San Joaquin keeps its touch-screen voting
County to stay with Diebold despite problems found in July test

By Les Mahler     The Daily Review    31 August 2005

San Joaquin County is going to stay with the Diebold Inc. touch-screen voting system and let the company iron out its problems, said the county's registrar of voters, Deborah Hench.

"The state is willing to retest them at any time," she said.

During a test in July, the secretary of state determined there were problems with the Diebold system.

Hench said the problems ? paper jams and screens freezing up during the voting tests ? weren't as bad as reported.

During the July test, about nine of 96 machines had paper jams, and 21 screens froze, she said.

Kim Alexander, president of California Voter Foundation in Davis, said Hench is using the same math that Diebold is using.

"The secretary of state was looking at the performance of all 96 machines," she said. "The truth is that none of them worked flawlessly."

The problems with Diebold's machines have forced Alameda County to look elsewhere, Alexander said.

In fact, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote today on finding another vendor for electronic voting.

Solano County already has scrapped its Diebold machines, she said.

Former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified Diebold Inc.'s machines in May of last year after problems arose in several counties during the March 2004 primaries. He also required that all electronic voting machines include verifiable paper trail audits, allowing the voters to see their votes through a plastic screen.

The verifiable paper trail also could be used to audit votes in a recount, Alexander said.

Hench said then that despite minor problems, the Diebold Inc. system worked fine in San Joaquin County.

She said the problem with July's tests was that there were no standards or guidelines for failure for Diebold to use in testing the machines.

"The tests show that we would have paper jams," she said. "Is that fair to Diebold?"

She noted that in the July tests all the ballots were accounted for and ould be read.

Also, the failure problems

didn't surface until the next day when the tapes were analyzed, she said. "We found out they failed the next day. The day of the testing, everything went fine," Hench said.

But the problem is that the machines do have a failure rate, said Nghia Nguyen, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State's office.

"If you have 96 machines, and over 20 have problems, that's not good enough for California voters," Nguyen said.

Also, Diebold couldn't explain why their machines had problems, she said.

Nguyen said the secretary of state is willing to retest the system and has given that option to Diebold. But the Ohio-based manufacturer of banking ATMs hasn't responded yet.

"The secretary of state wants to give counties as many choices as possible," Nguyen said.

Hench said even if she opted to go to another vendor for electronic voting, it would take time because no other vendor is certified to do e-voting in the state.

"Sequoia is only certified for the primaries," she said. "The rest of them had conditional certification, which will be revoked."

Supervisor Steve Gutierrez said the board has asked Hench for a report on the status of the Diebold touch-screen system.

"We want to know are we going to use it or not going to use it?" he asked. While the board wants feedback from Hench, he said it's up to the board to decide on whether San Joaquin County will stay with Diebold.

But he questioned if it's the system or just people questioning it.

"As long as people out there are doubting Thomases, there will always be questions about our systems," he said.

The county bought into the Diebold system for $6.4 million, with the first payment of $850,000 already being made, Hench said. For the November election, the county will use optical scan ballots, with Diebold picking up the bill for printing the ballots, she said.

That leads to another problem, Alexander said.

With San Joaquin County's electronic voting machines in storage in a warehouse, if approval does come, it will take time to make sure the machines stored work properly, Alexander said.