Alameda Voters Get First Look at New Voting Machines

J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Berkeley Daily Planet    15 November 2005
Alameda County voters got their first look at life in the paper-trail, electronic voting era when four companies showed off their machines Monday at the Alameda County Conference Center in Oakland.

A change in state law requires that as of the beginning of next year, all electronic voting machines in California must include a verifiable paper trail that provides a hard copy.

Alameda County Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold estimated that the purchase of the new paper-trail machines could range between $6 million and $20 million, depending on the system eventually chosen.

A steady crowd of poll workers and voters walked through the conference center on Monday, asking questions and doing sample voting on the voting machines of the four companies?Sequoia, Hart, Diebold, and Election Systems & Software (ES&S)?which submitted bids to supply Alameda County?s next generation of machines.

Participants were asked to rate the four types of machines. Ginnold said that the citizen evaluations are an ?important part of the overall evaluation process.? She said that the county currently has an election committee which is reviewing the four proposals and will receive the citizen evaluations. The committee will eventually rank the machines and based upon their evaluation, the Alameda County Purchasing Office will make a recommendation to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to vote on the voting machine purchase at its December 13 meeting.

The four machines displayed Monday have many things in common, but with slight differences that could be important to voters.

All of them display the ballot on a computer screen similar to the method used by the Diebold machines used by Alameda County in the last election. Three of the machines allow voters to cast their votes by touching the screen. But one of them, Hart, does not operate with the touch-screen method, instead using a manual plastic wheel and enter button below the screen that functions similar to a mouse and keyboard.

All of the demonstrated machines have a paper trail in the form of a continuous-roll cash register type receipt that prints out each ballot and retains the record in the voting machine. Voters have the opportunity to compare the printed ballot to the vote they have recorded on the screen. Once the ballot is cast, the receipt rolls on, hiding the previous voter?s ballot from the next voter and displaying only a blank tape.

All of the machines allow a voter to go back and change a vote, even after the paper ballot has been printed, but before the vote has actually been cast. Three of the machines print the full ballot and, if the voter decides to make a change, prints a ?VOID? mark at the bottom of the ballot and then prints an entirely new ballot with the voter?s changed choices. One of the machines, ES&S, prints the actual keystrokes as the voter goes along, including any corrections. Thus if an ES&S voter marks a vote for a particular candidate and then decides to change that vote, the machine marks a ?VOID? on that particular vote, then prints a second line that indicates the corrected vote.

A spokesperson for ES&S at Monday?s demonstration said the company?s machine provides a ?paper audit log that records every keystroke the voter makes. You can go back and see exactly what was done as it was done by the voter.?

Several of the vendors said that in addition to a written record of the vote, their machines also printed bar codes of each voter?s entire vote on the paper-trail ballots that could be used by scanners to electronically count the paper ballots in the event of a recount.

The Diebold machines also included a separate keypad and earphones to be used by the visually impaired.