COUNTY LIKES ITS CHANCES FOR PRIMARY DECERTIFICATION OF STATE VOTING SYSTEMS CRITICIZED.

Byline: HARRISON SHEPPARD

Sacramento Bureau

SACRAMENTO -- The secretary of state's 11th-hour decision to clamp down on dozens of voting systems ignited protests Monday from around California, although Los Angeles County officials predicted that their system will be recertified in time for the presidential primary in February.

Following a top-to-bottom review of most voting systems used in California, Debra Bowen announced just before midnight Friday that she'd decertified electronic systems in 39 counties out of concerns that they are vulnerable to hacking. She then recertified 38 of them, but with new security conditions attached.

Los Angeles County's system was the only one that was not recertified, because the vendor had not submitted materials to Bowen's office in time to be included in her review. Instead, she will begin studying that system now and potentially issue a recertification with new conditions sometime in the future.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said he'd spoken with Bowen and believes the county -- with its nearly 4 million votes -- will see its system recertified well before the February election.

"I don't see any reason to panic or go nuts over this," said Yaroslavsky, the board chairman.

"I don't think she's going to want to leave L.A. County hanging, because without L.A. County, you can't conduct a presidential primary in 2008. That would not reflect well on anybody."

Los Angeles County uses Election Systems & Software Inc.'s InkaVote Plus. The system is used for assisting the disabled and catching potential errors on ballots by other voters. Unlike most of the other electronic systems subject to Bowen's conditions, InkaVote is an optical-scan system that uses paper ballots.

Touch-screen voting machines and other components in the county's system were not subject to the review because they are scheduled to be replaced before the February primary.

Los Angeles County paid $25 million for the Inkavote system and first used it in November 2006.

County Registrar Conny McCormack said last week that she was "flabbergasted" that Bowen would decertify a system that she hadn't yet studied, and that had been certified last year by her predecessor, former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson.

Touch-screen systems in other counties made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Diebold Election Systems and Hart Intercivic were decertified and then recertified with a range of conditions. They include using only a single electronic polling machine per location; manual recounts of all electronic votes; reinstallation of software; securing of open data ports; and elimination of Internet connections.

Counties have 45 days to submit new plans detailing how they plan to comply with Bowen's requirements.

Bowen indicated she has a preference for optical-scan systems -- such as InkaVote -- over electronic machines.

"My decisions do reflect a bias towards optical-scan systems," Bowen said.

"These systems are not perfect. As the (review) teams demonstrated, the software suffers from many of the same flaws in the (touch-screen) machines. However, they have two fundamental things in their favor: They are more transparent and they are significantly easier to audit."

Election-reform advocates praised Bowen's decisions, saying she pointed out flaws in the state's voting systems and acted appropriately to try to address them.

"I think she did the right thing," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. "The top-to-bottom review showed numerous vulnerabilities in some of our state's electronic voting systems and she acted responsibly to address those. That's her job -- what she's elected to do as secretary of state."

But some vendors and county elections officials were upset at the decisions, saying it will take unnecessary time and expense to address her new requirements, and that her review was conducted under unrealistic conditions.

Sequoia, whose machines are used in 21 counties, including Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino, said it was disappointed in Bowen's decision and called her review an unrealistic worst case scenario evaluation based on laboratory testing that did not match real-world conditions.

"Electronic voting systems have never been successfully tampered with in an actual election," said Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer. "That same statement cannot be made about lever machines and paper-based voting systems throughout our nation's history."

She added that the security attacks performed by Bowen's review team would not succeed in the real world, and instead would be prevented or detected through a paper trail audit system.

Officials with San Bernardino and Riverside counties did not return phone calls.

Steve Weir, the clerk-recorder for Contra Costa County and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said the idea of reviewing voting systems was a good one, but that Bowen implemented it the wrong way.

"I think she's done more to move the ball in the wrong direction, by having an improper system to do the review, by not actually putting in place and testing against what we have as already the protections, and then telling the community out there your voting is damaged, but we're going to fix it," Weir said. "That doesn't feel good to me."

harrison.sheppard(at)dailynews.com

[phone]

CAPTION(S):

box

Box:

E-VOTING TROUBLE