Many don’t trust new touch-screen systems for ballot casting
Gilroy – Silicon Valley is ground zero for technological innovation, but some say they still don’t trust the county’s high-tech voting systems.
The county signed a $19-million contract with Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems in 2003, bringing touch-screen voting machines to polling booths from Palo Alto to Gilroy. This June, the machines were upgraded to include a voter-verified paper audit trial, said Matt Moreles, a Santa Clara County Registrar spokesperson. Each voter makes their selection on the touch screen, then looks at a paper printout to make sure it’s correct. The printout is stored inside the printer, where it can be referred to in a manual recount.
“Electronic machines are the most accurate platforms for voting,” said Howard Cramer, Sequoia’s vice president of sales. “They’re generally faster, generally more secure, and as elections get more complex, it’s the only tool available for dealing with that increasing complexity.”
And Moreles said they’re secure: county staff run logic and accuracy tests on each machine before elections, and pull random machines for testing on election day.
“Both times we did that in 2004, our system performed with 100 percent accuracy,” said Moreles.
Sequoia’s machines have had fewer problems than those produced by the much-maligned Diebold Election Systems, said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, and the voter-verified paper trail is a significant step. But she’s still “not a fan of electronic voting.”
“Anytime you put high-tech equipment into a polling place, there is likely to be some kind of problem,” Alexander said.
She cited a case in 2004 in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, where voters had to correct their votes multiple times before the Sequoia AVC Edge machines registered the correct choice. The problem was reported in the Albuquerque Journal.
Asked about the incident, Cramer said he spoke with the Bernalillo County clerk, who told him she knew of no problem.
To ensure the machines’ accuracy, Moreles said poll workers perform a 1 percent manual recount of the printouts, checking them against the electronic results. County supervisor Don Gage said he’s confident in that process.
“You can use statistics and look at a percentage, or you can count them all – which would defeat the purpose of having electronic voting,” Gage said.
He’s received only one e-mail from a constituent worried about electronic voting machines this year, he added.
But critics say 1 percent isn’t enough.
“One percent is not a sufficient number of ballots to count, to have a high probability of catching problems,” said Steven Hertzberg, founder of the Election Science Institute. The problem is, he added, “no manufacturer has produced a mechanism that allows you to easily manually recount the paper trail.
“There’s systems to produce paper, but no system to easily deal with it.”
Stanford University computer science professor David Dill said he can’t comment on Santa Clara County’s paper audits, but “in other counties, that [paper] count was almost farcical.” Dill is the founder of VerifiedVoting.org, a nonprofit that advocates for secure, verifiable U.S. elections. In San Diego County, Dill said, registrars used a Diebold machine to generate a random list of precincts to audit.
“They’re auditing Diebold machines, so they shouldn’t use a Diebold machine to decide how to audit it,” he said. “A public drawing or dice-rolling would be better.”
In addition, Dill said poll workers sometimes have difficulty addressing technical problems that arise at the polls. That’s not a problem here, said Moreles: in Santa Clara County, poll workers receive at least an hour and a half of hands-on training with the machines, in addition to online training. If the workers choose not to do online training, they go through a three and a half hour training.
“Even if someone worked as a poll worker last June, they’ll still be trained again this time, as a refresher, and to learn any changes,” Moreles said.
But Alexander said that across the state, short-staffed polling places sometimes use workers who’ve missed part of their training. Older workers, in particular, may have difficulty understanding how the machines work, said Hertzberg. In Cleveland, where he’s been studying election procedures, the average poll worker is 69 years old.
“Are these really designed for a 69 year old person to operate?” Hertzberg asked.
In November 2004, visually-impaired and disabled voters in Santa Clara County complained that Sequoia machines were difficult to use, with erratic volume controls, poor sound quality, and awkwardly positioned braille. Only 2 of the 50 blind voters surveyed by the Silicon Valley Council of the Blind said the machines worked smoothly. Dawn Wilcox, the group’s president, called the problems “an unacceptable state of affairs” in a letter addressed to the county registrar.
Media officer Elma Rosas said the registrar had altered the machines in response to the complaints. Larger braille, improved volume and speed rate controls, and ergonomically placed buttons are among the changes.
But for some, no new features can quell their basic distrust of electronic voting. For anyone who’s seen a term paper disappear with the blink of a monitor, computers hold a power that can be unsettling.
“I want a tangible piece of paper in front of me,” said Aaron Petray, a 22-year-old CSU-Monterey Bay student, working at Starbucks Coffee on First Street. “Digital technology is easier to corrupt. Even if it comes out on a printer, where does that vote get transmitted, digitally?”
Earlier this month, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson issued a notice to all county clerks and registrars, declaring that “all county elections officials shall have an adequate supply of paper ballots, as determined by the elections official” available in case of failed machines or machine-phobic voters.
In Santa Clara County, “an adequate supply” for each polling place is 25 English-language ballots and 10 each in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese and Tagalog, said Rosas. A polling place serves a maximum of 1,000 voters. Voters may also bring their sample ballot, mailed to all voters who registered 29 days before the election, and use it as a paper ballot.
Whether or not the machines are accurate, a paper ballot just feels safer to some voters. Mark Zappa, a Gilroy businessman and Republican campaign activist, says he just doesn’t trust electronic voting.
“I’d rather have something I can hold in my hand and look at,” he said. “I’m not anti-high-tech – I couldn’t operate my business without it. But for voting, I like to pull a lever.”
