E-voting critics converge in Sacramento for hearing

Electronic voting activism soared after Florida's chad-strewn debacle of 2000

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

Sharon Arata's elections odyssey began 15 years ago on her old-fashioned suspicion that non-U.S. citizens and dead people were voting in California.

To her consternation, Arata found that new voters rarely had to prove they had U.S. citizenship, a valid address and a pulse.

"We found that Santa Claus and Grey Wolf were registered to a vacant lot in Concord. And James Bond was, too," she said.

Republicans and Libertarians thronged to Arata's Voter Integrity Project of Contra Costa County. But the state's dominant political party was leery of demanding ID and nationality proof from new voters.

"I couldn't get Democrats to give me the time of day," Arata said.

No more. On Tuesday, traditional liberal activists for labor and the poor demanded Solano County officials return 1,100 Diebold Election Systems touch screen voting machines, unused. Last week, they marched the streets of suburban Vallejo, shouldering cardboard boxes marked "Democracy R.I.P." Inside the ersatz coffins were bogus ballots containing three names, all George W. Bush's.

"If a touch screen system comes in here, our democracy will become a contrivance no better than the democracy they supposedly had under Saddam Hussein," said organizer Doug McDonald, leader of the Community Labor Alliance.

Today, electronic-voting critics are expected to converge on Sacramento in record numbers for a hearing on state approval of a new computerized voting system from Diebold.

The venue is California's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel, a body that until 2003 labored in obscurity inside the Secretary of State's Office.

Now it's a monthly window on the faultlines of digital democracy, attendance required for voting-system vendors, local election officials weighing multimillion dollar contracts, reporters and the swelling ranks of voting-system activists.

Once the province of a few computer scientists and Web-savvy voting advocates, e-voting activism soared after Florida's chad-strewn debacle of 2000.

Just since this summer, it shifted beyond what one elections official calls the "black helicopter fringe" to grab the attention of mainstream politicos. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley broke with rank-and-file local elections officials in November and ordered all counties to provide voters with a viewable paper backup of their electronic ballot, so they could verify their vote was recorded properly.

In the weeks since, Sen. Barbara Boxer and a third of California's U.S. House delegation have signed on to bills mandating such a voter-verified paper trail nationwide.

"There's a sea change in elections. Gone are the days when you recruited the grandfolks to come down to the fire department and you punched out your votes," said Mark Kyle, California's undersecretary of state and chairman of the voting systems panel. "We're moving to a whole new arena that's very complex technically and people are very suspicious. Standards are changing yearly, and everyone's running to catch up."

Before the 2000 presidential race, said Loyola Law School professor Rick Hasen, most Americans paid little attention to the tools of voting.

"Now it's taking on a life of its own," said Hasen, an election-law expert."It tends to be people who for one reason or another tend to distrust the government."

Palm Desert accountant Susan Marie Weber said she and her friends laughed when Riverside County's elections supervisor suggested in 2000 that they had to trust her and the new touch screen machines, then the first in California.

"That's the whole point of the Constitution, that you should not have to trust the government," said Weber, head of the Desert Area Libertarians.

Weber sued and says she discovered e-voting vendors and elections officials had redefined the standard terms of elections: "Ballots" became digital screen images and an "independent audit" became a second or third record of the same image.

"It just gives you what was in it, over and over," she said. "I felt like I'm in Alice in Wonderland."

After the 2000 presidential elections and the tireless campaigning of several computer experts notably Stanford's David L. Dill, SRI International scientist Peter Neumann, Johns Hopkins' Avi Rubin and Harvard researcher Rebecca Mercuri perhaps the greatest driver for surging e-voting activism has been Diebold Election Systems itself.

Diebold CEO Walter O'Dell's promise at a GOP fundraiser to deliver Ohio votes for the Bush campaign in 2004 is a hoary staple of voting activism Web postings.

The McKinney, Texas-based firm also was forced to retreat from threats of legal action against college students who posted copies of its internal corporate e-mails on the Internet. Those e-mails deepened concerns that voting records in Diebold's popular touch screen machines could be manipulated with widely available software and passwords.

In December, California officials revealed that Diebold had supplied uncertified software to all 17 counties where it has voting machines.

At the same time, wariness over electronic voting has slowed the nation's rush to new systems. Voting systems consultant Kimball Brace said Congress failed to deliver for two years on its post-2000 promise of $6.5 billion for new machines. But voters also are insisting on having a paper ballot to double-check, something most electronic-voting machines don't yet offer.

"What it's caused is a lot of elections officials to suddenly put the brakes on things," said Brace, president of Election Data Services.

The pushback from e-voting activists and the lack of federal money has kept more than 3,000 U.S. counties, or more than 90 percent, using the same voting technologies in 2004 as they did in 2000.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com