Report says poll workers needed more training

By: GIG CONAUGHTON - Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO Poll workers didn't have enough training and county officials lacked adequate backup plans to deal with the widespread electronic voting system problems that forced some precincts to turn voters away in last week's presidential primary, according to a preliminary report released by county managers Wednesday.

However, the report also said San Diego County's first experience with electronic voting generally "went well" because voters said they liked using the new machines and that no security breaches or vote-count irregularities had been reported.

A still-mysterious power drain is believed to have caused poll workers to be presented with an unfamiliar computer screen that barred them from programming the ATM-like "smart cards" voters needed to use new touch-screen voting machines in the election's early hours.

The report said 40 percent of the programming machines failed to boot up properly, which in turn resulted in 36 percent of the county's 1,611 precincts being unable to open on time at 7 a.m. County officials said that poll workers were able to fix the problem in 4 percent of the machines quickly enough to open on time.

The report said the initial computer glitch resulted in the high number of late poll-openings when combined with three other problems:

Insufficient training: Poll workers did not have enough training to fix the computer problems themselves.

Lack of testing: In previous years, poll workers were told to test equipment before election day to identify potential problems. Because the new electronic machines were sealed for security precautions, poll workers didn't do any early testing.

Insufficient backup plans and communications: Elections officers never anticipated such widespread problems. Because of that, the county's 11 help hotlines for precinct workers were overwhelmed by the volume of calls. In addition, the 226 technical support troubleshooters were too few to get to all of the affected precincts.

Alex Martinez, the deputy chief administrative officer who wrote the report, said 88 percent of the polls were open by 8 a.m. and 98 percent were open by 9 a.m. He said the latest recorded opening of any poll was 11:05 a.m.

Martinez said county officials investigated and discredited individual complaints that the new electronic machines allowed people to vote twice, "lost" votes and gave voters the wrong ballots.

He said that officials with Diebold Systems Inc., the company that made the machines, were still trying to figure out why batteries lost power in the devices that program the white "smart cards" used in the voting machines.

Once the initial problems were solved, "The remainder of the day most of the election processes ran smoothly," he said.

State and federal officials had ordered counties to replace punch-card systems by this year's elections after the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida. San Diego County supervisors voted unanimously in December to buy 10,200 Diebold machines for $31 million. The county is the government charged with running all local elections and decides which system local voters will use.

Martinez said county officials immediately began investigating the election problems Tuesday morning. He said they plan to continue to investigate and will issue a follow-up report in 30 days.

"The Chief Administrative Officer (Walt Ekard), is being very aggressive and thorough in determining what caused the problems and we will be considering taking actions prior to the November elections to ensure this doesn't happen again."

County Supervisor Bill Horn, who called for an investigation on election day, said he still had questions after seeing the report. Horn also said he remained worried that people had been deprived of their right to vote by the late poll openings.

"I think more needs to come forward," Horn said. "My concern that is not in the report is in areas where the polls didn't open on time, and people work in Orange County or Los Angeles and were turned away you didn't get to vote."