Push for safer electronic voting bolstered by court decision

JIM WASSERMAN

Associated Press

SACRAMENTO - Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's push for safer electronic voting appears to be gaining momentum with a fresh victory in federal court and new agreements from counties with touch-screen machines to make extra security arrangements.

Shelley, who banned electronic voting in the state's Nov. 2 presidential election unless it met strict new security tests, called anew Wednesday for stronger measures after a federal judge in Los Angeles upheld his actions. His office also announced that more than half the counties affected by the conditional ban have agreed to new rules allowing them to use their machines. Napa County became the newest this week.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper denied requests by disability rights activists and four California counties - Riverside, San Bernardino, Plumas and Kern - to overturn Shelley's conditional April 30 ban on touch screens for the November election.

Cooper's ruling, from a state where 43 percent of voters used touch-screen machines in March and thousands experienced problems, provides new ammunition to critics nationally who call electronic voting untrustworthy without a paper backup. Activists in several states, including Maryland, Ohio, Florida and Texas, are challenging the use of paperless voting in a November presidential election expected to be tight.

"The court has found that the actions we have taken to ensure the security and integrity of the November election are appropriate __ that they are, in fact, necessary," Shelley said in a statement.

In the suit rejected by Cooper, disability groups argued that banning electronic voting will deny hundreds of thousands of people the right to vote in private, while the counties claimed they have already run several safe elections with the new technology.

Cooper, however, ruled the Americans With Disabilities Act requires only that disabled voters be given the opportunity to vote and doesn't require independent, secret voting. She also wrote that the public interest for secure voting outweighed their arguments.

"The secretary of state reasonably exercised his discretion," Cooper ruled, saying the law makes him "not only authorized, but expressly directed to withdraw his approval of any voting system found to be defective or unacceptable."

Disability advocates disagreed.

"We think the judge is wrong, We're going to appeal," said Jim Dickson, vice president for governmental affairs for the American Association of People with Disabilities.

Shelley and others, mindful of Florida's disputed 2000 presidential election vote and potential for hackers to disrupt the 2004 presidential contest, have demanded long lists of conditions for electronic voting. Those include paper ballots for those who want them and making counties give their machines' computer source code to independent analysts for security checks.