March was not a good month for the reputation of touch-screen voting machines.

In Chicago and surrounding Cook County, the nation's second-most populous, several of the machines failed in the March 21 primary elections. There were problems combining vote totals from those machines with the totals from a separate system. Losers from both major political parties later claimed that not all the votes had been counted, though elections officials disputed that.

New Mexico has decided to get rid of touch-screen machines altogether. A bill passed earlier this year will eventually require all counties in the state to use a system of paper ballots that would be marked with ink and counted electronically. Advocates insisted that voters had lost confidence in their touch-screen systems, which produced no tangible record of each vote and whose electronic counting process couldn't be double-checked by the average voter with the naked eye.

In Northern California, Alameda County, which adopted the touch screen machines five years ago, decided to put the machines aside and use inkable paper ballots for the June primary. Elections officials there said they couldn't make the machines comply with a state law requiring each voter to have a paper version of his or her vote.

In Riverside County, a pioneer in electronic voting, voters are preparing next month to use a new touch-screen voting system that is designed to allay many of these problems and concerns. Several watchdog groups fret, however, that the improvements won't be enough to save the voting and counting processes from delays and glitches like those that have cropped up in Chicago and several other communities across the nation.

Worse, the groups say, the machines could still fall victim from outright hacking attempts, though no such attempts have been conclusively documented.

"The security issues are so serious that we have doubts that the necessary measures could be put in place to ensure that the systems are bulletproof," said Tom Courbat, a member of the Temecula-area chapter of Democracy For America, which is organizing volunteers from a range of local political parties to monitor voting and vote-counting in the June 6 primary.

Courbat and other activists say the very process of democracy is at stake.

The currency of democracy

The touch-screen machines that Riverside County is buying are made by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, which provides election equipment to 20 of California's 58 counties. Of the other 38 counties, 33 rely mainly on equipment from just two other companies.

The software used to run the companies' machines is intellectual property; they don't open it to extensive public scrutiny, and watchdog groups such as Courbat's protest that elections officials can't rewrite it to make it incompatible with software that hackers might use. Courbat compares it to the software used in Nevada's privately owned casinos, which is open to inspection by the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

"The currency of democracy is much less protected than the money that people are just gambling away," Courbat said. "Does the public own this system or is it outsourced to a private company? That is the question. Who owns the common good?"

Riverside County's new machines are virtually identical to the ones they're replacing, but with a key addition: A small printer attached to the side of each new terminal creates a paper record of each vote.

The county is paying $14.9 million for the 3,700 terminals, minus a $2 million credit it received for returning the first-generation machines to Sequoia. The county is also receiving about $7.5 million in federal funds to help cover the purchase, according to Riverside County Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore.

The purchase follows an order by California's chief elections official in November 2003. Responding to computer scientists and voting-rights activists who protested that touch-screen voting machines were vulnerable to tampering before or during an election, then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered all touch-screen machines to produce a paper record of each vote by 2006. Such a record would be a tangible, easily understandable way to check the accuracy of each machine.

Hand counts

Elections officials have long performed recounts on one precinct out of every 100, and a state law passed last year requires elections officials to use the printed paper records to double-check the electronic tally. If recounts disagree with the computers, officials can order a general recount.

Susan Marie Weber, who is vice chairwoman of the Libertarian Party of Riverside County, said she doesn't trust elections officials to select precincts on a truly random basis. The process uses computer software programs that Weber considers just as secretive as the tabulation systems inside the computerized voting system.

"If we had a system that was totally transparent, we could stand around and watch the votes" being counted, she said. "And now you've switched to something that lacks all transparency."

The worst-case scenario envisioned by critics is that a rogue county employee -- or even a politically motivated computer expert hacking in from outside -- could reprogram an individual machine or even the central tallying computer to change votes from one candidate to another.

Fears of such a breach have grown since 2003, when computer science professors at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University concluded that a similar system made by Ohio-based Diebold Inc. could be fairly easily hacked.

