County prepares for first election with touch-screen voting system

By Les Mahler
San Joaquin News Service

Even a computer science professor like Tom Wrensch isn't sure he'll use new technology to vote in next Tuesday's primary election.

A problem with the software San Joaquin County is using for touch-screen voting makes him wary, he said.
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"I don't know if the software is going to do what it's supposed to do," he said.

Wrensch, who teaches at the University of the Pacific, isn't alone in his concerns. But county elections officials say they're confident in the Diebold Inc. touch-screen voting machines even if their own concerns nearly prompted a county lawsuit earlier this month against the California Secretary of State.

Skeptical questions from county residents and elections officials, such as Registrar of Voters Deborah Hench, started the day Secretary of State Kevin Shelly announced that the state would switch to the ATM-like Diebold devices for future elections.

In conjunction with that announcement, Shelly commissioned a task force to investigate all the security, technical and logistical problems that the new touch-screen machines would encounter.

Machines like Diebold's have gained favor among elections officials since the infamous butterfly ballot plagued the 2000 presidential election in Florida. But as fast as counties and states have switched, officials have heard reports of lost votes, over-votes and questionable election results.

Opponents of the newest technology have said the machines are prone to hacking, undermining the democratic principle of voting and counting votes accurately.

Peter Nuemann, principal scientist with SRI International Computer Science Laboratory in Menlo Park, is one of those critics.

"There are hundreds of cases where voting went wrong," Nuemann said. "The standards are too weak."

Neumann said he's not convinced by machine upgrades and verification studies by the manufacturers of those machines.

"Someone can do something nasty, and you'd never know it," he said.

Kim Alexander, founder of California Voter Foundation, said she's concerned that once a vote is cast, there's no way for a voter to verify that decision.

"Once the vote is cast and deposited, that electronic ballot goes into a cartridge, a central counting office and then into software to be tabulated," she said. The state will require a paper receipt from such machines by June 2005.

Like Wrensch, Alexander said she's also concerned about the software the Diebold machines will use software that had enough problems for Shelley to require a patch fix before the primary. Alexander said the software's glitches could lead to a miscount, and the patch is not certified. Nor is there enough time to check the software, Wrensch said.

But Hench said that even though nothing is perfect, the present system has the best safeguards the county and state can come up with.

She said a hacker can't access the machines, which are not hooked up to the Internet. And county officials perform other tests and studies to ensure the machines will work properly, she said.

"We test to see if the machines are counting accurately," she said. "We do a 'know test,' which is where we know what the count should come out to be, and we check to see if the numbers are correct."

To bolster her case, Hench said that early voting in the county by touch screen has gone on without a problem so far, 243 people have voted.

For more information on the Secretary of State's task force, visit www.ss.ca.gov/elections/taskforce.htm.

For more information on California Voter Foundation, visit www.calvoter.org.
Contact reporter Les Mahler at lmahler@sjnsnews.com.