Touch-screen voting faces fuzzy future

Eve Roberson was South Lake Tahoe's city clerk from 1971 to 1982, when voters cast ballots by filling in circles on paper.

"If you can believe this, we hand-counted them," said Roberson, a Santa Rosa election activist who also once served as El Dorado County deputy registrar of voters. "We did not have a computer back then."

Computers are everywhere now, yet most California voters will return to filling in circles on paper just like three decades ago. That's because Secretary of State Debra Bowen enacted a sweeping order this month to restrict touch-screen voting machines throughout most of California.

Bowen's decision could have a chilling effect on the technology's use in California for years, according to electronic voting activists and some election officials. In the wake of Bowen's order, registrars in counties that purchased thousands of touch-screen machines are planning to retrofit polling places with paper-based "optical-scan" voting systems similar to one used in Sacramento County.

Counties will spend millions of dollars this year on paper-based systems and ultimately may have to give up on touch screens because their future remains uncertain, some registrars said.

Bowen, an electronic voting skeptic, could remain in office through January 2015. She suggested last week that governments might be better off avoiding the latest technology as a matter of practice.

"I was having an interesting discussion recently with a venture capitalist who pointed out that for government applications, you don't want to be on the cutting edge," Bowen said. "You want to go with the most tried-and-true system available. And certainly optical scan has a long history of use in a lot of contexts, which means it has fewer risks."

Bowen's actions this month will most significantly affect 21 counties that had planned on having all voters use touch-screen machines. Those counties, which use machines made by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems, are restricted to one electronic voting booth per polling place to accommodate disabled voters. Counties and manufacturers must employ a series of new security measures to keep even one booth.

Orange and San Mateo counties will use touch-screen machines throughout their polling places because their manufacturer, Hart InterCivic, was deemed safe enough to use as long as new security guidelines are in place.

Fast-growing Riverside County has invested $25 million in 3,700 Sequoia touch-screen voting stations and has used the technology in 39 elections dating to 2000. The county will shelve all but about 700 of those machines in February under Bowen's orders.

Registrar Barbara Dunmore said Riverside County is prepared to spend $7 million to purchase 700 scanners that will read paper ballots.

The county does not plan to return its remaining touch-screen machines to Sequoia in hopes that the technology will be eventually be reinstated, Dunmore said.

Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer said no California county has asked the company to exchange its touch-screen machines for optical-scan equipment.

"Our customers have purchased their equipment, and we stand behind our equipment and are sure it will be able to be used in the future," Shafer said.

But Bowen said that rather than try to upgrade existing equipment, manufacturers should consider building entirely new machines that take into account the various security flaws raised by researchers.

"I don't know whether the security concerns the (University of California) teams raised can be remedied through software alone," Bowen said. "The teams identified problems with the physical setup of the machines. If I were a voting-system vendor looking to provide the greatest possible security, I would try to minimize the number of ports and external connectors because I would be concerned about someone plugging in. And in that case, it would mean a redesign."

She has vowed to maintain stringent hacking tests. Manufacturers and registrars have complained that the tests she used this spring were nearly impossible to pass because researchers had access to proprietary codes and did not have to overcome Election Day protections used by counties.

About the writer:

• The Bee's Kevin Yamamura can be reached at (916) 326-5548 or kyamamura@sacbee.com.