Voting system called vulnerable

SACRAMENTO - Voting-rights experts on Monday said Los Angeles County's electronic voting system is vulnerable to fraud and hacking and urged officials to return to the practice of publicly counting paper ballots.

Speaking at a hearing held to determine whether the county's electronic system should be recertified, several independent voting-rights activists said they had doubts about the system marketed by Omaha-based Election Systems & Software Inc.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified the county's InkaVote Plus system in August because a vendor failed to provide information and equipment on time to consultants performing a review of voting systems throughout the state.

The information was later submitted and the consultants finished their report last week, finding that the system's safeguards could be thwarted in a variety of ways, from unsealing the boxes that hold the equipment to finding holes in the software that could allow confidential information to be decrypted.

Judith Alter, director of Protect California Ballots, said reports from poll workers and poll watchers over the past year indicate a wide variety of problems with the ES&S machines, as well as other systems in use by Los Angeles County, including machines that jammed or did not turn on properly.

"Please return to publicly counted paper ballots, counted at the precincts, tabulated on adding machines with no software," Alter said. "The mathematical process
Advertisement
of adding numbers is not proprietary. Without ballots counted in public, we don't have democratic elections."

County officials expect Bowen to recertify the system with a series of requirements for new security measures, as she did for the other voting systems that she reviewed earlier this year.

Dean Logan, chief deputy of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's Office, said the office is confident the system will work with a minimum of security concerns.

They are ready to work with Bowen on whatever new security restrictions she recommends.

He said the testing conducted by Bowen's consultants did not include many of the procedural safeguards followed by county officials during real elections.

He also noted that the InkaVote Plus system is not used for tabulating the countywide vote. Instead, it's limited to the specific purposes of assisting the disabled and catching mistakes made by voters in marking the ballots.

Logan said the timeline for a decision from Bowen is getting short, as the February primary is nearing, and the county only has 26 days before it has to have the ballots ready for voters in time for early and absentee voting.

ES&S did not send a representative to the hearing. An official with International Lottery & Totalizator Systems Inc., which designed the system for ES&S, attended the hearing, but declined comment afterward saying the company was still evaluating the report.

harrison.sheppard@dailynews.com 916-446-6723