Voting machine maker criticized for problems

By Guy Ashley

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

OAKLAND - Alameda County officials met Wednesday with representatives of Diebold Elections Systems, indicating they were ready to get tough with the company should problems continue with the county's $12 million Diebold electronic voting system.

"We're quite angry," said County Counsel Richard Winnie. "We have a very important election coming up (in November) and we can't afford any more problems."

Winnie described Wednesday's meeting as productive, and said Diebold offered assurances that it would county officials weekly to show progress in fixing problems that hampered March 2 balloting in Alameda County.

As many as 200 precincts in Alameda County experienced problems with the county's electronic voting equipment during the primary. Though precinct workers were able to correct the problems in many cases, elections officials said, voters were turned away at perhaps 25 polling places.

The problems followed glitches that boggled county elections officials during last October's recall election, when several thousand absentee votes cast in Alameda County for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante were inexplicably assigned to another candidate.

Brad Clark, the county Registrar of Voters, said touch-screen voting machines appeared to work properly on March 2, but were at times hampered by problems with encoders, small machines that take blank voting cards and encode them with information tailored to each voter for use with the touch-screens.

The encoders were being used for the first time in Alameda County. Diebold officials have acknowledged encoder problems also hampered elections in San Diego County, which uses Diebold equipment as well.

A letter Clark sent to Diebold earlier this week invoked the performance clause in the county's 2002 contract with Diebold. The letter demanded a written "plan to correct observed deficiencies" with the county's Diebold system and implied the county could take court action or seek to rescind the contract should elections problems surface again.

"We expect them to stand by the contract," Winnie said. "If they don't, we will take the next step, though at this time I'm not ready to say what that next step might be."

Diebold spokesman David Bear said the company has been working with Alameda County in the weeks after the election to make sure the problems suffered March 2 are a thing of the past.

"We recognize our responsibility, and we are working with the county to address its concerns," Bear said. "It's the right thing to do, for the voters and for the county we do business with."

The public expressions of displeasure by Alameda County officials mark the latest problems for Diebold, an Ohio-based company that also is under investigation by the California Secretary of State's Office for placing uncertified software in machines in the 17 counties that used Diebold equipment in the October recall election.

That probe, and a review of how electronic voting systems performed throughout the state on March 2, will be addressed next month at a meeting of a special panel Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has formed to respond to persistent controversy about the accuracy of electronic voting systems.