Voting machine manufacturers answer to activists, politicians

By Dan Laidman

CONTRA COSTA TIMES  20 September 2004

If you've never heard of Jack Gerbel's company, that's fine by him.

Once-frustrating anonymity is suddenly quite nice for the president of UniLect Corp., the Dublin-based maker of the Patriot touch-screen voting system.

"I have had people say to me, 'UniLect? Patriot? I've never heard of that,'" he said. "And I've said thank you very much, that's one of the nicest things I've heard all day."

A veteran of four decades in the election-equipment industry, Gerbel explained that, these days, when people have heard of a voting machine maker it's probably "because they've screwed up someplace."

American voters have historically cast ballots without paying much attention to who created the contraptions that count them. As levers gave way to punch cards and optical scanners, there were intermittent outcries, but the 2000 election debacle and today's sharply polarized political climate have put voting machines under intense scrutiny.

Critics, including prominent computer scientists, have raised concerns about the vulnerability of touch-screen ballots to malfunctions and hacking. Voting-machine makers have largely been in the middle as activists and election officials wrangle over reforms, although in at least one case, that of Diebold Election Systems, a company has become a political lightning rod.

The East Bay's election-equipment companies present a microcosm of the industry. Gerbel's UniLect Corp., a small company with machines in Michigan, Pennsylvania and several southeastern states, has ridden out tough economic times by trimming operations while focusing on a relatively simple product design it insists is safe.

Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the industry's top companies, with a major presence in California and Florida, has become a leader in responding to activists and politicians' calls to add paper verification, while employing a sophisticated public relations and lobbying campaign.

A third company, a tiny Oakland-based data-management company called OSSI, has just recently jumped into the electronic voting arena, joining a growing crop of entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on the national election-reform tidal wave.

"I think there are opportunities here because this is a time of such change and turnover," said David Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley who has done work on electronic voting security. "There's room for new innovation."

But there are perils as well.

When Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, it authorized almost $4 billion in funds for counties to their election equipment, but political and bureaucratic tangles held up the money.

"During the last three years, it was really difficult to sell anything," Gerbel said. "Just about every company lost money."

In 2002, the British company De La Rue spent $23 million to acquire 85 percent of Sequoia. The company has about 150 employees, including some prominent figures formerly in the political world.

Alfie Charles, the company's public affairs director, served as press secretary for Bill Jones, California's previous secretary of state and now the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. After serving as the state's top elections officer, Jones worked as a consultant for Sequoia, which also employs as a vice president the former election chief of Nevada's largest county.

Along with its potent personnel, the company has deployed its checkbook to lobby politicians and give to their campaigns. Sequoia poured $100,000 into the successful California proposition in 2002 that secured a $200 million bond to pay for new voting technology. Other large election-equipment firms have made similar contributions.

Charles, the Sequoia spokesman, downplayed the lobbying and contributions, saying that the company's main political strategy is to be responsive to the public and innovative with its product.

Earlier this month, Nevada held the nation's first statewide vote using touch-screen machines that print a paper record of each vote as a backup.

The closely watched election, widely seen as a success, was held on Sequoia machines.

"They were the first to get to market with a viable printer for a voter-verifiable ballot and actually get that successfully implemented in Nevada, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for that," said Lowell Finley, a Berkeley elections lawyer. "On the other hand, there are some very serious questions about the programming methods and architecture that the company uses for its vote-tabulating software."

Charles, the Sequoia spokesman, countered that the company's equipment has "always been up to the test, but it doesn't stop people from throwing stones."

Critics who have raised such concerns got a boost when Kevin Shelley, California's secretary of state, spanked Diebold for problems with its Accu-vote Tsx system during the March primaries. The state has pursued legal action against Diebold, and Shelley has encouraged the adoption of paper-verification systems.

Kim Alexander, head of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation and a member of the state's touch-screen task force, is pleased by the move toward paper verification but worried by the power that machine makers wield.

"In my view, we have outsourced elections," she said. "We've placed much more responsibility onto the vendors, not only in terms of turning over our elections to 100 percent proprietary source code, but also to (handling) problems that come up" on election night.

Charles said similar criticisms have been raised each time a new voting method was introduced.

"The difference is there's a greater ability for detractors of the technology to communicate with each other and utilize the Internet to publicize their concerns," he said. "And that, I think, has added an additional political dimension that didn't exist with prior technologies."

Cyrus Baseghi thinks that upstart voting machine makers can carve out a niche by using the political controversy to their advantage. He is president of OSSI, a 15-person company specializing in point-of-sale software that first dipped into voting to do a ballot system for a Lake Tahoe homeowners association.

OSSI has diverted about 25 percent of its resources to developing a touch-screen system and an ATM-like voting machine, Baseghi said. The company hopes to be ready in 2006 to market them primarily to small, cash-strapped counties.

"We've kind of laid low," he said. "We haven't been targeted such as Diebold has been, so some counties might go with us just because we don't have the bad rap."