Glitches in voting machines examined

County report is expected soon

By Luis Monteagudo Jr. and Helen Gao
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

March 4, 2004

State and federal officials said yesterday they will examine the problems with the county's new electronic voting system, while a county supervisor and the ACLU called for investigations into the matter.

Officials with the county Registrar of Voters Office and the manufacturer of the system are trying to figure out what went wrong and determine how many polling places were affected.

According to a preliminary check, one-quarter of the 1,611 polling places opened at least a half-hour late as poll workers struggled to get the system running. Some voters said they had to leave before getting a chance to cast a ballot.

A county report on the malfunctions is expected to be released tomorrow or early next week, said county Chief Administrative Officer Walt Ekard.

"The problems will be identified and they will be fixed," said Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Dianne Jacob.

The problems with the county's new $31 million touch-screen voting system sparked complaints to the U.S. Justice Department, which had election monitors in San Diego overseeing the vote. Department spokeswoman Casey Stavropoulus said election monitors will report on the problems to the civil rights division of the department.

The Secretary of State's Office is also reviewing the problems to determine how they can be avoided in the November election, said spokesman Doug Stone.

County Supervisor Bill Horn wants an investigation into the voting glitches and he has asked his board colleagues to consider his request at their March 16 meeting.

Horn wants Ekard to "evaluate management practices within the Registrar's Office and make necessary changes."

Said Horn: "I don't want it to happen again. Not after we spent all that money."

Ekard said he had "complete confidence" in Registrar Sally McPherson. "Nothing I have seen shakes that confidence," he said.

Ekard added Horn's call for an investigation was unnecessary because the county began looking into the problem as soon as officials learned about it.

McPherson went home ill yesterday and could not be reached for comment.

In addition, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties called on the county Board of Supervisors to convene a panel of experts, community leaders and county staff to investigate the problems. It asked that the panel report its finding to supervisors by July 1.

The ACLU chapters in California were part of a coalition that sued the state in 2001 to end the use of the county's punch-card ballots. It was that lawsuit, plus the controversy over ballot problems in the 2000 Florida presidential election, that led the county to switch to its new system.

Yesterday, county elections officials only had a partial analysis of the severity of the problems.

Officials had contacted supervisors at nearly 1,000 of the 1,611 polling places. They determined that 75 percent of the polls were open by 7:30 a.m., 15 percent were open by 8 a.m. and the remainder opened after that. A few polling places didn't open until 10 a.m. or 11 a.m.

Computer programmers with Diebold, the manufacturer, are working with county officials to examine the faulty equipment. Diebold officials couldn't be reached for comment yesterday, but company spokesman Frank Kaplan said late Tuesday their review may take a couple of weeks.

Diebold and election officials have said the main problem was not the voting machines themselves but with the "precinct control module," which activates the plastic cards that voters used to call up their ballots.

The start-up screen on the modules did not activate. Diebold and county officials knew the start-up screen could fail to open if there were a problem with the module's power supply. But poll workers were not trained to deal with that situation.

"It was a possibility it could happen, but it was an improbability," Kaplan said.

McPherson said Tuesday it would have been complicated to give additional instructions to poll workers on resolving that problem. The county had roving trouble-shooters assigned to take care of technical problems. But, she said, training procedures will be reviewed.

The problems came after county officials had spent months touting their new system and defending it from critics who charged that the technology was flawed and vulnerable to hackers.

San Diego was not the only California county that encountered problems with its electronic voting system yesterday. Alameda and Santa Clara counties also reported glitches with their systems.

Luis Monteagudo: (619) 542-4589; luis.monteagudo@uniontrib.com

Gao: (619) 718-5181; helen.gao@uniontrib.com