ALAMEDA COUNTY
Computer glitches, human error, paper ballot shortage slow count

Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, March 4, 2004
Glitches plagued a new computer designed to speed voting in Alameda County on Tuesday, forcing voters in many locations to cast their ballots on paper instead of electronically. Some sites ran out of paper ballots before the breakdown could be fixed.

Other technical problems and human error slowed completion of the Alameda County vote count until 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, some three hours later than expected, said Alameda County Registrar Brad Clark.

Poll workers reported problems with the touch-screen voting device, called a voter-card encoder, at 20 percent of the county's nearly 1,100 voting sites, said Clark. "That's unacceptable," he said.

The encoder stores any ballot variation that a voter may request depending on party affiliation 11 versions in all Tuesday. It is designed to copy the correct data to a plastic card a little thicker than a credit card. The card goes into a touch-screen voting machine, which displays the correct ballot.

Although the encoder worked fine in trials before the election, it repeatedly crashed when poll workers used it for the first time.

"They had to be rebooted," Clark said, "and poll workers weren't trained to do that."

Election officials received from 125 to 200 complaints from polls throughout the county as voting began Tuesday. They managed to get all the machines running, but not before some sites had run out of the paper ballots they kept on hand in case of equipment failure.

As a result, some voters were told to come back later or go to another polling place.

Diebold Election Systems supplied the encoder as part of the county's $11. 7 million switch to electronic voting, which began in 2002. The county needed a device powerful enough to juggle increasingly complicated and varied ballots.

Clark said he had not yet met with Diebold representatives to find out what went wrong.

Voters in San Diego County also reported problems with card encoders, said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Alliance. Tuesday, San Diego switched to a newer version of the Diebold system that Alameda County uses.

"The two most common explanations I'm hearing from election officials about these problems was that this is a new voting system, and we're working out all the glitches," Alexander said. "That wasn't true in Alameda County. They've used this system for a number of elections now."

In February, Alexander's group urged voters to use absentee ballots in counties with electronic voting. The group cited "security concerns, questionable oversight practices and an inability to conduct meaningful audits of the election results on paperless systems."

In addition to voting-machine problems in Alameda County, poll workers at two Oakland churches where voting was held went home without ping off their results at one of the secure locations set aside to transmit the data to the registrar's main computers. The churches' janitors had to be roused to open the doors.

Results from Albany and Berkeley were held up because of problems transmitting them from a secure telephone line in Berkeley's City Hall.

Solano County officials, meanwhile, said their first election with touch- screen voting was nearly perfect and tallied votes more than an hour faster than any previous election. All the ballots more than 71,000 from 1,000 Diebold Systems machines in 277 precincts were counted by 11:37 p.m.

"The voters have spoken, and they like it," said Laura Winslow, the county's registrar of voters.

E-mail Rick DelVecchio at rdelvecchio@sfchronicle.com.