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County’s Voting Machine Upgrades Still Delayed by State Certification
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County’s Voting Machine Upgrades Still Delayed by State Certification
System May Not be Ready for June Elections
By Michael Thomas
A January deadline set by 2002’s Help America Vote Act has passed, and still the County has not finalized an agreement that would put one touch-screen voting machine in each polling place. The machines are supposed to make voting easier for people who are visually or hearing impaired or who have physical limitations.
The County has a tentative agreement with Sequoia Voting Systems, which includes upgrading the rest of the County’s voting devices to a new optical scan card system.
However, Sequoia remains among a group of companies that has run into long delays in getting machines certified by the office of California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson.
“They are looking at going before the voting systems panel in January or February,” explained Santa Cruz County Elections Clerk Gail Pellerin. That means that June primary elections for state and local offices may be conducted with the County’s old Mark-A-Vote system.
“Certainly as time goes on it’s going to be harder to convert to a new system [in time],” Pellerin said. “We may just implement the touch screen and do the whole conversion for November.”
The County has approximately $3.5 million from both the Federal Act and California’s voting modernization act, Proposition 41, to set up the new system. The contract with Sequoia is for about $2.5 million. Additional funds will be spent training poll workers and educating the public about the new system.
State is Behind in Certifying New Systems
Sequoia’s system was chosen among a passel of competitors in part because the County has a 25-year history of printing paper ballots with the company. Sequoia has also sold the County voting booths in the past.
Pellerin said that Sequoia has a good record of fixing problems promptly, but the decision was difficult to make in a tight timeframe.
“I felt like I was jumping out of an airplane and I had to turn around and pick a parachute,” she said. “It is a new technology and they’ve all got problems.”
Diebold has had a particularly tough time proving their AccuVote electronic voting machines are secure and reliable. Tests conducted by the California Secretary of State’s office last year found a variety of problems with Diebold’s system. The screens sometimes froze, and the printers that make a paper record of the votes often jammed, sometimes causing votes to be lost.
Then a “hack test” conducted in Florida last December showed that vote counts on the Diebold machines could be manipulated by someone knowledgeable in computer code with the same access to the machines as most poll workers.
In response, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson’s office referred the Diebold system back to Federal regulators for software tests â€" tests the machines may have trouble passing.
Sequoia Voting System’s Ownership Shuffle
So far, Sequoia’s system appears to have fewer functional problems, but the company’s sale last year to a Venezuelan-controlled firm called Smartmatic raised some eyebrows. Sequoia, presently based in Oakland, claims to have made some of the nation’s first lever-based voting machines, starting in the 1890s. It was sold to the British firm DeLaRue in 2002 for $35 million.
Then, with the federal government poised to spend $3 billion to $5 billion on election system upgrades, DeLaRue sold Sequoia to Smartmatic last March for $16 million.
Smartmatic, based in Florida and operated by Venezuelan engineers with close ties to that nation’s government, came under fierce criticism there in 2004.
Reportedly, Smartmatic was partially owned by the Venezuelan government agency responsible for conducting the recall election that failed to unseat incumbent President Hugo Chavez. Some observers sent by the U.S. pointed to serious problems with the conduct of the election, while observers from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s foundation declared the election fair.
Nevertheless, the recall election in Venezuela, which required new touch-screen voting machines throughout the country, brought Smartmatic an estimated $150 million in government contracts.
Smartmatic subsequently saw the purchase of Sequoia as a key opportunity to get a foothold in the burgeoning U.S. market for voting systems.
Benefits Extend Beyond Disabled
According to Pellerin, the complete overhaul of local voting systems, which may now be delayed until the November election, will have benefits for everyone. Instead of being handed a set of cards to vote on, voters will receive a single card that is printed on the front and back with all the contests included on one piece of paper.
The layout will look different. “Instead of filling in rectangles, they would be connecting arrows,” she said.
The County will also be able to print its own ballots, allowing more flexibility for changes, according to Pellerin.
For instance, last November a candidate for the Live Oak School District Board realized she would not be eligible to serve. However, it was too late to change the ballots, and she ended up winning a seat anyway, creating a difficult situation.
Perhaps the biggest change will be the installation of optical scanners at each polling place. Instead of having voters drop ballot cards in a plastic box, poll workers will send them through the scanner to be checked immediately for errors.
“If they have over-voted [checked more than the allowed number of candidates in a given race], the ballot will be rejected and the voter will have the option to correct it,” Pellerin explained.
The new equipment meets the “second-chance voting” requirement of HAVA.
On election night, precincts will send their votes to the County Clerk’s office on an electronic cartridge, rather than as boxes of untabulated cards. That means Pellerin may be able to release preliminary results of local contests a little earlier.
“In the end, what we want to have is safe, secure, reliable voting equipment that correctly counts every vote,” she said.
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