Home
Site Map
Reports
Voting News
Info
Donate
Contact Us
About Us

VotersUnite.Org
is NOT!
associated with
votersunite.com

Voters in O.C. Will Have Paperwork
Because a new electronic system won't be certified in time, April's special election for a state Senate seat will employ old-fashioned ballots.

By Jean O. Pasco,   Los Angeles Times    21 December 2005


Voters in coastal Orange County may feel a touch of nostalgia when they're handed old-fashioned paper ballots in the April 11 special election to fill a vacancy in the state Senate.

The county switched to electronic voting devices for the March 2004 primary and has used them in eight state and local elections since. But a crunch of deadlines to certify new voting systems prompted the step backward.

   
"We have no choice," Neal Kelley, registrar of voters, said of going back to paper. "There's no way the system is ready."

More than five years after the 2000 presidential balloting fiasco in Florida, California is still struggling to meet federal standards to reform its voting systems.

In 2002, Congress passed the Help Americans Vote Act, requiring counties nationwide to replace punch-card machines with electronic devices or paper ballots that could be read with optical scanners.

Registrars throughout the state scrambled to buy and install new systems, which must be certified by federal and state officials in time for elections in 2006.

Last year, the Legislature added another edict, responding to worries that electronic systems were vulnerable to error and sabotage. Beginning Jan. 1, each electronic device must display a paper record in voting booths so voters can verify their ions and recast their ballots if they find an error. The paper records also must be used for recounts.

Many counties hope to have systems certified in January by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. Some registrars have worried that they won't have enough time to test and install new systems for the June primary, when hundreds of congressional, statewide, legislative and local candidates will be on the ballot.

"We feel stranded," Christine Heffron, chief deputy registrar for Los Angeles County, said. "We don't have lots of options."

For next year's elections, Los Angeles County will continue to use InkaVote paper ballots, which qualify under the federal law. A separate system to comply with other federal requirements for disabled voters is still in the works.

The silver lining: No special elections are scheduled in Los Angeles County that would push up the timetable before June.

San Bernardino County is the only one in California with a voter-verified system in place, but it can only be used for small elections.

New printers, which cost $1,000 each for 6,100 voting machines, were used for the first time in the statewide Nov. 8 special election.

This week, Riverside County elections officials agreed to borrow about 100 of the electronic machines with printers from San Bernardino County for the city of Riverside's Jan. 17 municipal runoff election.

Officials said the devices probably wouldn't be certified by state and federal authorities in time but said having the printouts would give voters more confidence that their choices were properly recorded.

Under state requirements, local voting records must be preserved for six months and state and federal materials for 22 months, after which they will be destroyed.

Kelley said Orange County is in the same boat with the rest of the counties, hoping to get a paper-record system certified next month. Then comes a timeconsuming testing process, which takes at least 45 minutes with each of the county's 9,000 eSlate devices.

"It's crazy," he said. "It's going to be tight even if we work straight through till the end of May."

But it must be done, he said, because voting by paper ballot ? with thousands of different ballots needed in five languages ? would "be a nightmare." Los Angeles County has about 5,000 different ballots in seven languages.

Orange County officials spent $26 million on an April 2003 contract with Hart InterCivic, which makes the eSlate devices. It will cost an additional $10 million to outfit those machines with printers, Kelley said.

Other California elections officials estimated their additional costs at between $18 million and $23 million to comply with the paper record requirement.

Five of 13 counties ? Kern, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, San Diego, and San Joaquin ? bought electronic voting systems with the cost of future printers included if they were ever required by the state.

However, three of those counties have been in limbo for months because of problems with testing of their systems. Kern, San Diego and San Joaquin counties bought machines made by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which were called unreliable by then-Secretary of State Kevin F. Shelley in April 2004.

In July, McPherson rejected Diebold's paper record system after it experienced what he called unacceptable levels of screen freezes and paper jams.

McPherson announced yet another concern with Diebold's voting system Tuesday, based on the source code in the removable memory card found in its voting devices. He said he would ask the federal government to conduct more tests, spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns said.

"We have spoken with the counties and share their concerns about meeting the upcoming deadlines," Kerns said. "We're going to do everything in our power to help counties meet their requirements. But deadlines must come second to quality and security."

She said Orange County's paper-record system could be certified next month.



Previous Page
 
Favorites

Election Problem Log image
2004 to 2009



Previous
Features


Accessibility Issues
Accessibility Issues


Cost Comparisons
Cost Comparisons


Flyers & Handouts
Handouts


VotersUnite News Exclusives


Search by

Copyright © 2004-2010 VotersUnite!