Riverside County officials say they're considering a range of voting systems for the Feb. 5 presidential primary elections, with leased equipment and hand-counted paper ballots among the options.

The county will be allowed to use only about 600 of the 3,700 Sequoia Edge touch-screen voting terminals that it owns, under an Aug. 3 directive from Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Citing a threat posed by hackers, Bowen limited each polling place to one, to serve elderly or disabled voters.

As a result, county officials say they will be hard-pressed to acquire, test and set up a system that would meet Bowen's standards. Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore said in interviews earlier this month that a system of scannable paper ballots appeared to be the most promising. The county could buy 600 or so scanners from Sequoia at a cost of about $6 million, Dunmore said.

But Dunmore and two supervisors assigned to study the transition have since decided to expand their search. One option would be to lease the same 600 terminals for the February and June elections for a fraction of the cost, Supervisor Marion Ashley said.

Hand-counted paper ballots, which most jurisdictions abandoned in the 1950s and '60s, also remain a possibility, albeit a distant one. Most polling stations would have between 300 and 500 people voting, Ashley said, requiring more than the half-dozen citizens that have worked most stations in recent elections.

"It probably would be awfully hard to muster that many people and train them," Ashley said Monday.

Dunmore had suggested the Sequoia system because, she said, it would probably more easily sync up with Sequoia software that the county uses to run its elections. She said Monday that she's still looking into that issue. Dunmore is expected to issue a written recommendation before Aug. 28, when the Board of Supervisors reconvenes after its one-month summer recess.

A group of Southwest County voter activists criticized the move, calling it favoritism toward Sequoia. They sharpened that criticism after learning that elections officials in San Bernardino County, which has used a Sequoia system similar to Riverside's, might spend just $1.5 million adjusting to Bowen's requirements.

The county has already paid Sequoia some $30 million on a series of voting systems. That figure includes upgrade equipment required by state and federal law; federal grants have offset several million dollars of that total.

San Bernardino County Registrar Kari Verjil said that she's recommending just $1.5 million in additional equipment, including the voting booths that would be included in the $6 million Riverside County plan.

Verjil's recommendation, to be adopted or rejected by her county's Board of Supervisors today, is that voters mark their choices on paper ballots that would be sorted at each precinct and then hauled back to the registrar's office in San Bernardino for counting on the same Sequoia high-speed scanners it uses for absentee ballots. The county already has enough scanners to handle the job, but the results could take longer than with touch-screen machines, Verjil said.

Riverside County already plans to replace its 20-year-old scanners. Candidates are the Sequoia scanners used in San Bernardino and a system used in Orange and other counties, Ashley said.

If Riverside County does go forward with Dunmore's original suggestion, it could have to replace the machines as soon as 2010, when federal law will begin to require that each ballot be scanned electronically, photographed and maintained in order to provide two layers of backup in case the scanning process goes awry. That, Ashley said, is another reason to seek a temporary solution for 2008, such as the lease.

"We're trying to get the best we can for this election," Ashley said. "We want to make sure that we do it fast and transparently. Most of all, we want it to be accurate."

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