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Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates recently threatened to explore alternative options to touchscreen voting machines if security problems aren’t worked out and the machines cannot ensure a secure and accurate vote. But City Clerk Sherry Kelly says that any switch would be an expensive project that might need approval from Berkeley voters before it could be implemented. 

On April 5, Bates wrote a letter to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and Alameda County Registrar of Voters Brad Clark asking for a full investigation into the Diebold touchscreen voting machines, presently used in all Alameda County elections. Citing problems during last October’s gubernatorial recall election as well as the March, 2004 election, the mayor threatened to explore other voting options. Bates has also placed an item on the April 20 City Council agenda that, if passed by the council, would direct city staff to “investigate legal and procedural options if the council determines that the problems have not been resolved.” 

In a letter to the council sent the same day, Bates wrote that the Diebold touchscreen “voting irregularities [in Alameda County] have raised considerable concern in the community. Yet, we have no official information from the county on the nature of the problems or efforts to fix them. It is absolutely essential for democracy to work that voters have complete faith in our electoral systems. These problems are testing the faith of the electorate and cannot be allowed to persist.” 

“It’s a critical error that needs to be investigated as soon as possible,” Bates said in a telephone interview while vacationing in North Carolina. 

But according to City Clerk Sherry Kelly, any switch could cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars. Such a move might also necessitate the city changing its charter, something that can only be done on the ballot and thus not before November. Neither Kelly nor a representative from the California secretary of state’s office were certain whether a charter change would be necessary. 

City use of optical scan or the old punch card machines—separate from the controversial Diebold touchscreen machines—could only be done in an entirely separate city-run election, whether or not such an election was held on the same day as county/state elections. Kelly estimates that each separate city-run election could cost the city between $400,000 and $500,000.  

Currently, Berkeley is one of several cities that consolidates with the county-wide election process. This allows it to use county machines, county ballots and county employees to run the election. Any switch would force the city to foot the entire bill for all of this. 

“Even if we could do it, there is the really big issue of would you want to do it,” Kelly said. 

If the city were to change voting systems, it could only run elections for local ballot measures and local officials such as mayor, City Council, rent board and auditor. Any county, state or national elections would still be run by Alameda county on the current touchscreen machines. 

In 1994 Kelly said a run-off for mayor and auditor run by the city cost Berkeley $300,000 in hard costs. That cost included the voting system, rental space for polling places, and salaries for poll workers. It did not include time spent by regular city officials. If the city ran its own elections, Kelly said she would have to hire extra staff. 

“I didn’t feel comfortable that we could administer it with the staff we had,” said Kelly. “They got through it, but it was hard.” 

The current election system still costs the city money but not nearly as much as running it on its own. Kelly said Alameda County charges the city anywhere from 80 cents to $1.50 for every voter plus a portion of the capital costs for things like voting equipment, polling staff and the paper ballots used for local ballot measures and officials. The costs are mitigated because Berkeley is just one of several cities in Alameda County that contribute to cover the entire bill. The more cities that participate in the election, the less costly it is for each city. 

“It’s a good deal in that we couldn’t do it nearly that reasonably,” said Kelly. “Because they do it on such a mass number.” 

Alameda county, in the meantime, is also trying to work out the kinks in its own system but no final decisions have been made yet. County Registrar Brad Clark has sent his own letter to Diebold demanding answers to the problems that plagued the last two elections. During the recall thousands of votes were switched from Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Southern California Socialist John Burton. The problem was eventually blamed on the county’s vote tabulating software, another Diebold product.  

During the March 2 primary hundreds of polling places county-wide experienced delays when Diebold’s card-encoder machines malfunctioned. 

So far Clark said he’s only received a preliminary report back from Diebold but no definitive answers. Clark said he’s waiting for another report from the company that they are supposed to deliver on April 26.  

Clark said the problems during the recall election were mitigated during the March 2 primaries because they had some time to try and isolate the problem. They’ve been working on strategies to do the same for the new problems that happened during the primaries. 

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