Senators ask to suspend e-voting

Equipment malfunctions are behind move to temporarily halt use of touchscreen machines

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

The state Senate's elections leaders are expected to call today on Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to suspend use of touchscreen voting machines for November.

Fourteen counties use touchscreen machines, serving 43 percent of California voters.

Despite widespread acceptance of touchscreen voting in the March 2 primary, thousands of voters in three of the state's largest counties received the wrong ballot or were turned away from the polls by voting-system failures.

Senate Majority Leader Don Perata, D-Oakland, and Sen. Ross Johnson, R-Irvine, the chairman and vice chairman of the Elections and Reapportionment Committee, say the 2004 election is too important to rely on faulty e-voting machines in November.

If Shelley declines their request to decertify touchscreen machines statewide, the senators say they will sponsor legislation denying use of the machines in California.

 

State elections officials are studying last week's primary and had no immediate response to the letter, to be released this morning in Sacramento.

"We haven't seen it," said Shelley spokesman Doug Stone. "We'll have to see the contents in order to respond."

California was one of the first states to embrace touchscreen voting, and 14 counties used the machines in the March 2 primary, including most of the state's largest counties, driven by decertification of punchcard voting systems and court orders in civil rights cases.

Voter registrars are certain to resist decertification of the machines, and lawmakers are likely to be wary of ordering a return to paper-based balloting for a presidential election after state and federal grants of more than $50 million to counties for the new touchscreens.

"I think everyone's aware of the magnitude of the issue," said Perata spokesman Tom Martinez. "They're even more aware of the magnitutde of the problems in last week's election. And they don't want California to be the Florida of 2004."

Hundreds of precincts in Alameda and San Diego counties opened late on the morning of the March 2 primary as poll workers struggled to boot up devicescalled voter-card encoders that were essential for calling up electronic ballots on the touchscreens.

Diebold Election Systems failed to submit its encoders for testing until too late for the primary. Ciber Inc., a Huntsville, Ala. based lab, performed a single, limited test of the encoder's most basic function producing the correct ballot code for a voter's party and precinct but the devices never underwent broader testing for durability and reliability.

Without the encoders, no electronic ballots could be summoned from the touchscreens and no electronic votes could be cast. That was the case at 20 percent of Alameda County precincts and, according to a new report revealing larger problems in San Diego County, 40 percent of precincts there.

Poll workers booted up the encoders on election day and were confronted by a Windows screen, not the login screen that they were trained to expect. Checklists supplied by the counties and Diebold mentioned nothing about it.

Diebold "has made a preliminary determination that the problem experienced with the (encoder) devices was caused by an unexpected discharge of the internal battery," according to Wednesday's report by San Diego County.

"The possibility of this large-scale hardware problem was not anticipated by the manufacturer," the report said. "However, it was determined to be a possibility on a smaller scale" and two dozen county troubleshooters were trained to deal with it.

Alameda County Registrar of Voters' Brad Clark has said that his office charged the encoders and urged lead poll workers to recharge them over the weekend before the election. But, he said, Diebold never suggested the devices would lose charge so quickly.

Clark was unavailable to comment on San Diego County's findings or on the prospect of decertification for touchscreen machines, which Alameda County bought for $12.7 million in 2002.