Bowen has used her position as chairwoman of the Senate Elections Committee to castigate McPherson for certifying potentially faulty voting systems vulnerable to hacking, and for, in her view, dragging his feet on reinstating thousands of voters who inadvertently left identifying information off their registration forms.
She is carrying a bill to outlaw so-called bounty programs, in which petition and voter registration solicitors are paid for each signature, and another that would require initiative petition circulators to declare who is paying for their signature-gathering effort.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday June 23, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 76 words Type of Material: Correction
Secretary of state: An article in the May 14 California section on two Democrats running for secretary of state indicated that a member of incumbent Bruce McPherson's transition team in 2005, a former deputy secretary of state, became a member of the lobbying firm representing electronic voting system manufacturer Diebold Inc. According to the firm, GCG Rose and Kindel, Adan Ortega Jr. was an independent subcontractor when he worked for McPherson and later became an employee.
Last month, Bowen easily won the state Democratic Party endorsement after she and Ortiz addressed delegates at a party convention.
It is that endorsement, plus listings on several statewide slate cards, that Bowen is counting on to appeal to voters in coming weeks. Her campaign has been run mostly through the Internet and an extensive website that has attracted thousands of grass-roots volunteers to a race with nearly zero visibility.
Far from being merely a ministerial post, she said, the job of top elections official is perhaps the most important race in any state.
"Before Florida and Ohio, no one really understood how it all worked," she said. "Between [former Florida elections chief] Katherine Harris and watching the TV coverage of hanging chads, I think people have a general sense that things aren't quite as tidy and buttoned-up as you'd hope they would be for something so critical to democracy."
McPherson's critics have accused him of taking too long to deal with a series of security breaches and software problems arising from the hurried purchase of electronic voting systems by counties throughout California to comply with federal voting requirements. The risk is that eligible voters will be disenfranchised and vote results compromised, Bowen said.
Vote-recording memory cards "can fit in someone's pocket," she said, describing the security danger posed by the palm-sized cards. "The way things are now, you can't swap 700 paper ballots for a different stack of 700 ballots."
She also has been critical of McPherson's decision to certify electronic voting systems made by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems that were shown to be vulnerable to tampering. McPherson's advisory team included Adan Ortega Jr., a former deputy secretary of state who became a member of the lobbying firm that represents Diebold.
