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Court Orders
California Counties to Replace Voting Machines
February 14,
2002
Los
Angeles Times
San Francisco
Chronicle
Press-Enterprise
Los Angeles Times
State
Ordered to Replace Old Vote Machines
By Henry Weinstein
February
14, 2002 A federal
judge in Los Angeles on Wednesday ruled that California has to
replace outmoded punch-card voting machines by the 2004 presidential
election. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson's decision is the
first ruling in the nation requiring the elimination of obsolete
voting machines in the aftermath of the controversial 2000
presidential election. Similar suits are pending in a number of
other states. The decision immediately affects nine California
counties, including Los Angeles, which have about 8 million
registered voters. Wilson rejected the position of California
Secretary of State Bill Jones and several county voting officials
who said that they did not have the millions of dollars needed to
upgrade their systems and that it was not feasible to make a change
until 2005. The judge issued a one-sentence order and attorneys
said they anticipated he would provide a more detailed ruling later.
A lawsuit over the machines had been set for trial Feb. 19. The
ruling was hailed by Daniel Tokaji, an attorney for the American
Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which last year filed
the lawsuit seeking to compel elimination of the machines. "This
landmark decision means that by 2004, 'hanging chad' machines will
go the way of black-and-white TVs, eight-track tapes and the Edsel,"
Tokaji said. "It does what the secretary of state should have done
years ago: upgrade the infrastructure of our democracy by providing
a voting system fit for use in the 21st century." The ACLU attorney
said he hopes that the plaintiffs can now work out a consent decree
with Jones that would provide a plan for the transition to newer,
high-tech machines. Jones conceded last September that two types of
punch-card voting machines approved for use in California were
"obsolete" and needed to be replaced. However, in December, Jones
said that it would "invite disaster" if some of the state's large
counties were required to change systems by the 2004 presidential
election. On Wednesday, Jones, who is running for governor in the
Republican primary, said Judge Wilson "has set a deadline that may
be impossible for counties to meet with advanced voting technology.
Several counties will have to scale back plans to adopt state-of-the
art technology to meet the new deadline." Jones also said that
unless California voters pass Proposition 41--a $200-million bond
measure that would provide 3-to-1 matching grants to California
counties for the purchase of new election equipment--on March 5,
"many counties will be unable to purchase new systems at all."
State May Appeal or Seek a
Stay Jones spokesman Alfie Charles said
the secretary of state would decide whether to appeal the ruling
after consulting with county voting officials. Other political
sources said they believe that Jones will ask for a stay of the
ruling. Conny McCormack, Los Angeles County's registrar-recorder,
predicted that "the ruling will throw our Los Angeles County
election system into chaos." "Requiring us to procure, test and
install a new system in less than two years precludes us from
replacing punch cards with modern touch screens because there are no
funds currently available from the federal, state or county
government to do so," McCormack said. She said attempting to make a
transition more rapidly than is feasible could lead to more
tabulating errors in the next election. "The ultimate irony is this
would be the exact opposite outcome of that sought by the
plaintiffs," McCormack said. But Tokaji said evidence developed in
the lawsuit, Common Cause vs. Jones, "shows that the nine affected
California counties can easily upgrade their systems" in time for
the 2004 presidential election. Los Angeles is the largest of the
nine California counties that use the punch-card machines. In the
November 2000 presidential election, 53.4% of California voters,
including those in Los Angeles County, used machines for
"pre-scored" punch cards, similar to those that created some of the
problems with hanging and "pregnant" chads in Florida. Ballots cast
using those machines accounted for 74.8% of all ballots that did not
register a vote for president in California. The error rate for
those machines was more than double that of any other system used in
the state and three times as high as in Riverside County, which used
high-tech touch-screen machines, according to the suit filed last
April by the ACLU. The suit alleged that the wide variety of voting
machines used in California resulted in sharply disparate levels of
accuracy, with the consequence that a disproportionate number of
votes are not counted in some counties--including Los Angeles.
Moreover, the suit, filed on behalf of five nonprofit groups and
eight voters, asserted that "a disproportionate number of African
American, Latino and Asian American voters do not have their votes
counted at all." Officials Admit There Are
Problems Since the suit
was filed, voting officials throughout the state have acknowledged
there are problems with the punch-card machines and said they should
be replaced, but have expressed reservations about how fast change
can be made, primarily due to a lack of funds. McCormack said it
would cost $90 million to $100 million to implement a touch-screen
voting system in Los Angeles County. She said there are only four
companies in California certified to make the machines. "It is
incredibly difficult," she said, to make a machine with the seven
languages now used in California elections--English, Spanish,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Tagalog. She said that if
Proposition 41 passes, the county might get about $75 million from
the state. However, she said that the county would still have to pay
a quarter of the project's costs, and that she had no idea where
that $25 million would come from. McCormack said that when the
county issued a request for proposals seeking bidders to make a
limited number of such machines for an experiment in 2000, it drew
only two bids. Al Fawcett, director of administrative services for
the Sacramento County registrar of voters, also said that it would
be difficult for that county to modernize its system in time for the
next presidential election. "We are looking at a cost of $20
million to $30 million," Fawcett said. "There is no money and none
on the horizon." In addition to Los Angeles and Sacramento
counties, the outmoded systems are in use in Alameda, Mendocino, San
Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Clara, Shasta and Solano counties. In
December, the House of Representatives passed a bill which allocates
$2.65 billion over three years to improve voting technology,
education and training. A bill pending in the U.S. Senate would give
the states $3.4 billion over five years for the same purpose. In
addition to Common Cause, the AFL-CIO, the Chicano Federation of San
Diego County, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the
Southwest Voter Registration Project were plaintiffs in the suit.
