Electronic voting devices lack federal OK and disrupt vote for thousands

By Ian Hoffman - STAFF WRITER

None of the devices used Tuesday to generate digital ballots for millions of California voters have undergone federal testing and certification.

One such device, a precinct control module supplied by Diebold Election Systems, disrupted voting in the primary for thousands of voters, affecting as many as one in five precincts in Alameda County and one in 10 precincts in San Diego County.

A large number of voters were forced to fill out paper, provisional ballots, and some were sent away without casting ballots in two of the state's largest counties.

High volumes of provisional votes and late absentee ballots added uncertainty to Alameda County election results. On Wednesday, county Registrar of Voters Brad Clark reported to state officials an estimate of 30,000 uncounted absentee ballots, 8,000 provisional ballots and perhaps 2,000 ballots damaged in the mail or by voters or election officials.

 Some of the provisional ballots may be ruled invalid as counting proceeds over the next few weeks. But the county's estimate suggests that as much as 13 percent of votes for Tuesday's election remain to be counted.

Clark said he was disturbed at the prospect that voters may have been turned away when poll workers were unable to get the voter-card encoders to work and, in some cases, ran out of provisional ballots.

``If people were turned away, that's awful,'' Clark said, adding that he has no first-hand reports of voters being unable to cast some form of ballot.

County elections officials were swamped Tuesday morning by some 200 calls for help from poll workers in all parts of the county. Diebold representatives said part of the problem seemed to be a low battery charge in the voter-card encoders, causing them to boot up into an unfamiliar Windows screen. Technicians talked poll workers through the four or five steps to get to a recognizable screen.

``To have that many service calls is just not acceptable,'' Clark said Wednesday.

According to correspondence at the secretary of state's office, Diebold submitted its PCM 500 and another model for federal testing labs too late to be tested and certified for the primary election.

A Huntsville, Ala., laboratory performed a limited test of the device's basic function - to generate the proper digital code for a voter's precinct and party affiliation - but never undertook the full array of tests, such as those geared toward reliability.

Computer scientist David Jefferson, a member of the secretary of state's touchscreen task force, said the devices' poor performance indicated design flaws.

``In the best of all possible worlds, it probably should not have been certified,'' Jefferson said. ``I would probably pin fault on the system designers.''

Unlike the touchscreen machines, poll workers only had one or two voter-card encoders. Technically, they could have encoded cards using one of the touchscreens, but state elections officials had advised against it. That left electronic voting for more than 2 million voters largely dependent on the faulty voter-card encoders.

``As far as I'm concerned, this is a serious point of failure,'' Jefferson said.

``It's not acceptable for the system to behave differently when the batteries are run down than when it's plugged in,'' he said.

In a Feb. 23 letter to California elections officials, the state's voting-systems consultant said none of the voter-card encoders used in California have been through full federal testing and certification.

``Although this system may be used with some confidence for the upcoming election,'' wrote Steven V. Freeman, ``the nature and limitation of the testing to meet the urgent March deadline preclude the results being applied for later elections.''

Critics of electronic voting say it's the latest example of Diebold Election Systems and elections officials using voting equipment and software not certified as meeting federal standards for reliability, accuracy and security.

``The use of equipment that is not fully tested and certified puts the vote count at risk and undermines people's confidence in election results,'' said Kim Alexander, president of the Davis-based California Voter Foundation.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com .