State approves touch-screen voting software for county

By Les Mahler
San Joaquin News Service

STOCKTON The California secretary of state has approved voting software for San Joaquin County, paving the way for the county to use the technology with no worries in the March 2 primary.

The software is needed for the county's touch-screen voting machines, said county Registrar of Voters Deborah Hench. Without the software, she said, the county's 1,625 voting machines would not be able to keep track of voters who cast ballots for candidates in parties other than their own in the March 2 primary.

The software also fixes a problem the voting machines have with mistakenly casting two votes in one race if a voter tarries too long at one screen, Hench said.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley gave his approval Wednesday. Shelley wants counties to track crossover voting patterns, Hench said.

Doug Stone, a spokesman from Shelley's office, said Shelley wants the tally to keep track of those voters to get an accurate delegate count for the primary election.

Hench said that mandate from the state was problematic because state officials dallied in approving the software to fix the problem. That forced the board of supervisors into a closed-door session Tuesday to discuss a possible lawsuit against Shelley's office, Supervisors Victor Mow and Leroy Ornellas said. Three other counties San Diego, Kern and Solano have had similar problems and also considered a lawsuit, Mow said, and supervisors discussed whether to be part of such a move.

Mow said the county needed Shelley's office to approve the software quickly.

"The question was, could the county have an election in March with the certified system?" he said.

Ornellas said the board was concerned that someone could challenge a local election if the county used the older machines without the new software.

"We have some very important elections, and we didn't want to create that kind of situation," he said.

Both supervisors said the new software addressed those concerns and negated any need for a lawsuit, though supervisors had already agreed that there probably wasn't enough time for a lawsuit to be effective anyway.