County Seeks to Mend Electronic Voting Problems

By MEGAN REITER
Contributing Writer
Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Amid concerns that widespread technical problems tainted voting results in Alameda County’s elections earlier this month, county officials met with representatives from Diebold Election Systems last week, seeking answers for their machines’ malfunctions.

The county is looking into the failure of the machines’ voter encoding cards at 200 polling locations during the elections, forcing poll workers to use backup paper ballots, and to turn away many voters when the paper ballots ran out.

San Diego and Alameda counties had the most problems with the cards.

The new voter card, the PCM 500, a plastic card that calls up the ballot when ed in the machine, had more memory to accommodate the complexity of the multi-party ballot.

But according to Diebold spokesman David Bear, the encoder cards did not cause the malfunctions. Instead, they resulted from a still unexplained power drainage that caused a different screen to come up when the card was ed into the machine.

The problem was easily fixed by navigating to the appropriate screen, but poll workers were not trained to handle the situation, Bear said.

Diebold is reviewing why there was a power drain in the first place, he added.

The company was also supposed to include testing reports for the new cards for state certification, after introducing the cards to California election officials Dec. 22.

However, the new encoder cards were conditionally certified for the March 2 election without test results because several counties lacked a practical alternative to the software.

According to Elaine Ginnold, assistant registrar of voters for Alameda County, part of the problem resulted from the rushed development of the cards.

The technology could only be developed after all the parties had determined their voting rules, meaning that development could not start until late October or early November, she said.

It is unlikely that a different system will be used in November because of the $12.7 million spent to purchase the system, said Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele.

Ginnold said the county would use the same system in November but with encoder cards used in previous elections and more provisional ballots to ensure voters are not turned away.

Other electronic voting mishaps with Diebold equipment have raised questions about its accountability. In the October recall election, the system inexplicably gave votes cast for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Southern California socialist John Burton.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered paper backup records be provided starting in July 2006 to increase the accountability of the electronic system.

The state expects Diebold to submit a report for software certification in April, Ginnold said.

The Board of Supervisors is waiting for the investigation results from Diebold before deciding on further actions.