Four days after California's chief elections officer outlined a new review of voting machines used in the state, local elections officials say they have significant concerns about not only the timeline... but about the way the review will be conducted.
This afternoon, the California Association of Clerks And Election Officials (CACEO) submitted a formal response to the voting machine review now being organized by Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Last Thursday, Bowen unveiled a draft of the criteria to be used in the new review.
And the clock is ticking. The secretary set the deadline for public comment to be this Friday, and said she will declare the criteria to be final and official no later than next Friday; that's just 15 days in all.
The CACEO response says Bowen's plans sound reasonable... on the surface, that is. But that seems to be where the happy talk ends.
The major concerns:
* Local elections officials question an investigation that focuses almost exclusively on the security and reliability of electronic touch-screen machines. What about paper-based voting systems? "This, to be correct, ought to [include] all systems," said Steve Weir, registrar of voters in Contra Costa County and CACEO president.
* Bowen's plan would allow teams of 'hackers' to try and gain access to a machine's memory system. But the CACEO says that plan "disregards the real world election environment." The group is also critical of Bowen's plan to allow the 'hacker team' to possibly have access to the internal source code of the touch-screen machines. "Any system can be attacked if source code is made available," says their official response.
* Finally, there seems to be serious angst about the timeline for this review of voting machines... given not only the new February 5, 2008 presidential primary, but local elections in some parts of California this November. "You can't go through this review process on a fast track," Weir said in a phone interview this afternoon.
Bowen's campaign for the job of secretary of state relied heavily on her promise to take a second look at voting machine security and reliability. But as of now, it seems many of her local partners in that process aren't so sure that she's picked the right path.
