BlogWood: MT Archives

4 CA counties get a paper trail

Buh bye Diebold:

California will prohibit the use of 15,000 of voting machines from Diebold Inc. in the November election because of of security and reliability concerns, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley announced today.

Mr. Shelley also said that he was recommending that the state's attorney general look into possible civil and criminal charges against Diebold, and said that the company may have committed fraud in its dealings with the state.

The move is the first "decertification" of controversial touchscreen voting machines, which have appeared by the tens of thousands across the nation as states scramble to upgrade their election technology. Opponents of the high-tech systems argue that the systems are less secure than what they replace, so that that the electoral process could be hacked. Without a paper trail in real time to show the votes, they argue, electoral mischief could go undetected and recounts could be impossible.

"We are taking every step possible to assure all Californians that their ballots will be counted accurately," Mr. Shelley said.

The Shelley decision comes after more than a week of furor in California over glitches that plagued the Super Tuesday primary in several counties. Mr. Shelley has said Diebold's missteps "jeopardized the outcome" of the primary, in part because thousands of San Diego voters were turned away from polling places when Diebold equipment malfunctioned. At public hearings about the voting problems, Diebold Election Systems' president, Robert J. Urosevich, said in the company's defense that "We're not idiots, though we may act from time to time as not the smartest."

A recent California report alleged the company broke state election law by installing uncertified software on machines in four counties. It is those machines, known as the AccuVote TSx, that would be prohibited.

The four counties that currently use those machines, San Diego, San Joaquin, Solano and Kern, would switch to an older technology, optical ballot scanning, in which voters mark ballots by hand and the ballots are then fed into a reader.