If the touch-screen isn't approved, most California counties will miss Jan. 1 deadlines to begin offering handicapped-accessible voting machines that also provide a backup paper record.

Fifteen county officials, including elections chiefs in Alameda, Marin, San Joaquin and Los Angeles, wrote Secretary of State Bruce McPherson last week to "urge that you act as quickly as possible ... to ensure our ability to comply with the looming federal and state deadline."

Yet Diebold employees and local elections officials were dismayed to hear the company portrayed as an "ethically challenged" and "corrupt" maker of voting machinery designed to fix elections.

The firm, based in McKinney, Texas, has spent more than two years trying to win permanent California approval for its AccuVote TSx and undergone the most rigorous state testing of a voting system.

"People have made this a personal issue with Diebold, and they don't see a company that has made improvements," said San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters Debbie Hench, who wants to use more than 1,600 of the Diebold touch-screens in the June primary. "I don't think there's a vendor around that could satisfy these people."

Diebold has added stronger passwords and encryption, but opponents say the voting system remains vulnerable to a simple hack. With unobserved access to voting computers and ion of as little as 60 lines of code, a computer expert for Black Box Voting Inc. says he has been able to change vote tallies for an entire jurisdiction.

Jim March, a board member of the group, called the vulnerabilities "a whole set of aces up the sleeve for an election official who wants to cheat."

Before considering approval of the system, officials at the California Secretary of State's office have agreed to test those claims, by letting Black Box Voting try hacking into the Diebold system on Nov. 30.

"The places where there are known vulnerabilities in this system should raise a yellow flag before we certify this system," said state Sen. Debra Bowen, a Marina del Rey Democrat.

State law says a voting system cannot be approved for use in California unless it is secure. So far, state voting-system technicians have concluded that the system is secure enough. What could matter more in McPherson's decision on the Diebold system is opposition from advocates for visually and physically handicapped, the voters that most counties are buying the Diebold system to serve.

Dan Kysor, director of governmental affairs for the California Council for the Blind, and Teresa Favuzzi, executive director of the California Foundation for Independent Living Centers, said the Diebold system isn't accessible enough.

Electronic touch-screens have brought the handicapped to the brink of casting their ballots privately, without assistance, by offering an audio version of the electronic ballot and various means of marking their choices. But Diebold's latest touch-screen lacks a key tool, a sip-and-puff device for physically handicapped voters, and is designed in a way that makes it hard for visually handicapped voters to initiate the voting machine, Favuzzi said.

The machine has a printer and rolls of cash register-style thermal paper for producing paper trails, or printed records of ballots, that voters can double-check for accuracy and that elections officials can use for recounts. But visually handicapped voters can't read the printouts and get no such independent verification.

"We actually expect to have access to the verification process," Favuzzi told state elections officials Monday.

Rejection or delay of approval for the Diebold system would put California counties in league with counties around the nation that are likely to miss deadlines for handicapped-accessible voting under the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The National Association of Counties recently pressed Congress to roll back those deadlines by two years, citing the lack of available systems.