California puts voting machines through paces

By SETH FREEDLAND/The Ukiah Daily Journal    11 October 2005

California will put the tools of democracy to perhaps the most rigorous testing of any state, ordering voting-machine makers to surrender their proprietary software for security reviews and supply dozens of their machines for mass, mock-election tests.

In memos this week to local elections officials, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson laid out plans to create a new technician-led office, devoted to putting voting machines through their paces before California voters use them. Despite the assumed computerized precision, concerns of screen freezes, software crashes and a lack of a traceable paper trail remain top e-voting fears among advocates.

Marsha Wharff, Mendocino County clerk and registrar of voters, applauded McPherson's decision to form the streamlining office.

"I think it's a really good idea," Wharff said. "A team of people has to go through all that testing and it hasn't been formally part of a cohesive office before."

The move comes as huge sums of federal and state money are going to voting-system purchases nationwide and manufacturers increasingly are supplying high-tech computers to record and count the vote. When Mendocino County signed a contract in 2003 with Diebold Election Systems for its latest touch screen ballot boxes, Wharff said she refused to accept any machine without certification.

"We required a paper trail even though some other counties didn't want it," she said. "That's the only way the public can see that the electronic equipment is counting accurately. Without it, you can't verify votes for the public." But in 2004, a state law mandated paper trails for voters to approve their ballot before electronic submission and now such standards will be centrally maintained by the state.

The country watched this summer as McPherson ordered Diebold to offer its latest ATM-style touch screen, the AccuVote TSx, up for mass testing in a San Joaquin County warehouse. For nearly a full day, officials entered votes into 96 machines. To their dismay, they found numerous instances of paper jams in the paper-trail printer and software crashes of the nature described by voters nationwide in the last presidential election.

Kim Alexander, president of the Davis-based California Voter Foundation, said seeing the screen freezes firsthand showed "how vulnerable these systems are to error and fraud."

McPherson declared the machine unacceptable and rejected it before Diebold recently fixed the problems, according to reports.

Now all voting-machine makers will face the same hurdle. And instead of merely providing their prized software to a third-party firm for the state to check after any problematic election, manufacturers now must hand copies to California elections officials. They plan to recruit computer-security experts, who will sign nondisclosure agreements and study the software for vulnerabilities to fraud or manipulation, something vendors have historically resisted.

Maryland recently agreed to allow some of the harshest critics of electronic voting to explore the vulnerabilities of its Diebold touch screens. But the combination of mass testing and state-enforced software reviews are believed to make California's rules the most stringent in the nation.

Wharff said she is waiting for state certification for the equipment still and hopes it will be completed before Jan. 1, 2006, to comply with the Help America Vote Act, a recent bill demanding an e-voting machine in every location for people with disabilities.

For the special election on Nov. 8, the county will continue to use its optical scan machines which use paper ballots with penciled-in bubbles. The ballot is fed into the card reader and if the computer detects a double-vote or cannot read the mark, it pops it back out. Next June's election should see the first touch-screens for Mendocino County.

Mendocino County election officials are not as concerned as other counties over potential e-voting snafus because Wharff refuses to solely rely on the electronic voting machines. Even so, she calls e-voting "very reliable" and recalled the 2nd District county supervisor recount in Spring 2004, in which machines declared Jim Wattenburger's razor-thin victory over Richard Shoemaker.