Problems in the poll booth

Some Colusa County residents voting in the February primaries may hit a roadblock on their way to the polls - an investigation into whether 20 of its electronic voting machines lacked the state’s approval.

The office of Secretary of State Debra Bowen is looking into whether Election Systems & Software sold the machines to Colusa and four other counties without state-required certification. A hearing on the controversy is set for Monday in Sacramento, and the voting equipment firm faces possible fines or a suspension from the California market.

“This isn’t the counties’ fault; it’s the company’s fault,” Nicole Winger, Bowen’s assistant secretary of communications, said Tuesday.

An after-hours call to ES&S’s Omaha, Neb. headquarters was not returned.

The state probe began in August and involves the company’s AutoMARK, which allows disabled voters to record their choice of candidates onto paper ballots.

ES&S sold 972 of the disputed machines statewide, according to Winger. San Francisco County bought 558 units, more than half the total, with Marin, Solano and Marin purchasing the rest.

Colusa County bought the ES&S devices in July 2006, largely because the firm earlier had supplied the optical-scan ballot counters the county has used since 2003, according to Clerk-Recorder Kathleen Moran, who supervises county elections. (The optical-scan system, which reads pencil marks on paper ballots, is not a subject of the state inquiry.)

But unknown to county election officials, the state says, ES&S did not sell counties the original version of the machine but an updated one with plugs and other controls moved around - changes that requires a new round of testing and certification, according to state officials.

“There wasn’t a distinction between phase one and phase two; they were just the machines,” Moran said. “I wasn’t aware of any (separate) versions.”

What we’re trying to determine is what sort of unauthorized changes were (made) in the software or firmware of the system,” said Winger. “These are to the plain eye markedly different machines.”

Officials from Bowen’s office on Monday will meet ES&S officials to try to learn whether the firm made more important changes to the voting machines before selling them, Winger said.

If Bowen rules that ES&S sold unapproved equipment to the counties, the company could face sanctions ranging from forced reimbursement to a three-year ban on selling elections systems in California.

Any ruling would not affect Colusa’s City Council election Nov. 6, which Colusa County is conducting by mail. The county is arranging to borrow 20 early-model ES&S machines from other counties for the February primaries.

One of the nation’s largest builders of vote-counting equipment, ES&S claims customers in 43 states, but media reports have pointed to numerous complaints in several states about electronic and mechanical glitches.

In Florida, touchscreen ES&S machines were linked to an election brouhaha last November, when the Republican Vern Buchanan won the Congressional seat for the state’s 13th District in a close and disputed race against Christine Jennings, a Democrat who refused to concede defeat. A judge stymied Jennings’ demand to inspect the equipment’s programming code, which she alleged “lost” up to 18,000 votes for her.

Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune can be reached at 749-4708. You may e-mail him at hyune@appealdemocrat.com.