Electronic-vote complaints reviewed

WEB SITE ALLEGES BALLOT TAMPERING IN RIVERSIDE COUNTY

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News

 

Voting activists alleging irregularities in the primary election have asked California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to impound the electronic voting system used in Riverside County.

A lengthy article published Thursday on Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org), a Web site that has become a clearinghouse for concerns over electronic voting, suggested that employees of Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactures the touch-screen machines and vote-counting software used in Riverside, may have improperly intervened in the election.

``The secretary of state definitely needs to come down here and do an investigation,'' said Brian Floyd, campaign manager for Linda Soubirous, a candidate for the county board of supervisors who lost by 49 votes, or one-tenth of a percent. Soubirous is seeking a recount.

Floyd said he saw two men, who were subsequently identified as employees of Sequoia named Michael Frontera and Ed Campbell, working at computers in the vote-counting room on the eve of the election. Two days later, when provisional ballots were being counted, Floyd said he saw Campbell take a cartridge that appeared to contain ballots out of his pocket and return to the vote-counting room. Another witness claims Campbell loaded information from the cartridge into the vote-counting system and then left the county, taking the cartridge with him.

A press officer for Shelley said the office is reviewing complaints about the Riverside election.

Riverside County Registrar of Voters Mischelle Townsend said the Internet account was inaccurate.

``I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in reading what was posted on that site. It is so replete with misrepresentations, false statements and misleading information that I am going to have to put out a statement,'' Townsend said Thursday evening.

Alfie Charles, a Sequoia representative, said company employees in Riverside provided technical support and helped transfer data to the secretary of state on Election Night. Sequoia employees ``did not conduct any sort of programming of the central tally system,'' Charles said.

Bev Harris, author of the article and publisher of the Web site, said the concerns she documented are the ``kind of thing that is an example of what can happen in November'' in counties that use touch-screen voting machines. Harris and others say the digital ballots produced by the machines are susceptible to fraud. They want election officials to equip the machines with printers so that a voter-verified paper ballot can be used for recounts.

Thursday, state Sens. Don Perata, D-Oakland, and Ross Johnson, R-Irvine, the chair and vice chair of the Senate Committee on Elections and Reapportionment, introduced urgency legislation that would ban the use of all touch-screen voting machines in California until they can produce backup paper ballots.