County looks at 'blended' voting
November special election may be Diebold system's last in Alameda County

By Ian Hoffman    ANG News   25 August 2005

Alameda County ? the first large West Coast county to gamble on Diebold Election Systems Inc. and its electronic voting machines ? is weighing whether to end that experiment, going with a more paper-based voting system and perhaps another supplier.

County officials are contacting voting-system vendors this week and asking whether they can provide a so-called "blended" voting system, with a winning bidder to be chosen in November.

Alameda is headed the way of many large counties ? toward a hybrid of optical scanners for paper ballots and either electronic touchscreens or computerized ballot-marking devices for handicapped voters.

If vendors can supply such a system, this November's special election will be the county's last with Diebold touchscreens as the only voting equipment in the polling place.

Diebold remains the nation's largest voting system supplier and is selling thousands of its touchscreens in Mississippi, Utah and Ohio. And the firm still may try selling Alameda County on a new system.

But the county's move away from touchscreens and toward other vendors is a blow to Diebold after a two-year string of missteps and mistakes by the firm.

County elections officials stoutly defended the company in 2003 when Diebold computers awarded thousands of votes to the wrong candidates, and in 2004 when Diebold exerted last-minute pressure on the state to approve voting equipment only to have it break down in a quarter of Alameda County polling places.

In June, county supervisors signaled a willingness to increase their original $12 million investment in Diebold equipment by approving negotiations for purchase of newer touchscreens for an additional $6 million.

But the last straw came in July, when state tests of 96 of those new touchscreens revealed paper jams, system crashes and screen freezes in 28 percent of the machines. Secretary of State Bruce McPherson rejected the machine for use in California.

Since then, sales reps from other vendors have come knocking at the door of acting county elections chief Elaine Ginnold. She and her staff have test driven several other voting systems. She will ask county supervisors Tuesday for the go-ahead to solicit bids on the new hybrid system in September.

The move to a paper-based voting system makes sense, Ginnold said.

"One reason is the cost of electronic machines is quite high, and in the light of changing state and federal regulations we don't see the prudence of spending a lot of money on touchscreens at this time," she said.

An equal reason comes from the county's voters. Almost 40 percent are voting on paper absentee ballots, and this proportion of mail-in voting is rising with every general election.

The big question is whether any vendor is ready to challenge Diebold in Alameda County. Federal law requires every polling place nationwide to offer at least one handicapped-accessible voting machine, but the law doesn't say exactly what accessible means.

Electronic touchscreens tend to be widely accessible to visually and physically handicapped voters. But state law requires all electronic voting machines to offer some paper backup record for voters to confirm their electronic choices, and providing this paper trail reliably has been a stumbling block for Diebold.

Two other large vendors are likely to vie for Alameda County's business. Oakland-based Sequioa Voting Systems will have touchscreens with paper trails running in seven California counties in November, but the company still is waiting for testing labs to clear the software necessary to handle the unique challenges of a California primary election.

Sequoia is talking to Alameda County about that system, which the firm expects to be approved by year-end, and about an optical scanning system.

"It's our home county, it's a county we take a lot of pride in and we think we can offer the county exactly what it needs to restore confidence in the election system," said Sequoia spokesman Alfie Charles.

Election Systems & Software has conditional state approval for a handicapped-accessible ballot-marking device known as the AutoMark. But disability groups have split over whether the machine is accessible enough.