State curtails e-voting

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, bowing to fears of computer fraud, Friday decertified Los Angeles County's electronic voting system and sharply curtailed the use of two other machines that California counties had hoped to use to conduct the February 2008 presidential primary.

She said she would allow unlimited use of one system, Hart InterCivic, as long as security and auditing safeguards are implemented.

But in the case of two major companies -- Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems -- Bowen said she would allow just one machine per polling place, apparently to provide an accessible option for disabled voters.

Electronic voting critics had unsuccessfully lobbied Bowen's predecessor to stop the machines' use in California. More than three dozen California counties have invested millions of dollars in the technology and some will be forced to replace many machines by February under Bowen's order.

"I reject the notion that I should not require changes in security simply because counties already own (the machines)," Bowen said.

The tested systems are used by 43 of California's 58 counties and by 9 million out of 15.7 million registered voters, according to UC Berkeley.

Bowen, a Democrat who was skeptical of electronic voting during her tenure in the state Senate, commissioned $1.8 million in tests this spring by the University of California to explore the security faults of three electronic voting systems.

She had said she would issue a decision by Friday to comply with a requirement to give counties six months' lead time to make changes.

But she delayed acting for hours, finally holding a press conference at her downtown office as midnight approached.

Stephen Weir, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, questioned her decision-making process, saying Bowen could and should have waited until Monday to act.

Weir said Bowen is moving the ball "in the wrong direction" because she used an improper system to test the machines. He said her decision essentially tells "the voting community out there 'your voting system is damaged, but we're going to fix it.' That doesn't feel good to me."

Bowen's decision could have a ripple effect on dozens of other states that use the same voting systems if officials there follow her lead and rely on the UC research.

Teams of hackers, led by computer scientists at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, determined that the machines are vulnerable to various levels of security breaches ranging from using small mechanical tools to break into a voting machine to deploying a computer virus to change a vote tally.

Matthew Bishop, a UC Davis researcher who led the "Red Team" that hacked into the machines, testified Monday at a hearing that his researchers were able to change vote totals and override the software on electronic voting machines.

A report released Thursday by UC Berkeley researcher David Wagner determined that hackers could install viruses that spread throughout a county's voting network when ballots are being tabulated by a central computer.

But Bishop's test drew immediate controversy when its results were released a week ago. The experiment focused on machines made by Diebold, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic. A fourth company, Election Systems & Software, did not provide information to the state in time to undergo review. Bowen decertified that system, which Los Angeles County had planned to use in February.

The state's registrars charged that the tests were unrealistic because Bowen did not have the computer scientists consider the layers of security deployed by local officials on Election Day. Voting machine companies also took issue with the fact that Bowen gave researchers complete access to proprietary cards and codes that would otherwise have to be stolen from elections offices.

But electronic voting critics rallied around the latest studies as evidence that California must not use the machines in next year's elections. Some want the state to rely on traditional paper ballots or a system such as Sacramento County's in which voters fill in bubbles on a form and then feed it into an "optical-scan" machine. Others said they want voting machine firms to use "open source software," programming that is not proprietary to any one company and is accessible by the state.

In the wake of voting improprieties during the 2000 presidential election, electronic machines grew popular as a way for counties to comply with federal laws requiring both the modernization and accessibility of voting booths.

California registrars have purchased thousands of electronic voting machines for their counties.

Locally, Sacramento, Yolo, El Dorado and Placer counties last year used optical-scan units for voters without disabilities and electronic voting machines for those requiring accessibility, according to the secretary of state.

Groups representing voters with disabilities have defended electronic touch-screen machines because they can provide independence in the voting booth through technologies such as audio playback of selections or a sip-and-puff tube.

Bishop said the team conducted its research in five weeks, a time frame made short by Bowen's need to determine whether to decertify the machines by a Friday deadline to take effect in the February .

About the writer:

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