The printer is designed to address just such a risk. The voter is supposed to check the printed record before leaving the booth; it remains on the spool and is kept by elections officials in case of a recount.

Riverside is one of 18 counties expecting to use Sequoia touch-screens and printers next month; several other counties expect to use similar systems made by Diebold. About 150 of the new-generation Sequoia machines were used earlier this year for city elections in Rancho Mirage and Riverside, with no major incidents reported. The county has received 1,325 of the new machines, with 2,375 yet to come, according to Dunmore.

Dunmore and officials from Sequoia say Courbat's and Weber's concern over the system is overblown. They note the lack of evidence that either the new system or its predecessor has ever produced an incorrect tally of the votes in Riverside County.

"I can't speak to Cook County, Ill.," Dunmore said. "All I know is that we've conducted 36 successful elections on them."

Nobody has ever seriously challenged the actual results from Riverside County's electronic machines, which have been used since 2000. But worries over the counting process, which occurs on the tiny copper filaments and silicon chips inside the machines, have prompted at least one challenge by a losing candidate.

A chance to shine

Members of Courbat's group and several members of small political parties say they worry that large numbers of phony votes could slip through the double-check, which has to include all ballots in at least 1 percent of voting precincts. Dunmore said election officials double-checked between 15 percent and 20 percent of the votes in the two recent city elections, with perfect results.

The chief problem is that touch-screen systems are more complicated, voting activists on local, state and national levels say. Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said she believes the most secure option is a system of ballots that voters mark with ink and feed into electronic scanners, partly thanks to the relative visibility of the counting process. Such systems, like those recently chosen by New Mexico, are already in use in the counties of San Diego and Los Angeles.

"The success of every election depends on how well every election procedure is followed," said Alexander, whose nonprofit group monitors elections statewide. "You're counting on hundreds, if not thousands, of people to do that. There is a lot of new equipment being used (June 6) for the first time, and the primary is a complicated election. It will be a challenging day."

In another sense, complicated elections give touch-screen machines a chance to shine, advocates say. Unlike paper ballots, which typically have to be printed in two, three or more languages, a touch-screen user can select the appropriate language at the terminal. When considering the touch-screen system for 2000, Riverside County officials estimated it would save them some $600,000 in paper costs each election year, though Dunmore recently said that figure has to be adjusted to account for the 40 percent of voters who use absentee ballots.

Advocates of touch-screen voting point out that every system provides opportunities for glitches and fraud. Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for Sequoia, said most of the problems that cropped up in March arose from procedures that are unique to Chicago and Cook County. For one, local election laws required each polling place to combine the vote totals from its touch-screen machines with totals from the machines that counted inked ballots. Moreover, she said, those two jurisdictions had switched directly from punch-card machines.

Many counties nationwide used Votomatic and similar punch-card systems until just a few years ago. When it first debuted, in the 1960s, some security experts claimed that its computer-based counting system could be hacked, too.

But in the end, the simple mechanism of punching a metal stylus through a piece of paper was the systems' undoing, in Florida's 2000 presidential election. The scale of confusion there was as great as any cited by skeptics of touch-screens.

Big improvement, but …

Many users have praised the touch-screens as easier to use than paper ballots even as others have reported difficulty getting the right candidate to light up on the screen in front of them.

Skeptics such as Courbat and Alexander say the printers are big improvements over the paperless touch-screen machines they're replacing. Members of Courbat's group also say they've noted new security measures Dunmore has taken since taking office: For example, she has pledged to keep the vote-counting computer disconnected from the county's intranet, thus blocking a particularly wide avenue for potential hackers. But that broken connection is also one of several points that Courbat wants volunteers to monitor next month.

Skeptics in Riverside County also acknowledge the convenience and relative speed of counting votes from touch-screen computers. But they also worry that convenience and speed may have eclipsed the larger issues of security and reliability. As Alexander put it, having election results by midnight doesn't count for much if they remain in doubt afterward.

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.