Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, January 13, 2006
San Bernadino Sun, January 12, 2005

Confidence in the voting system is expected to build this year as San Bernardino and Riverside counties offer voters a paper printout to review choices before casting their ballot.

Since state law requires that electronic voting machines provide a voter-verifiable paper trail this year, both counties are taking steps to ensure the June 6 primary election runs smoothly.

San Bernardino County, which was the first in the state to use the technology on Election Day last November, has color coded printer cables to ensure poll workers plug them into the correct port.

To keep pace with neighboring counties and state law, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed to buy 3,700 new touch-screen voting machines equipped with printers to allow voters to review their choices.

"This will give the voter an extra bit of confidence that they can see the ballot on a paper record stored in our office," said Barbara Dunmore, Riverside County's registrar of voters.

The machines, ordered from Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, are $3,500 each, bringing the cost to more than $12 million. A $7.5 million federal grant from the Help America Vote Act and a $1.9 million trade-in discount from Sequoia will help defray the cost.

The Help America Vote Act, which was signed into law October 2002, allocated $3.75 billion in federal grants so counties can replace antiquated voting systems. More than 700 counties, including San Bernardino and Riverside, have cashed in.

Riverside County switched to touch-screen machines for the 2000 presidential election, making it the first county in the state to use that technology.

But San Bernardino County was ahead of the game when county officials spent $13 million on about 4,000 voting machines in July 2003. Sequoia Systems' paper-trail machines were not state-certified at that time, but the company added the technology immediately after.

"It does cost a little extra on our end in training poll workers but it adds confidence to the voting process," said Kari Verjil, registrar for San Bernardino County. "Overall, it's a positive change."

Although paper jams and circuit failures with the electronic voting machines added to the strain of Election Day last year, Verjil said the small glitches are offset by increasing voter confidence.

Not everyone, though, thinks the system inspires confidence.

The Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank, has released a study saying the paper trail is costly and unnecessary because most voters are satisfied with the existing touch-screen systems.

An opinion poll conducted by Global Market Insite found that 51 percent of voting and non-voting Americans trust automated voting machines as is.

Vince Vasquez, a public policy researcher who co-authored the study, said the paper trail makes it more cumbersome for election officials and does not take into account at-risk voters like the blind and elderly who cannot read the printout.

"With the paper trail, we're sacrificing the benefits of e-voting: efficiency, speed, reliability," he said.

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