New CA SOS Debra Bowen won't push for return to paper ballots

By Daniel Weintraub -

Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/87474.html

Debra Bowen, California's next secretary of state, was accused during the recently ended campaign of hanging too closely with opponents of electronic voting who believe the boxes can be tampered with to rig the results of an election.

Bowen posted items about voting security on her own Internet Web log. She ran an ad showing make-believe thieves stealing an electronic voting machine. Internet sites where "black-box" voting critics gather to exchange conspiracy theories buzzed about her candidacy.

Now, with her victory over incumbent Bruce McPherson secured (and undisputed, as far we know), Bowen will be California's chief elections officer in January and instantly become perhaps the nation's most prominent and influential skeptic of the technology. Or will she?

I spoke with Bowen last week as she was preparing to leave the state Senate for a month's hiatus from government before she is sworn in as secretary of state. She said she has not made any decisions yet about how to approach the issue of electronic voting. But she did say she doesn't intend to push to return California to a more paper-oriented system, or to encourage the universal use of optical scan technology, which allows voters to make their choices on paper ballots that are then counted by computers.

Instead, Bowen said she will likely focus on making the new voting technology more user-friendly.

"It's not just a matter of the hacking and all of the things people are concerned about," she said. "There have been a lot of usability issues. ... There are a variety of practical problems that deserve some attention."

She is concerned about the training of poll workers, many of whom are retirees with little familiarity with computers. And she is troubled by what happens when the electronic systems fail.

Bowen said that in one Santa Clara County precinct on Nov. 7, a poll worker was sent to the local Kinkos with $40 to make copies of the sample ballot so that people could vote on paper because the machines were too slow to handle the demand. Elsewhere, she said, voters were in line several hours after the 8 p.m. closing time.

"We have a lot of places where the vendors will say it's not a machine problem, it's a user problem," Bowen said. "But machines don't run themselves. So problems with set-up or use or bugs have to be considered problems with the machines.

"It's not just an issue of how the technology works, but what are the backup plans when things go wrong on Election Day? You're never going to have an election where something does not go wrong. But telling people to come back later is not a back-up plan."

Bowen, however, said she does not believe that electronic voting can be scrapped because it has brought important advances that need to be preserved. Among them: access for the disabled, for whom touch-screen voting is usually far easier, and early voting in public places, which in most counties is not viable without touch-screen voting because there are so many different versions of the local ballot, depending on a voter's exact address and precinct.

Despite Bowen's alliance with the black-box voting skeptics, then, she may one day become an evangelist for California's voting laws and regulations because the state is one of relatively few that already require a voter-verifiable paper trail and random audits of the results.

As it happened, we spoke the same day that a national standards board released a draft report concluding that computer voting systems that do not include an independent paper trail cannot be made secure. If any security audit relies on information that exists only in the guts of the machine, the report said, there is no way to know that the entire system is not faulty.

The losing side in any election is thus prone to question the result.

We're seeing just that kind of situation unfolding in Sarasota County, Fla., where 18,000 voters failed to vote in the congressional race even though many of them voted in races above and below it on their electronic ballot. The machines used in Sarasota County warned voters if they skipped a particular race, but they provided no paper trail that can be used to verify the outcome.

Democrats are questioning the Republican victory, and some are even calling for Congress to seat the Democratic candidate who lost the race on Election Day.

"If the balance of power in Congress were dependent on the outcome of that race, it would be front-page news every day," Bowen said.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, meanwhile, is introducing legislation that would require every state to use voting machines with a paper trail that can be viewed by the voter and checked later against the electronic results.

"It is crucial that there be an independent record that can be reviewed by election officials," Feinstein said.

It sounds as if Feinstein is talking about making California's systems a model for the nation. It will be interesting to see whether Bowen, once she takes office, supports or opposes that notion.