New machines use more paper ballots, but activists still unhappy over any use of computerized tallying
By By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Published June 9th 2006 in insidebayarea.com
After a three-year experiment with Diebold Election Systems and
touch-screen voting machines, Alameda County is paying $13.25million
for a new, more paper-based voting system — and still being accused of
selling out to corporate election fixing.
"You're completely ignoring every single piece of testimony today," shouted Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater, whose marquee has featured a near-weekly screed against any use of computers in voting.
County supervisors spent a year agonizing over what instruments of democracy to buy for the November elections and beyond. On Thursday, voting activists pressed the county to lead a national protest against computerized voting and rely instead on hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots.
In a split vote, however, supervisors chose a middle-of-the-road system recommended by county officials and supplied by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia would provide 1,000 optical scanners for most polling place voters and 1,000 touch-screen machines to accommodate voters with disabilities.
Most of the cost will be paid by $8.7million in state and federal grants, plus $3million that Diebold is paying Alameda County to buy back the 4,300 touch screens that the county purchased in 2002 for $12million. Those monies will cover all but a fraction of the equipment cost, plus
$350,000 that Sequoia wants for developing instant runoff voting for Berkeley and other cities.
Alameda County has been a hotbed of resistance to electronic voting, and the presence of any touch screens made activists livid.
It was "shameful," said Gary Crane, executive director of Fair Elections, an East Bay voting group, for liberal Alameda County to entrust votes to software from any private corporation.
"Now they have virtually carte blanche to walk into every other county in America and say, 'Look, if Alameda County trusts us, why shouldn't you?' So we're really talking about democracy in America," Crane said.
To placate critics, Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker persuaded enough colleagues to back hiring independent computer hackers to test the Sequoia system and demand money back from the company if it were found unsecure.
Steven Bennett, the West Coast sales rep for Sequoia, said the Lai-Bitker provision was problematic. "It's not in our contract. No clause says we have to let just anyone they choose come in and go through the system and say whatever they want about it," he said.
The company and county need to renegotiate. Bennett said, "We're willing to work with this county. We're based here, and we have a lot of our employees who live here."
Hacking tests on Diebold voting machines revealed multiple security holes, including one computer scientists called "the worst ever found in a voting system."
A hacking test for Sequoia's touch screens could be tougher. Unlike Diebold, its balloting software doesn't run on top of Microsoft Windows but proprietary Sequoia operating systems written in two different computer languages. Its optical scanners run a language so arcane that most programmers are unfamiliar with it; computer scientists say just reading the software would be tedious, even painful.
Supervisor Scott Haggerty insisted on another security and accuracy measure for the November election: a comparison of the electronic tally on all of the Sequoia touch screens with the paper records of each ballot printed by each machine.
Supervisors Keith Carson and Nate Miley tried unsuccessfully to buy an entirely different system made by Omaha-based Elections Systems & Software and built around an electronic device called the AutoMark, a computer that allows the disabled to mark ballots but does not tally any votes.
But county officials cautioned against the move, saying that the AutoMark was slow and that ES&S has had trouble meeting its contracts in other counties.
Voting activists were disappointed in the choice of the Sequoia system, and Lowell Finley, a Berkeley-based lawyer for Voter Action, vowed to sue the county if the purchase went forward.
At least one computer scientist who has been highly critical of computerized voting systems said the county ended up making a good decision.
David Wagner, an assistant computer-science professor at the University of California, called the Sequoia system "a really smart move on Alameda's part.
"A lot of the voters will be voting on paper ballots which ameliorates a lot of of the security concerns," he said.
"You're completely ignoring every single piece of testimony today," shouted Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater, whose marquee has featured a near-weekly screed against any use of computers in voting.
County supervisors spent a year agonizing over what instruments of democracy to buy for the November elections and beyond. On Thursday, voting activists pressed the county to lead a national protest against computerized voting and rely instead on hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots.
In a split vote, however, supervisors chose a middle-of-the-road system recommended by county officials and supplied by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia would provide 1,000 optical scanners for most polling place voters and 1,000 touch-screen machines to accommodate voters with disabilities.
Most of the cost will be paid by $8.7million in state and federal grants, plus $3million that Diebold is paying Alameda County to buy back the 4,300 touch screens that the county purchased in 2002 for $12million. Those monies will cover all but a fraction of the equipment cost, plus
$350,000 that Sequoia wants for developing instant runoff voting for Berkeley and other cities.
Alameda County has been a hotbed of resistance to electronic voting, and the presence of any touch screens made activists livid.
It was "shameful," said Gary Crane, executive director of Fair Elections, an East Bay voting group, for liberal Alameda County to entrust votes to software from any private corporation.
"Now they have virtually carte blanche to walk into every other county in America and say, 'Look, if Alameda County trusts us, why shouldn't you?' So we're really talking about democracy in America," Crane said.
To placate critics, Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker persuaded enough colleagues to back hiring independent computer hackers to test the Sequoia system and demand money back from the company if it were found unsecure.
Steven Bennett, the West Coast sales rep for Sequoia, said the Lai-Bitker provision was problematic. "It's not in our contract. No clause says we have to let just anyone they choose come in and go through the system and say whatever they want about it," he said.
The company and county need to renegotiate. Bennett said, "We're willing to work with this county. We're based here, and we have a lot of our employees who live here."
Hacking tests on Diebold voting machines revealed multiple security holes, including one computer scientists called "the worst ever found in a voting system."
A hacking test for Sequoia's touch screens could be tougher. Unlike Diebold, its balloting software doesn't run on top of Microsoft Windows but proprietary Sequoia operating systems written in two different computer languages. Its optical scanners run a language so arcane that most programmers are unfamiliar with it; computer scientists say just reading the software would be tedious, even painful.
Supervisor Scott Haggerty insisted on another security and accuracy measure for the November election: a comparison of the electronic tally on all of the Sequoia touch screens with the paper records of each ballot printed by each machine.
Supervisors Keith Carson and Nate Miley tried unsuccessfully to buy an entirely different system made by Omaha-based Elections Systems & Software and built around an electronic device called the AutoMark, a computer that allows the disabled to mark ballots but does not tally any votes.
But county officials cautioned against the move, saying that the AutoMark was slow and that ES&S has had trouble meeting its contracts in other counties.
Voting activists were disappointed in the choice of the Sequoia system, and Lowell Finley, a Berkeley-based lawyer for Voter Action, vowed to sue the county if the purchase went forward.
At least one computer scientist who has been highly critical of computerized voting systems said the county ended up making a good decision.
David Wagner, an assistant computer-science professor at the University of California, called the Sequoia system "a really smart move on Alameda's part.
"A lot of the voters will be voting on paper ballots which ameliorates a lot of of the security concerns," he said.
