BOWEN MEASURE TO ENSURE THE INTEGRITY OF CALIFORNIA?S VOTING SYSTEMS CLEARS SENATE
Political Desk

 
By Political Desk
August 29, 2005

A bill by Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach) designed to catch electronic voting machine tabulation errors and ensure the integrity of California?s electoral system cleared the full Senator today on a bipartisan 36-0 vote and now goes to the Governor.

?Using the electronic machines to do the 1% manual tally to verify the accuracy of the vote is ridiculous, because the machine is only going to recount the votes the same way it counted them in the first place,? said Bowen, the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee. ?California?s manual count law is designed to verify the results of an election, but since you can?t manually count electronic ballots, the only logical way to comply with the 1% manual tally required by law is to use the paper trail connected to each ballot.?

Under current law, elections officials are required to conduct a public manual tally of the ballots cast in at least 1% of the precincts chosen at random. The manual tally is designed to check the accuracy of votes tabulated by an electronic or mechanical voting system. SB 370 requires elections officials to use the accessible voter verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT) ? which is a ballot printout the voter checks for accuracy before they cast their vote ? instead of just using a printout of the machine?s own tally. Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems are required to produce an AVVPAT for every ballot as of January 1, 2006.

?What?s the point of requiring DREs to produce a paper trail if you?re not going to use it to verify the accuracy of the electronic vote?,? continued Bowen. ?I?m a lot more concerned about the accuracy and the integrity of the election results than I am with how quickly the ballots are counted.?

Secretary of State Bruce McPherson came out in opposition to SB 370 on August 10, taking the position of the California Association of Clerks & Elections Officials that using the AVVPAT to conduct the 1% manual tally would ?add a significant amount of time? to the process. Furthermore, the Secretary argued ?since the tally must occur within the 28-day canvass period, they will not have time to complete the canvass.?

?It?s a ridiculous argument,? continued Bowen. ?The 1% manual tally requirement has been on the books for decades in California, meaning local elections officials have had to count paper ballots to verify the accuracy of election results tabulated by machine punch card readers long before the advent of electronic voting machines. Also, remember that if the elections officials are truly doing a random 1% manual recount as the law requires, they?re going to be counting paper ballots anyway, since not every precinct in every county uses DREs exclusively and about one-third of all California voters vote using a paper absentee ballot.?

Last week on the Assembly floor, Assemblyman John Benoit (R-Palm Desert) ? the author of AB 369 to gut the mandatory paper trail requirements of current law ? spoke against the bill, saying:

?I am, like all of the rest of you, very concerned that our elections be fair and accurate. However, there is a point of diminishing returns and we are crossing it with this bill. It was never intended that that paper receipt would become a means by which you would do a recount.?

?A point of diminishing returns?,? responded Bowen. ?Either you want election results to be accurate or you don?t. I don?t see how anyone can say with a straight face that they?re for fair elections, they?re for having a paper trail on electronic voting machines, yet they?re against using that paper trail to ensure the accuracy of the vote count.

?No voting machine is going to be 100% error free, 100% of the time, but unlike with paper, when it comes to electronic data, a small human error, a technology glitch, or a tampering incident can change thousands of votes in an instant,? continued Bowen. ?People need and deserve to know their votes have been counted accurately, and the best way to ensure that is to make sure there?s a paper print out of every electronic ballot. Since the law requires electronic voting machines to produce that kind of a paper trail as of January 1st, it only makes sense to use those paper voter verified ballots for auditing and recounting. If we don?t, we?ll have spent millions of dollars on high-tech voting machines and lost something even more valuable in the process ? the integrity of our voting system.?

SB 370 also requires the paper trail to be used when a manual recount of an election is requested by any candidate and declares that if there?s a difference between the results of the electronic vote and the paper audit trail, the results from the paper audit trail will serve as the official ballot of record.

The bill passed the Assembly 57-19 on August 25. The Governor has until October 9 to sign, veto, or allow the bill to become law without his signature.