Glitches empty polling places

Electronic voting failures cause some

By Melissa Evans, STAFF WRITER

Voters were frustrated Tues-day by technical difficulties with electronic voting machines problems that some say caused them to leave the polls without casting their vote.

Poll workers gave voters pap- er ballots when voting machines failed, but several polling sites ran out of ballots for the partisan races.

"I don't think many people will go back to vote," said Kathy Nikkelson, a Newark Republican turned away at Louis Ruschin School in Newark. "Being denied the right to vote ... that's not good."

The problems blamed on technical and human error were experienced by voters across the state. By early evening, registrar officials in Alameda County estimated at least 200 precincts had been affected.

Roving technicians were busy all day Tuesday fixing glitches with the new computerized sys-tem and drivers were delivering paper ballots to polling places throughout the county.

 Dozens of machines failed to boot up properly, forcing voters to wait until they were fixed or to go to another polling site to cast paper ballots.

Other glitches involved devices called encoders that are ed into touch-screen voting machines to customize them for a particular election and location, said registrar officials.

As of Tuesday evening, it was unclear how the glitches might affect the election outcome.

Advocates of electronic voting say paperless ballots save mon-ey and eliminate problems com- mon to old systems. But the technology brings a new breed of security concerns, including software errors and hackers, which critics say could render the results unreliable.

Registrar officials said they were unsure how many voters had to leave polls before the problems could be fixed.

Newark resident Dave Sevilla said he waited for nearly an hour but had to leave for work about 7:20 a.m. without voting after the computer system at the Sil-liman Center crashed.

"It sucks," he said. "I don't have time to go back and take care of business. Even though I have the legal right to do so, I can't go back to vote.

"What's really sad is they had no one there who knew what they were doing with the machines."

Staff writer Jennifer Kho and wire services contributed to this report.