Senators assail touch-screen voting
Too many problems to correct by November's election, a Democrat and a Republican say.
By Ed Fletcher Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Friday, March 12, 2004
Citing Election Day problems with touch-screen voting machines, a bipartisan duo of state senators Thursday called for the state to abandon use of the high-tech systems for the upcoming presidential election.

"The responsible position is to recall these things until we are sure - damn sure - they work well," said Sen. Don Perata, a Democrat from Oakland, where hundreds of voters were forced to cast provisional paper ballots when the electronic voting machines wouldn't work.

 

 Problems with electronic voting systems also were reported elsewhere. In Orange County, about 7,000 voters were given the wrong ballots. In San Diego, only 64 percent of polling places opened on time due to technical malfunctions.

Fourteen counties used some type of touch-screen voting machine in the March 2 primary election, and more were expected to begin using them by 2006 - whennew federal voting system requirements kick in.

Last week's election was the first in California after the phaseout of the punch-card ballot, which gained infamy in the 2000 recount in Florida.

Counties can now use optical scan voting systems that read paper ballots or touch-screen voting machines that promise to make voting more accurate for all voters and more accessible to people with disabilities.

Perata and Sen. Ross Johnson, R-Irvine, said voters should use optical scan systems until the problems with touch-screen systems are solved.

"So far, electronic voting is a lemon," Johnson said. "Democracy is too important to be left to a machine, much less a machine that is a lemon."

Perata, Johnson and Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, told reporters that touch-screen voting systems should be able to show voters - on paper - how their votes were recorded.

In 2003, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered that all new touch-screen voting machines include by July 2005 "a voter-verified paper trail."

So far, the state has given $50 million to counties to help them upgrade their voting machines - with much of that money going to counties moving to electronic voting.

Johnson said cost should not be an issue.

"Whatever the cost to ensure that every vote counts and is counted, then we should be prepared to do that," Johnson said.

But others were not sure that the state should be moving away from touch-screen voting so swiftly.

Officials at the secretary of state's office said they are still studying the results from last week's election.

"We are in the process of examining this information and are working with the counties to gain a full understanding of what went wrong and what went right on Election Day," said Doug Stone, director of communication for Shelley. "The secretary of state plans to make the November election as secure as possible and (ensure) that every vote will count."

Eve Hill, executive director of the Western Law Center for Disability Rights, said there are a lot of problems with optical scan systems, too, but those problems are underreported.

The senators, she said, "are responding to a bit of uninformed hysteria."

Touch-screen machines are thought to reduce the number of voters who cast too many votes or too few votes on a particular ballot question and often allow disabled voters to cast ballots without assistance.

Moving away from touch-screen systems "would mean that people with visual impairments and manual impairments can't vote on their own," Hill said.

The center this week filed lawsuits against several counties, including Sacramento, for not providing voting equipment that allows disabled voters to cast ballots on their own.

Kimball Brace, president of Washington-based political consulting firm Election Data Services, said counties may have a hard time switching to a new voting system for the November election.

"It's awful tough to do that in an election cycle," Brace said. "I don't think you have enough time to put something else in place."