Registrars Faulted in Election Woes

By Helen Gao
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

March 17, 2004

A top state election official said yesterday that county registrars of voters, including San Diego's, pressured the secretary of state to certify a key component of an electronic voting system that was not fully tested and later malfunctioned on election day.

Marc Carrel, assistant secretary of state for policy and planning, made the remarks during a Board of Supervisors meeting packed by residents, poll workers and representatives of watchdog groups who came to comment on the election.

Locally, 40 percent of the laptop-like devices that encode the voter cards that call up ballots on touch screens did not boot up properly March 2. As a result, 36 percent of the polling places, or 573 of 1,611, opened late. An undetermined number of voters were turned away.

Carrel said San Diego County Registrar Sally McPherson and her counterparts in other counties had insisted that "they absolutely needed" to have the "precinct control modules" certified.

In a Feb. 17 telephone conference call, McPherson told state officials she "had no other choice but to use the PCMs for the March 2 election, with or without state certification," said Carrel, reading from prepared comments by Undersecretary of State Mark Kyle.

Just four days earlier, the state had told Diebold Election Systems Inc., the manufacturer of the machines, that it would not get its encoding devices certified for March 2 because the company submitted them too late for testing.

The state subsequently gave conditional certification to the equipment Feb. 23 after its technical consultant reviewed limited testing by a laboratory and recommended it for one-time use March 2, pending more tests.

"It was foreseeable that this might not have been certified, and a backup system should have been in place," Carrel said.

Speaking publicly for the first time since March 2, a somber McPherson denied that she pressured the state into certifying the encoding devices by threatening to use them regardless of whether they were certified.

"I think the counties encouraged the secretary of state to provide us with the ability to use the PCMs," she said. "We were eager to use the PCMs because they were easier for poll workers to use."

McPherson said the ultimate responsibility for certification lies with the state.

"The secretary of state has full power to certify the system or not approve the system," she said. "That was his choice to certify or not."

As for why paper ballots were not provided as backups as directed by the state, county officials had said there was not enough advance notice to do so.

Diebold's president, Robert Urosevich, defended his company at the meeting. He said Diebold was not told that the encoding devices would have to undergo federal testing until December.

He also faulted the federally designated laboratories charged with testing the equipment for not acting promptly, a sentiment echoed by Carrel.

"The equipment is sound and runs very well. Obviously, there are some startup issues," said Urosevich, who vowed to fix the glitches and get the equipment recertified by July 1.

County supervisors blamed Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, saying he dragged out the certification process and left no options for the county, which was under court mandate to replace its punch-card voting machines.

"I don't think we had a partner in the secretary of state helping us to bring this online in any sensible way," Supervisor Ron Roberts said. "You were not only not helping us to get it done, you were creating confusion."

Pamela Smith, chairwoman for SAVE-Democracy, a local group critical of electronic voting, said the county should share some blame.

"To blame the secretary of state when the county has pressured him into certification is as convoluted an explanation as possible," she said.

Representatives from SAVE-Democracy, San Diego and Imperial counties' chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the San Diego County League of Women Voters called for an independent investigation into the election involving outside computer experts and watchdog groups.

Thus far, the county has had a team of senior managers handling the investigation internally.

"To continue to have people who are responsible for the outcome to look at their own mistakes and problems is never a good idea," ACLU chapter Executive Director Nancy Sasaki said after the meeting.

Sasaki said she was distressed by the tone of the meeting, at which "the Board of Supervisors appeared to be trying to lay the blame for the election-day foul-ups everywhere else except at their own doorsteps."

Supervisors have rejected calls for outside reviews, saying their staff is doing a good job analyzing the problems and finding fixes. They plan to continue using the machines because they believe the public's experience with electronic voting has been overwhelmingly positive.

Advocates for the disabled praised electronic voting for its accessibility. Others liked the fact that the machines provided ballots in multiple languages.

"We had an extraordinary response from the public. They loved it," said Suzanne Hansen of San Diego, who served as a poll worker.