January 09, 2006

"Registrar proposes all-mail vote"

"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 for a 10 percent increase in two years. 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 or has some other major problem.

"This doing things in a hurry with millions of dollars in voting equipment, you want to make sure you get it right," Ginnold said. "With all of the uncertainty in voting equipment right now it just doesn't make sense to spend all that money on it."

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.

Yet California elections officials are threatening to withdraw their approval for ES&S, citing problems that thesystem 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.

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

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

Panic is running high especially in the 17 counties running Diebold equipment. All of them need at least one part of Diebold's latest system to comply with federal law, as well as 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 lab for examination."

You can find the article here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at January 9, 2006 11:17 AM