The Secretary of State has made the right call to decertify
machines that aren’t secure
Providing for public safety, maintaining infrastructure and conducting elections – these make up the “holy trinity” of any local government’s duties.
That’s why we applaud Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s decision to decertify electronic voting systems in California that failed a recent security review.
Bowen – the state’s chief election officer – cited research conducted by University of California, Berkeley in her decision to decertify most touch-screen and optical-scan machines sold by several manufacturers.
Santa Clara County owns 5,500 Sequoia touch screen voting machines, and faces a huge bill and lots of work to replace them with acceptable machines in time for the 2008 primary election in February.
“Sequoia was one of the most problematic systems,” Nicole Winger, Bowen’s spokeswoman, said.
The UC-Berkeley report on Sequoia Systems’ touch screen voting machines is available online at www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/sequoia-source-public-jul26.pdf.
Despite the serious security flaws the researchers found with the electronic voting machines, the decision to decertify the machines doesn’t sit well with county officials who must deal with the fallout.
“We’ve spent $19 million on voting machines,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage said. “They were certified and we added a paper trail and did all the things we were supposed to do, and now the state turns around and tells us we can’t use them.”
We sympathize with Gage’s frustration – especially given the record budget deficit that the county recently faced – but conducting fair and trustworthy elections is one of the most important jobs of local government.
We wish fixing the problem didn’t come with a big price tag and huge headache for election officials.
And we really wish that Bowen’s predecessor hadn’t certified machines that turned out to have serious security flaws.
But wishing won’t fix the problems, and fixing the problems is a must.
No system – even paper ballots – is perfect. But voting is fundamental to our system of government, and we need to make as certain as reasonably possible that every vote is counted exactly as it was cast.
If banks can securely count money dispensed and deposited at ATMs, then surely we can find ways to securely count votes cast at electronic voting machines.
We have a secretary of state who is committed to “security and accuracy in elections,” as her spokeswoman Winger put it. She’s made an inconvenient but correct decision in pursuit of that goal.
It’s going to be an expensive, difficult process to find electronic voting machines that meet reasonable standards of security and accuracy. But conducting fair, secure elections is that important.
