New restrictions imposed by the state on electronic voting machines will have little effect on Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, which both use systems incorporating paper ballots, local election officials said.

However, tallying votes on election nights may be delayed as much as two hours, they said, because the results from polling places now must be hand-delivered to elections headquarters rather than remotely transmitted.

The two counties were among dozens whose voting equipment was decertified as part of a sweeping order last week by Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The local machines and counting procedures will be recertified, though, well before the presidential primary in February, officials predicted.

“There are a few procedural things that she (Bowen) wants us to do from a security standpoint, but most of those are already in place,” said Santa Barbara County Clerk-Recorder-Assessor Joe Holland. “It's just a matter of documenting what we're doing.”

He estimated that will take no more than 60 days.

In San Luis Obispo County, the impact “is going to be fairly minimal,” echoed Julie Rodewald, that county's clerk-recorder and registrar of voters. “The biggest result will be that we can't send results electronically on election night from polling places - which was done in the past - but will have to drive them into election offices” in downtown San Luis Obispo from all areas of the county. She estimated that will mean a delay of 90 minutes to two hours in tallying all the votes.

Both counties use paper ballots and counting machines with optical scanners for all elections. Disabled voters are allowed to use touch screens for voting, but even those Automark machines produce paper ballots that are then run through the optical scanners.

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Under Bowen's order, “other counties that have electronic voting machines are having to replace those with ones that use paper ballots,” Holland said. “We always wanted to stay with paper ballots because that, to me, is the security feature that gives the highest degree of confidence that the results are accurate. We were offered the opportunity to go to electronic ballots on many occasions,” but opted not to.

“It turns out that was the right decision,” he added.

Due to concerns that electronic voting machines aren't secure enough, and could be vulnerable to hackers under certain circumstances, Bowen is allowing no more than one such machine in each polling place.

Some counties that widely used the electronic machines now will have to collectively spend an estimated $35 million statewide to replace them with optical-scanning equipment.

Optical scanners count the votes from each paper ballot as it is inserted into the machine. The results are stored in a memory card sealed inside the machine.

Previously, after the polls closed, the vote totals from each polling place could be electronically transmitted via modem to a central computer at election headquarters. That's no longer allowed under Bowen's order, so memory cards from the scanners will have to be transported to a central location to tally the votes with a computer, Rodewald said.

Although it may take slightly longer for the final results to be known, voters won't notice any difference in procedures or equipment at polling places in either county, the local officials said.

Holland stressed that extensive safeguards are in place to ensure the accuracy of the optical scanners, including random sampling and hand-counting of some paper ballots to double-check the machine results.

Chuck Schultz can be reached at 925-2691, Ext. 2241, or cschultz@santamariatimes.com.

August 9, 2007