http://www.chicoer.com/news/bayarea/ci_3577250
3/07/2006
E-vote pioneer will return to paper ballots
Piedmont, first in state to use touch screens, returns to
old technology in city balloting today
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
For elections, Alameda County is headed back to the future,
and what that future looks like will play out today in the city of Piedmont.
After six years of electronic ballots, voters in Piedmont's
municipal elections will be marking their choices on paper ballots, and so far
that is the direction Alameda County is headed for the June primary.
The city has a history of being a pioneer in voting
technologies for the county, even for the state. Piedmont made California
history in 1999 with the state's first election conducted on ATM-like
touch-screen voting machines. Riverside County and Alameda County were close
behind, and by the last statewide race more than a third of state voters were
casting fully electronic ballots.
Yet paperless touch-screen voting has fallen from favor
after three years of criticism from computer scientists and voting activists
who say fraud and errors on the machines can be virtually undetectable.
California and many other states now require that voters have some form of
paper printout to double-check their electronic vote and that elections
officials use that paper for recounts.
But most voting machine makers did not adapt their touch
screens for printers intime for use in elections this spring and early summer.
So Piedmont is headed back to plain paper ballots, and so probably is Alameda,
at least for the June elections.
Voters in Piedmont or anywhere in the county also will have
a chance to experiment today with a new, low-tech variant designed for those
with disabilities. It is a ballot-marking tablet called VotePad, with plastic
pages and audio instructions to guide voters in marking their choices. Ellen
Theisen, founder of VotersUnite, led the invention of VotePad as a simple,
nontechnical answer to the demand and federal legal requirement for
handicapped-accessible voting. Elections workers at the city community center
and other polling places will be on hand to help voters try out the VotePad.
Acting Alameda County Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold has
been around long enough to see voting systems come full circle, from the old
paper punch cards to paperless electronic voting and now back to optically
scanned paper.
"I think there's a lot of irony in it," she said
Monday. "It's very interesting that five years later we're here in this
position without any electronic voting equipment."
Contact Ian Hoffman at
ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.
© 2006 Chico Enterprise-Record
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