County aims for smoother election

Changes made to avoid March repeat
By Daniel J. Chacón
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 13, 2004

Important election dates

 Sept. 23: Sample ballots are mailed to every registered voter.

 Oct. 4: Absentee ballots are mailed. Early voting begins at the Registrar of Voters Office, 5201 Ruffin Road, Suite I, in Kearny Mesa.

 Oct. 18: Last day to register to vote for Nov. 2 election.

 Oct. 26: Last day to request an absentee ballot by mail.

 Oct. 30 and 31: Weekend voting at registrar's office, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

 Nov. 2: Election Day. Registrar's office and polls are open for voting, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Source: San Diego County Registrar of Voters Office

In March, San Diego County election officials trusted a new $31 million electronic voting system and suffered the consequences when it malfunctioned.

Paralyzed by an easy-to-fix computer glitch, more than one-third of polling places opened late and an unknown number of voters were turned away.

Critics had warned that the electronic voting system that relied on touch-screen machines was vulnerable to hacking and software bugs. What failed was a device used to activate voter cards to call up ballots on the touch screens because the batteries had drained.

The muddled primary election thrust San Diego into the national spotlight as a poster child for opponents of electronic voting.

For the Nov. 2 general election – when voters will pick a president, a U.S. senator for California and a mayor in San Diego – the county is using a different voting system and trying to institute a plan to prevent a repeat of March.

"Certainly I was disappointed (with the primary), but it was lessons learned," Registrar of Voters Sally McPherson said while recently touring a warehouse storing the 10,200 touch-screen voting machines. "We're definitely making changes."

The county had no other choice.

A month after the primary, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned San Diego and three other California counties from using the AccuVote-TSX machines made by Diebold Election Systems Inc.

The touch screens worked fine during the primary, but computerized card encoders in a separate, laptop-like device malfunctioned because of a battery problem. The encoders brought up the wrong touch screen – a problem poll workers weren't trained to fix.

Now San Diego County is preparing to roll out a different voting system that watchdog groups say is more accurate but still susceptible to errors.

The optical-scan system allows voters to vote on paper and then scan their ballots electronically. The system is a temporary fix until the state agrees to certify the touch screens, which the county expects to happen next year.

"It's more reliable than what we had by a long shot," said Pamela Smith, a nationwide coordinator for Verified Voting and former chairwoman of the San Diego County group SAVE-Democracy, which opposes electronic machines.

"The only thing more reliable than precinct-based optical scanners . . . is actually paper ballots that are hand-counted," she said. "(Scanners) have something that gives them a meaningful manual audit."

The county used the optical-scan system in March to count absentee ballots, but Nov. 2 marks the first time it will be introduced countywide.

"This is the second time we've had to install a brand-new system in the fourth-largest jurisdiction in the United States. It's quite a job," said Mikel Haas, policy adviser to the county's chief administrative officer and the county's former registrar.

"It's not easy, and it's not easy under the crucible we've been working," he said. "But I'm very confident we're going to have a good election."

Optical-scan problems
About 1.3 million people are registered to vote in the county. Of those, about 1 million are expected to vote in November, with 30 percent casting absentee ballots.

In March, the optical-scan system miscounted more than 2,800 absentee ballots in the Democratic presidential and Senate Republican primaries. It was unable to handle multiple scanners feeding a large number of ballots into the computer tabulation system at the same time. Election officials said the outcomes of the two races were not affected.

Diebold, which made the problematic touch-screen machines and is providing the county the optical scanners for free, fixed the glitch on the scanners by removing a line of computer code, Haas said.

"Everybody is confident that particular issue is not going to happen again," he said.

Counties nationwide have stumbled into other problems with optical scanners.

In Napa County, the scanners couldn't detect certain inks, and in Alameda County, during last year's recall, a Socialist candidate received thousands of votes meant for Democrat Cruz Bustamante, according to the California Voter Foundation. In Florida, a county suspended voting after a candidate took a large lead over another – a problem traced to a software glitch.

San Diego County expects a smoother election in November but is making arrangements for the unexpected.

"Some of these scanners will fail – you might as well know now," McPherson said.

The county will launch an education campaign at the end of September using mailers to tell voters about the system and how to use it.

There will be more and better-trained poll workers, McPherson said. She hopes to have 7,500 poll workers – 700 more than in March and the most in the county's history.

Besides a new voting system, the county is dealing with a federal agreement that seeks to ensure that people who speak Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese get to vote. The county formed advisory groups and will hire outreach coordinators for each of the three languages to recruit poll workers. Government employees and high school students have been encouraged to become poll workers, too.

Ten phone lines are being added at the registrar's office, and cell phones with text messaging will be at each polling place. In March, the phone lines in the office jammed under an avalanche of calls from frenzied poll workers.

The November election will cost the county about $5 million, about the same as March, McPherson said.

Under its original contract, Diebold agreed to provide the county the optical scanners for one election if the touch screens failed but amended the contract in June to provide the scanners free until November 2006.

That's the deadline Shelley gave California counties using electronic voting machines to have a system that allows voters to check their votes on paper or on a listening device after casting their ballots.

Until such a system is in place, San Diego County will use the less-technical optical scanners, which the secretary of state certified last month.

Paper trail
McPherson said the optical-scan system provides safeguards to ensure election integrity because there is a paper trail and voters can continue filling out ballots if a scanner breaks.

"Voting never stops. That's the message," she said.

With the system, voters use a pen with blue or black ink to mark their choices on a paper ballot, which they feed into a scanner that looks like a fax machine. The scanner tabulates the votes electronically and rejects ballots with mistakes, such as voting twice in the same race, giving voters a chance to correct errors.

"Fill in the bubble, ain't no trouble," Haas said.

Each of the county's polling places will have one scanner, and troubleshooters in the field will carry extras and be trained to fix ones that break.

Haas said voters may have to wait in line to use a scanner, especially during peak hours when polls open at 7 a.m. and before they close at 8 p.m.

If a scanner breaks, voters can fill out paper ballots that will be sealed in a box and scanned later, McPherson said. Any of those ballots with mistakes will be disqualified and not counted, because the voter won't be there to recast the ballot.

"That is a place where you could have some concerns about error," said Nancy Sasaki, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego & Imperial Counties.

Nevertheless, Sasaki praised the county's efforts, saying officials have "done a very good job in preparing for the November election."

But Andy Stephenson, associate director of Black Box Voting, a consumer protection organization for election-related issues, predicts Diebold won't be able to print San Diego County's 2 million paper ballots on time. The county expects printing to begin Sept. 18 and to be finished by mid-October.

"I just absolutely see a train wreck coming, and I wish I could do something about it," Stephenson said.

Haas said the county provides 800 versions of paper ballots and will have workers at a Fresno printing plant to ensure the job is being done.

"Speculation ahead of time is just that," he said, adding that Diebold has assured the county that printing isn't a problem. "We feel pretty comfortable."

David Bear, a Diebold spokesman, said, "We're working hand in hand with the local election officials to prepare for the upcoming election . . . in order to provide a safe, secure election for the voters in San Diego."

Smith of Verified Voting hopes San Diego County runs a smooth election.

"The main thing at this point is that people definitely need to come out and vote, and that San Diegans need to know that they have the precinct-based optical-scan system, which is generically known to be a better system," she said. "It's still Diebold, which gives us some concern."