SAN DIEGO - San Diego County will push for more voters to use absentee ballots in February, county officials said Monday, two days after the state decertified the county's 10,000-plus electronic voting machines for the second time since they were bought in 2003.

County officials said getting voters to cast absentee ballots could speed up vote-counting in the presidential primary election - a process that could be lengthened by the decertification.

Meanwhile, state and county officials, electronic voting companies and their critics were still dealing with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's controversial decision late Friday to essentially ban several electronic voting systems.

San Diego County officials said voters would see paper ballots in February's presidential primaries. They also said no decisions had been made to challenge Bowen's decision or to break out of the county's 2003 agreement to spend $31 million on the again-decertified Diebold machines.

Bowen's office said that "defective, vulnerable" decertified Diebold and Sequoia Voting System machines could be made safe for use at a future date - but that Bowen felt paper ballots were a better choice.

Diebold Elections Inc. officials said they were "disappointed," and criticized Bowen's "top to bottom" review that gave computer experts unlimited time without security measures to break into electronic voting systems.

And one local electronic voting critic praised Bowen's "courage" - but said that election results should not be trusted, even with paper ballots, if they were counted by optical scanning machines instead of people.

Bowen, who was an electronic voting critic before being elected secretary of state, ordered a complete review of electronic voting systems in May. She said the review was needed even though the systems had been approved by state and federal testers because of concerns the systems could be rigged by hackers to throw elections.

On July 27, Bowen announced that University of California computer experts were able to hack into and tamper with Diebold, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems' machines.

On Friday, Bowen decided to decertify the machines. However, Bowen said the machines could be used in limited numbers - one at each polling station for disabled voters, and for early voters, as long as counties increased security.

San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, meanwhile, continued to be critical of Bowen's review of the systems Monday. Before the results were announced, Seiler said the "laboratory-style" testing that gave computer teams unlimited time to tamper with the machines was like "giving a burglar the keys to your house."

"We've been on one roller coaster after another," Seiler said. "We don't know from election to election what we're going to be allowed to use."

For the county, it was the second time its 10,000 Diebold machines had been decertified. In March 2004, when the county introduced the machines, electronic "glitches" caused 36 percent of the county's polling places to open late. That prompted then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to decertify the machines and force the county to go back to paper ballots.

San Diego County's machines were eventually recertified in 2006 after adding printers to create "paper trails," and the county used them without incident in the elections in November.

Many counties across the country moved to electronic voting systems in recent years after the 2000 Florida presidential election between George Bush and Al Gore. That election became a balloting fiasco when recounts of traditional "punch-card" ballots raised controversy over "hanging" and "dimpled" chads.

San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, and Helen Robbins-Meyer, the county's assistant chief administrative officer, said Monday that the county planned a marketing campaign to push more voters toward using absentee ballots. County officials did not have exact absentee balloting figures Monday, but Seiler said she thought about 27 percent of local voters were "permanent" absentee voters.

Seiler and Robbins-Meyer said one reason for pushing for more absentee voting was to speed up vote-counting that they now fear will be slowed by the electronic voting ban. Absentee ballots can be counted early if they're returned before election day.

Robbins-Meyer said county managers, meanwhile, were still reviewing Bowen's additional security demands - seven pages worth - for the electronic machines.

Asked if the machines could ever meet all the requirements, Robbins-Meyer said, "That's a good question."

She said a decision to either challenge Bowen's decision or break ties with Diebold was one for county supervisors. Supervisors could not be reached for comment Monday.

Meanwhile, local electronic-voting critic Ken Karan called Bowen courageous for "stepping up" to "billion-dollar corporations and their counterparts in county elections offices."

"It's a step in the right direction," Karan said. "But optical scan machines suffer from the same vulnerabilities. As long as computers are counting votes in secret using secret software, nobody is going to know with any certainty that votes reflect the will of the people."

- Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.