FW: Paperless e-voting used for the last time in California on Tuesday

["Pete Klammer" <pklammer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paperless e-voting era ends

Touch-screen machines with no printable record used for the last time
in California on Tuesday
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER  

http://insidebayarea.com/localnews/ci_3197545
 
Elaine Ginnold awoke in a darkened home with no electricity . a
harrowing way for the Alameda County elections chief to launch
Tuesday's special election with fully electronic voting machines. 
No power, no votes. 

Ginnold muttered an epithet but relaxed later when driving past her
local polling place, a fire station with its lights blazing. Her
Election Day opened with the usual headaches: no-shows of poll workers,
polling places still locked and a smattering of technical problems such
as inoperable electronic voter cards and a few inoperable e-voting
machines. 

The days of those last glitches, and worrying about power outages, are
on their way out. The era of paperless, fully computerized voting
machinery ended Tuesday in California. 

Ginnold for one isn't sorry to see a return to paper balloting. 

"I'm looking forward to it," she said. "I don't see that we're going
backwards at all." 

Soon after voters in Piedmont tried their hand at paperless,
touch-screen voting in 1999, electronic voting soared in popularity. It
was easy as an ATM. The curses of paper balloting . multiple languages,
multiple districts, multiple parties, paper jams . would vanish, along
with the hanging or pregnant chad so reviled from the 2000 elections.

E-voting had none of these ambiguities: The memory either stored a vote
for, a vote against or none at all. 

E-voting makers and elections officials talked of near-instantaneous
results, beamed wirelessly from polling places to central elections
offices for immediate posting on the Internet. 

But in 2002, criticism arose from an unlikely quarter: Computer
scientists who had written software for NASA moonshots and Star Wars
missile-defense systems said computers were too subject to programming
error and too unsecure to rely on them solely as arbiters of political
power. 

More detailed analysis of e-voting software at Johns Hopkins University
and elsewhere revealed vulnerabilities to hacking. 

The new voting machines also brought their own drawbacks. They were
expensive, often costing $4,000 apiece, and while the touchscreens
themselves had relatively few problems, related hardware and software
breakdowns thwarted several large counties in 2004. 

In California, voters wary of politics and government latched onto the
controversy and to one solution proposed by computer scientists: Add
printers to the electronic voting machines and provide a printed record
of the ballot for voters to check and elections officials to recount.

In six months, the state became the first to require a voter-verified
paper trail for all e-voting machines. Last month, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger signed a bill requiring the paper trail in recounts. 

"It's been a long road to get where we are now, where the use of
paperless electronic machines is on the decline," said Kim Alexander,
president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation and a leading
advocate of paper trails. "I say goodbye to 

e-voting, and good riddance." 

On Tuesday, the governor confronted his own voting glitch. 

When he appeared at his polling place in the L.A. suburb of Brentwood,
poll workers looked up his name and reported that he already had voted.
Los Angeles County elections officials said that a worker testing touch
screens for early voting in Pasadena apparently had cast a test ballot
in the governor's name. 

Schwarzenegger was told he would have to cast a provisional ballot,
meaning that his votes might not be counted for weeks. He objected and
was allowed to cast a regular ballot. 

It was unclear whether the governor and his alter ego in Pasadena ended
up voting twice or canceling each other's votes. 

Starting Jan. 1, all electronic voting machines must produce a paper
trail that will be used in automatic recounts of 1 percent of
precincts, as a check of computerized vote tallies, and in full
recounts in the event of an election challenge. 

Alfie Charles, an executive with Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems
and a former state elections official, said he thinks paperless
e-voting is gone for good. 

"It worked well and served its purpose but unfortunately was not
trusted, for either perceived or valid reasons," he said. "And in
elections, perception is critical." 


Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman @angnewspapers.com.