margin in California. A late January KQED/NPR poll shows Sanders with a 14% lead over Joe Biden, and 22% lead over "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg. But the knives at the Democratic National Committee are out for Sanders.

In an ominous development, an audacious move by election officials in California swings the pendulum back to more hackable, un-transparent, and unverifiable elections than ever before. The state is piloting a system in Los Angeles County which transmits a voter's choices by a barcode, that the voter cannot read, and which could say anything.

The Los Angeles County Registrar's office states:

"A Vote Selections QR Code below the County name and seal, which encodes the vote selection IDs in the same order in which they are printed on the ballot. The QR code is used by the VSAP Tally System to read and process the votes cast on the ballot."

So controversial is this type of system, using barcodes, that it was banned in Colorado last year.

The system is widely criticized by election integrity activists as a giant step backward in honest elections. Los Angeles County has stonewalled election activists' requests for more information on the security of the system, and has not responded to an offer by a computer expert to determine if the system would pass a "hack test."

If there were a battleground on which to stop any momentum accumulated by Sanders on March 3rd, Super Tuesday, California, and Los Angeles in particular, would be the place. L.A. County holds fully one-fourth of the state's voters.

Elections activists have long called for a universal system of voter hand-marked paper ballots, either counted by hand or run through an optical scanner device that takes and stores a digital image of each ballot.

Brad Blog's Brad Friedman, who has followed the story since L.A. County first proposed using the system, reports:

"L.A. County Clerk/Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, who had been very responsive and helpful in previous years, no longer answers simple questions about the new voting system called "Voting Solutions for All People" (VSAP)"

Why Use QR Codes for Voting?

Los Angeles County, the state's most populous county and crucial to the ambitions of any Democratic Party nominee, has adopted the Smartmatic VSAP "Voting Solutions for All People" ballot marking device voting system, which utilizes a touch-screen machine on which a voter taps his or her choices, similar to a bank ATM machine. The ballot marking device then prints out a barcode on a paper ballot which cannot be deciphered by the voter.

Although the voter's choices are printed on the ballot with the familiar "bubbles" filled in next to candidates' names, it is the barcode, in this case a two-dimensional type of barcode called a QR code, that is read by the vote-counting machine that the printed ballot is inserted into. The QR code is undecipherable to humans and could say anything.

For example, the QR code below reads "Elizabeth Warren." But the QR code below that reads "Ha ha I just stole your vote."