Unplugged: County voters will return to paper and pen
By Ben van der Meer
San Joaquin News Service
Last d: Wednesday, Aug 03, 2005 - 11:35:19 pm PDT

You'll find conventional ink pens and paper sheets with bubbles to fill in for the November special election, says San Joaquin County's registrar of voters.

Top elections official Deborah Hench said that while the state's certification of Diebold Inc.'s voting machines is on hold, voters will make their preferences known the relatively low-tech way, at least this year.

"We'd love to have certification before the end of the year," Hench said, "and I know Diebold would love to have certification sooner rather than later."

But state officials held up that process last month after tests showed that Diebold's touch-screen voting machines had paper jams nearly 10 percent of the time, and were also prone to screen freezes.

While Ohio-based Diebold works on the problem, Hench said, she doesn't expect to use touch-screen machines though they performed flawlessly San Joaquin County in the 2003 gubernatorial recall until June 2006 at the soonest.

Though that means the November election will cost the county more Hench said the price tag is about $1.2 million Diebold officials have agreed to pay for printing costs for election ballots, which will save about $300,000.

Hench said the rise in printing costs, from $350,000 to $750,000 per election in just a few years, prompted the county to investigate touch-screen machines, which cost $3,200 apiece.

"When you're talking about printing, it's not just duplicating paper, it's using state-certified paper that has to be checked," she said. "We figured the machines would pay for themselves in 10 years or less."
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San Joaquin County has paid $858,000 so far for its share of 1,625 machines, but until they're certified, Hench said, they can't be used.

In a statement Wednesday, Diebold Election Systems Vice President Dave Byrd said the paper jams were relatively rare and that the company will still make fixes.

"While the aforementioned issues were inconvenient, they did not have any impact on the actual outcome of the test elections," Byrd said in the statement.

Concerns have also popped up about the Diebold optical-scan machines the county will use in November to check paper ballots. Cheryl Lillenstein, a Palo Alto resident who saw a report about the machines' problems, pointed out that professional hackers in Florida demonstrated in June that the optical-scan machines can also be hacked.

"Doesn't this test astonishingly, the first of its kind demonstrate that it's time for California to test ALL the voting equipment, and not just accept secret vote counting software that voting vendors control?" she said in an e-mail.

Hench said the hacking had taken place on a machine that had been modified by the attachment of a separate device to allow the blind to vote, and that the hack happened to that attached device.

The California Secretary of State's office has not certified that particular device for use here, she said, and it won't be part of the voting in the special election.

"I can't tell you that hacking the system can't be done absolutely," she said. "But I can't tell you that people can't steal paper ballots either."

Officials at Diebold Inc. could not be reached for comment.