A paper jam roils California vote

First of two parts

Riverside County was in the vanguard of a new electronics era in 2000, when it became the first county in the nation to convert to computerized voting machines.

With the new technology, voters were able to cast their ballots up to 10 days early and miles outside their own precincts at shopping malls. An RV outfitted as an electronic polling station was sent to senior centers, Indian reservations and places deep in the desert.

But after what Riverside Registrar Barbara Dunmore calls 40 successful elections on the $25-million system, those programs are dead. The county has more than 3,000 of the machines in a warehouse, stacked up to the rafters, perhaps never to be used again.

In a series of controversial decisions last year, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified the vast majority of electronic voting machines in the state, arguing that they were vulnerable to tampering and have defects that could corrupt vote counts.

As a result of her order, about a third of California counties are scrambling to prepare for the Feb. 5 presidential primary, printing millions of paper ballots, acquiring new optical scanners and pressing into service optical scanners normally used to count absentee ballots.

San Diego, San Bernardino, Santa Clara and Riverside are among 21 counties hit by the decertification, putting thousands of machines worth millions of dollars into storage.

The counties believed the machines provided a bulwark against a disputed election, like the one that hit Florida's punch-card system in 2000. In their view, that election demonstrated an accuracy problem, not a security problem. Nonetheless, the electronic machines are under a cloud.

Bowen enlisted a team of eminent computer scientists from top laboratories and universities. They were able to hack into every type of voting machine. "People just don't trust them," Bowen said about the electronic machines. "You only have one chance to get an election right."

The systems in Los Angeles County, which already uses paper ballots, and in Orange County were recertified and do not expect major problems.

But some county registrars are warning of potential problems if elections are close, because paper ballots are sometimes mismarked and must be interpreted for the actual voter intent -- just as with the Florida punch cards of hanging-chad notoriety.