California relents on touch-screen balloting use for November election

By Guy Ashley in the Contra Costa Times   20 August 2004

California's top elections official has officially re-certified Alameda County's touch-screen voting system for use in the November election.

Despite problems in the November election, Piedmont City Clerk Ann Swift supports the move.

"The real problem last time was not the voting equipment," Swift said. Rather, it was the encoders that format the electronic ballots for each voter that failed.

The problem with the encoders has since been remedied, Swift said.

"If you balance the benefit to voters, I think you come out way ahead" with touch-screen voting, Swift said. "I think it's a fairer, better system."

The electronic ballot is better for anyone with visual impairment, and allows for correction of mistakes made during the voting process, Swift said. "With the old system if you colored in the wrong box, you were in trouble," she said. "Now you can go back and fix it."

In an order issued Aug. 9, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley said Alameda County could use its Diebold AccuVote TS system in November. The decision in large part overturned an order Shelley issued in April that decertified electronic voting systems in Alameda and nine other California counties because of concerns about accuracy and vulnerability to outside tampering.

But Shelley stuck to demands for yet more e-voting upgrades after November, namely a requirement that all such systems be modified by July 1, 2006 to include accessible, voter-verified paper trails to further address accuracy concerns.

Last week's order was widely expected after a state panel of voting-systems experts cleared the way for Alameda to use its AccuVote system in November.

That decision came in July after tests showed county elections officials had complied with nearly two dozen security upgrades that Shelley demanded as conditions for re-certification.

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.

The system has been the source of headaches over the past two years due to equipment glitches that have complicated Election Day operations and, in at least one occasion, assigned votes for one candidate to an opponent. State elections officials also have rebuked the system's manufacturer for equipping the county's voting system with software that was not certified as required.

A pending lawsuit, meanwhile, contends Diebold Election Systems Inc. misled Alameda County about the security and legality of its equipment when it sold the touchscreen system to the county for more than $11 million.

Critics of 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.

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 during 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.

Lowell Finley, a Berkeley attorney specializing in election law, said the state 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."