Alameda County latest to want all-mail election

By Ian Hoffman     ANG News    07 January 2006

In the chaotic marketplace for voting equipment, California counties are scrapping their vendors, dumping one machine for another and experimenting with new kinds of voting.

The boldest move yet could come in Alameda County, where if the elections chief has her wish, there would be no polling places, no voting machines in the June primary ? just a straightforward, all-mail election like the entire state of Oregon has held for years.

Almost half of Alameda County voters in November ? 47 percent ? mailed their ballots anyway. But the big reason that acting Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold wants an all-mail election is that virtually every major voting system she might buy lacks state or national approval.

"This doing things in a hurry with millions of dollars in voting equipment, you want to make sure you get it right," Ginnold said.

Past efforts to try all-mail elections in California have fallen flat in the Legislature. Last year state Assembly members killed a proposal led by San Mateo elections chief Warren Slocum for six counties to try all-mail elections.

Though Ginnold's idea involves one county and one election, she is seeking urgency legislation, which requires approval by at least two-thirds of state lawmakers.

Federal law says every polling place in the country must have at least one handicapped-accessible voting machine available, yet only one ? featuring Election Systems & Software's AutoMark ballot marker ? has national and state approval.

And California elections officials are threatening to withdraw their approval for the machine citing problems that the system has shown correctly tallying and reporting votes. The other big vendors ? Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart/InterCivic ? are scrambling to get national and state approvals for their machines.

It is the same situation nationwide, and in California local elections officials are dealing with their frustration either by criticizing the secretary of state's office, by taking a gamble on new equipment and new vendors or by trying work-arounds.

San Francisco is ditching Omaha-based ES&S, which not only supplied the city's voting machines but also helped run its elections, for Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems and its machines. A few other counties also are talking about going with new vendors.

Panic is running high, especially in the 17 counties running Diebold equipment. All need at least one part of Diebold's latest system to comply with federal law and with a state law requiring paper printouts for all electronic votes. But the firm's optical scanners have been successfully hacked to produce fraudulent vote totals, and they include a kind of software that is forbidden under federal voting system rules. As a result, California state elections officials forced Diebold to send that software back to a testing laboratory for examination.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for local elections officials, and time is tightest for San Diego County, which must hold an election in April to replace Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who pleaded guilty last year to corruption charges and resigned from Congress.

Sonoma County is finessing the mandate for handicapped accessibility by running two voting systems. Visually or physically disabled voters will cast ballots on ES&S AutoMarks, but Sonoma County elections officials will hand copy each of those ballots over again onto the traditional Mark-A-Vote ballots that most voters will use.

But Alameda County is contemplating the biggest changes. Ginnold, the registrar, will ask her county supervisors next week for approval to seek emergency state legislation allowing an all-mail election in the June primary.

If approval is received, Alameda County would conduct the state's largest, nonlocal election entirely by mail ? no pollworkers, no polling places, but heaps of voter education, stamps and ballot envelopes. Going from polling machines to mail-in ballots cuts costs by $1.50 to $2 per voter, Ginnold said.

In her pitch to county supervisors, Ginnold said the move would "increase the convenience and ease of voting for all voters" ande save an estimated $1 million.

"Election costs will be lower, and turnout will be higher," she wrote.

Supervisor Keith Carson, president of the county board, plans on backing her idea.

Democrats and Republicans have been leery that all-mail voting might change the dynamics of the campaigns that put them in office. Both parties worry the other will benefit.

"Good luck," said one Democratic staffer, who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about the subject publicly. "There's just too much concern here about the effect of all-mail elections. I can't imagine Republicans allowing just Alameda, a Democratic stronghold, to have all mail, which would pump up turnout."

Political science professor Paul Gronke at Oregon's Reed College, a leading authority on all-mail and early voting systems, says the notion that mail elections boost turnout is a "myth" fostered by elections officials who like those elections for other reasons.

"I think intuitively it feels right for people: One of the barriers to voting is the inconvenience of voting, and so, when you make it easier, you're supposedly ping that barrier," he said.

But multiple recent studies have failed to find evidence that all-mail elections trigger more voter participation, he said.

"The great barrier to voting in this country is people are disinterested, they're disenchanted or alienated. Or they feel there's no difference among the candidates or they have no choice, and early voting systems won't change that," Gronke said.

"It gets regular voters to turn out again. But what it doesn't do is solve one of the problems of the nation and California in particular, and that's to bring in new voters."

But he said Ginnold and counties in Washington correctly realize that all-mail voting make sense for counties facing strict state and federal deadlines for new voting machinery and no machinery to meet those deadlines.

"I have to say I'm with her on that point," Gronke said.