The X-factor of TSx voting machines

By Michael Fitzgerald, The Record, Stockton, Calif. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Aug. 10 - If you bought a car that kept breaking down, you'd return the lemon. So why does the county persist in keeping the AccuVote TSx voting machines?

These electronic wonders, which cost taxpayers $5.7 million, failed their most recent test, a mock election conducted in July in a Stockton warehouse.

Inside that warehouse, 1,625 TSx systems have languished in boxes since San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters Deborah Hench bought them in 2002.

Hench touted the machines as a wonderful new world of voter-friendly touchscreen technology and taxpayer savings. But the TSx machines have been used only once, in the 2004 primary. Then it was back to the warehouse.

To continue the car analogy, they have spent most of their time up on blocks in the garage. Worse, the garage costs the county $6,100 a month in warehouse rental fees.

The recent test did not succeed in getting the car street-legal. As state officials watched, Diebold tested 96 TSx machines. Nineteen machines crashed 21 times. Ten machines suffered 11 printer jams.

There are two ways to look at this failure. One is that nearly one-third of the machines tanked.

The other way is that the 96 machines counted 10,720 ballots cast in a mock election with 100 percent accuracy but suffered minor glitches. Or significant glitches involving peripheral machinery.

What glitches? All frozen screens rebooted in a minute, returning to the point on the ballot where the voters left off. And 11 paper jams out of 10,000 ballots doesn't sound so bad.

However you choose to look at it, the secretary of state decreed that Diebold's TSx machines are too shaky. He refused to certify them. Up on blocks they stay.

Some counties are getting fed up with Diebold. Solano County severed its contract with the Texas company in 2004. Officials in Alameda County sound ready to do the same.

Groused Keith Carson, chairman of Alameda's supervisors, "I can't believe they his fellow supes would continue down this dark path with Diebold when there are more problems with each testing."

So it's a fair question why San Joaquin County sticks with these hapless machines. After all, former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley publicly denounced Diebold as incompetent and shifty. A Maryland computer-security company reported that hackers could cast multiple ballots and change terminals' vote counts. And there are other worries.

Hench's critics say she's not objective toward the TSx: She staked her reputation on them; now she has to pretend her electronic albatrosses are OK.

But there do appear to be two good reasons to keep them for now.

The first is that the county negotiated a clause with Diebold making it pay for any San Joaquin election in which Diebold's failures make paper elections necessary.

The second has to do with the sometimes loopy world of American voting. Congress, traumatized by hanging chads in the 2000 election, ordered all polling places to have at least one paper-free electronic voting machine running by 2006.

Seven companies rushed to market. None of their products was 100 percent ready, opined Assistant Registrar Austin Erdman. Hench was unavailable.

And no machine is ready still, because California legislators in their wisdom added new rules and regulations, such as the one requiring paper-free electronic voting machines to keep paper records.

Every new modification requires federal and state testing and approval, which takes the better part of a year.

Of the not-ready-for-prime-time machines, Diebold's is the least flawed, Erdman said.

What if the TSx machines never get certified? "After January, we'll have to take a look at our options," Erdman said.

What Erdman didn't say: the registrar could have waited several years until the technology improved. Next time a company promises a wondrous, high-tech voting machine, a lot more skepticism is in order.

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