San Francisco
Chronicle
Hanging
chads on the way out 9 counties told they must replace punch cards
by '04
By Bob Egelko
February 14, 2002
A federal judge has ordered California to get rid of hanging chads
before the 2004 presidential election, ruling that nine counties --
including Alameda, Santa Clara and Los Angeles -- must replace
their punch-card voting machines with something more reliable. The
ruling comes in a lawsuit filed by minority groups and voting-rights
advocates, who say the current system discriminates against voters
in counties with antiquated machines. It was announced yesterday.
The nine counties are home to more than half the state's registered
voters, and to two-thirds or more of its black and Latino voters.
According to the suit, voters in those counties are more than twice
as likely to have their votes go uncounted as voters in the other 49
counties. Incompletely punched holes in the ballots, the result of
voter confusion or flaws in the machines, produced the so-called
hanging chads that marred the crucial November 2000 presidential
recount in Florida. That state, one of four sued for voting machine
disparities, is ahead of California in converting to more modern
machines, said attorney Dan Tokaji of the American Civil Liberties
Union of Southern California. He said yesterday's ruling was the
first in the nation to require a state to get rid of punch-card
machines. "Because of this decision, voting in California will move
out of the dark ages before the 2004 presidential election," said
Brad Phillips, another attorney for the plaintiffs. U.S. District
Judge Stephen Wilson of Los Angeles said the machines had to be
replaced by 2004, a year earlier than the timetable sought by
Secretary of State Bill Jones, the state's top elections official.
Jones, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, said
the ruling would cause problems. "It is time to move beyond the
outdated chad-prone punch-card ballots," Jones said. "Unfortunately,
the shortened time frame outlined by the judge will jeopardize the
smooth conduct of elections and will prevent taxpayers from getting
the best bang for their buck." He said some counties had told him
they would be unable to install the most up-to-date system, which
uses an ATM-like electronic touch-screen, until July 2005. That
means they will have to spend money on other systems for 2004 and
delay or cancel plans for touch-screens, Jones said. Countywide
touch-screen voting is now available only in Riverside County. Many
others, including San Francisco, use optically scanned paper
ballots, a system that is considered more reliable than paper
ballots. The state will provide $200 million in matching funds for
upgrades of local voting systems if voters approve Proposition 41 on
the March 5 ballot. Each dollar spent by a county would be matched
by $3 of bond funds. The ACLU's Tokaji said the bond money should
be enough to install touch- screens in all, or nearly all, of the
precincts in the nine counties. Congress also appears likely to
approve some federal funding, he added. The nine counties with
punch-card machines are Alameda, Los Angeles, Mendocino, Sacramento,
San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Clara, Shasta and Solano. E-mail Bob Egelko at
[email protected].
The Press
Enterprise
S.B.
County must drop chads by 2004
February 14,
2002
By Tim Grenda
The county's top election
official expressed concern Wednesday about how she will comply with
a federal judge's order to switch from older punch-card voting
machines to a more high-tech method by 2004. "This is not a good
thing for elections," said San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters
Ingrid Gonzales. "This forces us to move before we're really ready.
It seems like that clock is ticking a lot faster now." The American
Civil Liberties Union, which sued the state seeking to force
counties to replace punch-card voting systems, praised the judge's
order to have the new methods in place in time for the November 2004
elections, a year earlier than a previous deadline. "This landmark
ruling means that by 2004, 'hanging chad' machines will go the way
of black-and-white TVs, eight-track tapes and the Edsel," said ACLU
staff attorney Dan Tokaji. The ruling by U.S. District Judge
Stephen V. Wilson was the first of its kind since the 2000
presidential election when a recount in Florida drew national
attention to thousands of unreadable "hanging chads" on ballots.
Riverside County had gonehigh-tech for the 2000 elections after the
county spent $14 million to buy 4,200 electronic voting machines.
The county's touch-screen voting became a nationwide model for
others seeking to avoid voting problems like those in Florida.
Earlier deadline California Secretary of State Bill Jones last
year issued a July 2005 deadline for San Bernardino and eight other
counties that used the punch-card voting systems to update to newer
voting technology. State election officials, who had asked for a
2006 deadline, vowed to meet the nearer deadline. Gonzales at the
time called the 2005 deadline "feasible." But on Wednesday, the
judge granted an ACLU request to move the deadline to November 2004,
the next presidential election. A trial to decide the matter had
been scheduled for Feb. 19 in a Los Angeles federal courtroom. That
trial has now been canceled, court officials said. The judge's
order requires the counties, including San Bernardino, only to
discontinue use of the punch-card voting systems by 2004. It does
not require counties to replace them with touch-screen electronic
machines such as those used in Riverside County. Gonzales said
that's a good thing. San Bernardino County would have to spend more
than $18 million to buy enough electronic voting machines to serve
the county's roughly 620,000 registered voters and train officials
to use them, Gonzales said. "Counties that might have wanted to
move toward electronic voting may not be able to, because of the
deadline," she said. Other ballot technology While no decision on
how to proceed has been made, the county could implement an improved
paper voting system by 2004 and possibly move toward electronic
voting after that, Gonzales said. In one paper-ballot system,
voters use a pencil to fill in a bubble next to their candidate. The
ballots are then counted by a machine, she said. The process is
similar to test forms used for most high school and college exams.
There also are other voting systems where a machine, rather than a
pin held by the voter, punches out the holes on the paper ballot,
she said. "That's a much less expensive and fairly easy transition
for us to make," Gonzales said of the improved forms of paper
voting. "I think we're talking less than $50,000 to do that." Reach Tim Grenda at (909)
890-4460 or [email protected]
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