Berkeley mayor upset about e-voting

Bates says 'costly' move may be necessary

By Kristin Bender, STAFF WRITER

BERKELEY Mayor Tom Bates is asking Berkeley officials to consider breaking away from the county election system if problems with electronic voting machines can't be fixed.

Bates' move comes just days after state Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, introduced legislation to ban computerized voting machines in Alameda County and across the state in the Nov. 2 elections.

Failure of voter-card encoders, miscounts and programming problems on March 2 reportedly kept an unknown number of people in about 200 Alameda County precincts from voting.

Bates said he wrote to Alameda County Registrar of Voters Brad Clark asking for an investigation into problems with the Diebold system.

"We really want to light a fire under Alameda County," Bates said in a telephone interview from North Carolina, where he is vacationing this week. "We want them to get on the ball and stop (future problems) from happening. If not, we'd like them to get off this system."

Clark said an investigation is already under way.

"We've done quite a bit of fact-finding," he said.

Clark said a report from Diebold is expected this week. The findings will help county officials determine if voter-card encoders will be sufficiently improved or if they will need to be replaced.

Admitting it would be "costly and complicated" for Berkeley to leave the county's voting system, Bates has placed an item on the April 20 Berkeley City Council agenda, directing city staff to begin looking at options if the problems are not resolved.

A vote of the council is required for staff to begin investigating the issue.

Splitting off from county elections, Bates said, "would be a dire step and not something I'd want to enter into lightly."

But it could be done, Clark said.

Diebold officials have pledged to fix the problems plaguing their machines.

Clark said reverting to older, less high-tech systems would be costly and could prove impossible in a short time period.

"We cannot use the (former) system because it's been decertified," Clark said. "Our only option would be to go to (a system) like we use for the absentee ballots."

on Thursday, Perata, head of the state Senate elections committee, and state Sen. Ross Johnson, an Irvine Republican who is co-chairman of the panel, introduced a bill to ban the use of computerized voting machines across the state in the November election.

The bill would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to go into effect immediately, but already Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, the state's top election official, is seriously considering decertification of computerized voting machines, a Shelley spokeswoman said.