Pull out the old optical scanner machines from storage — and the county’s credit card while you’re at it. Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s post-midnight order Saturday to 21 California counties, including San Joaquin, to convert from touch-screen voting systems back to paper ballots isn’t going to be cheap. How about $35 million statewide and counting?
Deborah Hench, retired San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters, forewarned county officials of this pending crisis when she left earlier this summer. She was an aggressive defender of electronic voting. In 2002, she oversaw the county’s purchase of more than 1,600 Diebold TSx touch-screen machines for $5.7 million to replace the optical scanners and paper ballots. Five years later, Bowen has decertified the ATM-like machines, which operated last fall like clockwork. Unless the manufacturer can make them more secure from potential computer hackers, they are almost worthless.
Paper ballots will be printed for the Feb. 5 presidential primary election for the nearly 30,000 registered voters in Tracy, plus a couple hundred thousand in the rest of the county, at an estimated $500,000 cost. Adding more state-of-the-art optical scanning machines to the county fleet, if necessary, could be expensive. Each costs about $75,000. The county election’s office still uses the scanners to count absentee ballots.
Hench, the nonpartisan registrar of voters, had the right hunch on Democrat Bowen, who had Diebold in her political gunsight the day she announced her candidacy for secretary of state in 2006.
As secretary of state, Bowen has placed the integrity of elections in doubt by questioning e-voting security when there isn’t any clear and irrefutable evidence to support her concerns that the machines are vulnerable to crashing and hackers.
The University of California tests on which she based her decertification were unfair. The scientists were supplied with source codes and other confidential information to hack into the voting system, and they ignored the security procedures that election officials employ.
Until the e-voting machines are recertified, we suggest San Joaquin County promote absentee voting, which will reduce the volume of Election Day ballots being force-fed into the scanners. And we suggest that all costs converting and holding paper ballot elections be charged on the secretary of state’s credit card.
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The truth is the system failed during the recall, and has yet to work correctly. I asked a judge in Sacramento about the machines and he said what difference does it make, all the candidates are the same. Like the old saying goes tell it to the judge? I don't think so.
Benigno