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Alameda County’s Paper Ballots May Cause Delays

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Times Staff Writer

Voters in Alameda County, the most strongly Democratic of the state’s big counties, will use paper ballots for tonight’s election, raising fears that a tardy vote count might delay overnight results for the party’s gubernatorial primary.

The battle between state Treasurer Phil Angelides and state Controller Steve Westly was a dead heat going into today’s election, and both candidates were counting on an advantage in Alameda County, home to an estimated 5.7% of the state’s 6.6 million Democrats.

Officials say a final count could come as late as noon Wednesday.

“If there’s a cliffhanger, we know that all eyes could be on our vote count,” said Guy Ashley, a spokesman for the Alameda County Registrar of Voters in Oakland. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure when we do have the vote results, we will have good results.”

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The Angelides camp on Monday said it hoped for a declared winner by late Tuesday.

“It certainly could extend things,” spokesman Dan Newman said of Alameda County’s use of paper ballots. “But we’re cautiously optimistic that we’ll have enough votes Tuesday night to put Phil over the top. That said, we want to make sure that every vote is counted fairly.”

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted in March to shelve its electronic voting machines until it could replace about 4,000 Diebold Election System touch-screen machines. The decision to revert to paper ballots came after officials realized they would not have enough replacement machines to serve the area’s 830 polling stations.

Alameda County was among 18 statewide to be sued in March by a California-based voter rights group over its use of the touch-screen electronic machines.

Voting methods became a nationwide issue during ballot recounts in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, when the reliability of punch-card ballots was called into question. Many counties switched to electronic machines, bringing a new spate of concerns.

“The systems that record votes electronically are highly vulnerable to tampering,” said Lowell Finley, an election law attorney and co-director of the nonprofit group Voter Action, which also filed similar lawsuits in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado.

“They’re extremely difficult to audit. And they have a history of miscounting votes.”

Ashley said the county has used the touch-screen voting machines for the last five years. “They’ve been pretty good, but there are some folks in the county who don’t like them,” he said. “Activists have been making noise. There have been problems elsewhere.”

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Ashley said that 40% of county residents already use paper mail-in ballots, and officials say they will go to paper ballots full time. “The future with us will be paper ballots,” he said.

The county has trained 90 workers to count the ballots. Over the weekend, officials invited candidates to view the process. About 40 local office-seekers showed up, although Angelides and Westly were busy campaigning.

“We’ve trained people how to feed the paper ballots into optical scanners,” Ashley said. “It’s not rocket science, but it takes a while. I’m content that by Wednesday morning at the latest, we’ll have a result and it will be accurate.”

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