Voting machines still not recertified
By Craig Gustafson   San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE     January 2, 2006

New state and federal election laws that affect voting kicked in yesterday, and the resignation of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham has forced San Diego County to comply with them two months earlier than expected.

That could be a problem.
Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has yet to recertify the use of the electronic voting machines the county ordered two years ago from Diebold Election Systems. He recently asked a federal testing agency to review the memory cards used in the machines because of security concerns.

The decision comes less than four months before the April 11 special election to replace Cunningham, R-Rancho Santa Fe, leaving county officials anxious about how they'll meet the new laws to help disabled people vote independently and require a paper trail for electronic votes.

Mikel Haas, the county's registrar of voters, said he's waiting "semipatiently" for the state to make a final decision but acknowledged that he doesn't know when that will happen. He said there isn't a Plan B if McPherson chooses not to certify the machines.

"We will have to come up with something, but we're not in the panic mode at this point," Haas said. "We're waiting like a lot of counties are on the secretary of state to finish what he needs to do to feel comfortable with the system and certify it." 
  
The county's $31 million contract with Diebold stipulates that the Ohio-based company must provide the county with 10,200 touch-screen machines that meet all state and federal laws, Haas said. The county has yet to pay for the voting system.

Diebold has provided the use of optical-scan machines ? where paper ballots are ed into an electronic scanner ? at no cost to the county since the company's voting system malfunctioned during the March 2004 primary.

A key component used to activate voter cards to call up ballots on touch screens failed because of a battery problem. More than one-third of the county's polling places opened late and some people didn't get to vote. A month later, then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned San Diego and three other counties from using those machines.

Diebold, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of electronic voting systems, is still waiting for recertification.

In a Dec. 20 letter, Caren Daniels-Meade, McPherson's elections chief, told Diebold that there were "unresolved significant security concerns" about the machines' memory cards. She asked that the code on those cards and the interpreter used to decipher the code undergo a federal review.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said the company will submit the source coding ? or program instructions ? for the machines to federal investigators to clear up any issues.

"It should be a fairly quick and seamless process. . . . We certainly hope it's as quick as possible," Bear said.

Bev Harris, a spokeswoman for Black Box Voting, a nonprofit and nonpartisan election watchdog group, said the federal review should conclude that the Federal Election Commission prohibits using an interpreter device.

"Diebold is definitely negligent," Harris said. "They should be recalling their product line and they should reimburse the county. There's no excuse at all for them putting that in there."

Bear said rhetoric from groups such as Black Box Voting distort the record of electronic voting systems.

"The facts are that both the optical scan and the touch screens have been used for many, many years in thousands of elections and have performed extremely well," he said.

The county needs McPherson to recertify its machines to comply with a pair of laws that took effect yesterday.

A new federal law requires that every polling place have at least one voting machine that allows disabled people to vote without assistance. It won't apply to the Jan. 10 special election to fill two San Diego City Council seats because it's a local election.

The county will need to meet that standard for the April election, while the rest of the state's counties have until the statewide primary election in June to meet the standard.

Under state law, electronic voting machines will be required to create a paper trail for all ballots cast as of yesterday.

Diebold began retrofitting the county's touch-screen machines in November with a device that creates a receipt like those from a cash register. The work should be completed this month so county officials can begin testing the equipment. Those tests could take six to eight weeks, Haas said.

The machine, called the AccuVote-TSX, allows voters to cast their ballots by touching a 15-inch screen. It also has several features, including the ability to change font sizes, headphones for blind voters and ballots in multiple languages.

If the machines are recertified, Haas said he plans to put at least one in every polling place in April and June. The rest of the voting stations will stick with the optical-scan variety.

Haas said he expects the entire system to be replaced with touch-screen machines by November.

"We chose the touch-screen system because it's the best solution for a county our size, with the complexity of our ballot, with four languages we have to put out there," he said.