Welcome to the Machines

Those electronic voting machines everybody loves could be coming to a voting place near you as San Francisco is looking into signing a $12.6 million four-year contract with Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. The proposed contract would give us 610 optical scan voting machines (machines that read a paper ballot) and 610 touch-screen voter machine for the disabled.

But before we sign anything, the city is asking Sequioa systems, the makers of the machines, two things. One is a paper trail, something that has been a large source of controversy because up until this point, there wasn't any. This meant that when things get screwed up, as they have, there's a way of tracking things or at least figuring out what the real vote count was. The other is some information on the software. This is another issue because nobody really knows how those suckers work. If they're said to be easily hackable and not very secure, it's good to know how the things works to see what could possibly go wrong. Especially since nobody trusts those things anyways.

Yesterday, a hearing of the Budget and Finance Committee was held to discuss the proposed contract. It was hoped that a decision would be made one way or the other about the machines but no decision was made. The reason is because after attempts by the Board of Supes (mainly Chris Daly and Tom Ammiano) to get Sequoia to give up the goods about their software, Sequoia refused to give it up. No software, no dice. So we're back to where we were before.

If the deal isn't completed with Sequoia, election director John Arntz says he might have to go buy more expensive, not quite so up-to-date voting machines elsewhere.