March 07, 2006

"E-vote pioneer will return to paper ballots"

"For elections, Alameda County is headed back to the future, and what that future looks like will play out today in the city of Piedmont.

After six years of electronic ballots, voters in Piedmont's municipal elections will be marking their choices on paper ballots, and so far that is the direction Alameda County is headed for the June primary.

The city has a history of being a pioneer in voting technologies for the county, even for the state. Piedmont made California history in 1999 with the state's first election conducted on ATM-like touch-screen voting machines. Riverside County and Alameda County were close behind, and by the last statewide race more than a third of state voters were casting fully electronic ballots.

Yet paperless touch-screen voting has fallen from favor after three years of criticism from computer scientists and voting activists who say fraud and errors on the machines can be virtually undetectable. California and many other states now require that voters have some form of paper printout to double-check their electronic vote and that elections officials use that paper for recounts.

But most voting machine makers did not adapt their touch screens for printers intime for use in elections this spring and early summer. So Piedmont is headed back to plain paper ballots, and so probably is Alameda, at least for the June elections."

Posted by Randy Riddle at March 7, 2006 01:01 PM