Thread: Good news CA: Out of touch: Voting machines sit idle

Out of touch: Voting machines sit idle

Feb 3, 2008
By: GIG CONAUGHTON - North County Times
County voters go back to paper and pen for Tuesday election


When voters head to the polls Tuesday, San Diego County's electronic touch screen voting machines will again be missing in action ---- shrink-wrapped and stacked 25 feet high on pallets in a lonely, locked corner of a county warehouse.

Instead of casting votes by touching high-tech computer screens, voters will again be using pens and pencils to fill in bubbles on low-tech paper ballots ---- and county officials say they don't know when the machines may ever be used again.

"They're just sitting here," San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler said last week as she stood in front of the county's caged machines. "Just wrapped up in plastic."

When county supervisors agreed in 2003 to spend $31 million to buy 10,000-plus Diebold touch screen machines, electronic voting was seen as the way to avoid fiascoes such as the 2000 presidential election in Florida, when the world watched counters argue over hanging chads.

But suspicions and debate over the security of electronic voting by activists have increased since then.

San Diego County's machines have been employed for widespread use twice since 2003, once with problems that caused 36 percent of polls to open late in 2004 and once without incident in 2006. But they've also been barred twice because of security concerns.

The latest ban came in August. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen banned almost all of the electronic voting machines in the state ---- affecting 21 counties ---- after state-sponsored attack teams showed them vulnerable to tampering.

Seiler was actually on the Diebold marketing team that sold San Diego County its machines before becoming the county's registrar.

She and many other registrars statewide believe Bowen's tests were unfair because they gave expert hackers the machines' software codes and unlimited time and did not include security checks that poll workers would provide in elections.

"She really gave them the keys to the store," Seiler said last week. "Anybody could hack into it."

Filling in bubbles

Because of Bowen's ruling, San Diego, Riverside, and 19 other counties have had to work quickly over the last six months to switch back to paper ballots.

Seiler said last week that the election should run smoothly, although county officials say vote-counting will take longer than ever before because paper ballots will be run by hand through optical scanning counting machines.

The process, she said, will start when the county's 1.31 million voters head to 1,650 polling places. They'll be given pens or pencils and 11-inch ballots and steered toward booths.

In past elections, voters would place their ballots in secrecy sleeves and feed them into an optical scan machine that would keep count of all the votes cast at the precinct that day.

Because activist groups worried about the security of the scanning machines at the polling places, optical scan machines won't be at the polls, and no counting of ballots will be done until they reach the registrar's office.

When voting ends at 8 p.m., poll workers will break down their equipment, secure their ballots and precinct captains will drive them to one of 65 guarded collection centers staged around the county.

Rented trucks filled with 6-foot-tall rolling racks will pick up the ballots and equipment from the collection centers and drive them to the Registrar's office-warehouse in Kearny Mesa.

There, absentee ballots and regular ballots will head in different directions, and be screened and counted.

At the warehouse last week, Seiler pointed out a chain-link and barbed-wire fenced area where several two-person teams ---- watched by supervisors ---- will feed the screened ballots one by one, precinct by precinct, through optical scanning counting machines.

When each precinct is finished, the computer memory card with the precinct count will go to yet another secure room where those counts are fed into six other tabulators that sum up the final vote count.

Because precinct votes won't be done in the field, officials said, vote tallies will take longer.

Chuck Wallis, the registrar's internet technology coordinator, said elections officials think it will take between nine and 15 minutes to count each precinct, once they arrive and the tallies can begin.

County elections officials have 28 days to complete the entire counting and verifying process before election results can be certified.

Paper the future?

Counting may take longer with the paper ballots, but the smoldering questions around electronic voting security could make paper ballots - not touch screen machines - the future for elections.

Doug Chapin, director of Electiononline.org, a nonpartisan group funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, said last week the future of electronic voting nationwide was "still very much in flux."

Chapin said after the 2000 Al Gore-George Bush election controversy, the federal government offered California and other Western states money to switch away from the punch-card voting systems used in Florida and much of the rest of the country, including San Diego County.

Many computer scientists, Chapin said, feared that computerized voting systems could be tampered with to create voter fraud on levels never seen before.

But Chapin said arguments over electronic voting "went from pure policy to heavily politicized" after a series of incidents.

The most infamous was in 2003, when Wally O'Dell, then the chief of Diebold - the company building electronic voting machines - stumped for Bush and pledged to "deliver" him Ohio's electoral votes in his 2004 re-election bid.

The debate continues. Elections officials say security measures would allow computers to be used safely. Scientists continue to point out vulnerabilities, even though Chapin and Seiler said they knew of no recorded incidents of electronic voting machines being tampered with in real elections.

Chapin said some states, including Colorado and Florida, have started backing away from electronic voting machines.

Meanwhile, San Diego County wonders what will become of its investment.

Evan Goldberg, Secretary of State Bowen's spokesman, said it was unlikely that she would allow any of the machines she banned in August to be recertified. He said electronic voting companies would have to submit new or modified machines for future use.

Christopher Riggall of Premier Elections, the name Diebold changed to last year, said the company has talked to the secretary of state and is completing a federal certification process - but has not made plans to submit new or modified equipment to Bowen to clear it for use here.

San Diego County still has elections to run in June and November. Seiler said she does not expect the machines to be used.

"Our investment is sitting here," she said. "We don't know what the future brings."

www.nctimes.com

A computer memory card is then transported to another location and joined with other memory cards to be tabulated?

Sounds like a shell game.

I for one am glad to see these machines go. After what happened in Ohio in 2004, I'm glad someone is taking action against the corruption of our voting system. We just have to be sure that whatever they replace the machines with isn't corrupted either.

..even though Chapin and Seiler said they knew of no recorded incidents of electronic voting machines being tampered with in real elections.

What a short memory they both have.