Alameda County can vote touch-screen

By Guy Ashley

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

A special panel of state elections experts has approved Alameda County's touch-screen voting system for use in the November election, a move that probably will ward off the need for a last-minute replacement to the county's controversial voting equipment.

But critics of this week's recommendation by California's Voting Systems Panel say it overlooks security shortcomings in the Diebold Accuvote System used by Alameda and other counties that leave the systems vulnerable to outside tampering.

The panel's recommendation to allow Alameda County to use its Diebold system in November puts the matter in the hands of Secretary of State Kevin Shelley for a final decision. In April, Shelley decertified electronic voting equipment in several California counties, including Alameda, due to concerns about their security.

Shelley also ordered that all "e-voting" equipment provide paper records to voters by 2006.

But in the meantime, he says he will allow counties to use the electronic systems over the next two years if the vendors can demonstrate compliance with 23 security requirements.

Alameda County opted to upgrade its Accuvote system to meet those requirements, while other counties took the state to court in a thus-far unsuccessful challenge to Shelley's ruling.

The county's registrar of voters, Bradley Clark, said he is working on a written statement that the county will submit to Shelley's office that vows to meet the 23 security requirements.

"Now that the technical upgrades have been approved, the other things we have to do are no big deal," Clark said.

The Accuvote allows citizens to vote with a touch of the finger on a computer screen instead of pen on paper. It stores the votes on data cards similar to those used in digital cameras, and workers upload the results onto the election division's main computer.

But Lowell Finley, a Berkeley attorney specializing in election law, said the panel's recommendation was made despite test results showing the Diebold system is vulnerable to vote tampering, either by officials on the inside or by outside hackers.

Finley has filed a lawsuit asserting that Diebold Election Systems Inc. misled Alameda County about the security and legality of its equipment when it sold the touch-screen system to the county for more than $11 million.

"I still think there's a very real risk of the results of the presidential election being tampered with," Finley said. "Nothing that we have seen satisfies us that that risk has been reduced to an acceptable level."

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