Faced with questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines, the Pima County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday to postpone a $2 million purchase of voting equipment.
The county had planned to buy touch-screen machines to help people with disabilities vote on their own, in compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act, County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said.
They were to have come from Diebold, a Texas company that produces automatic tellers and electronic voting machines.
"We believe they're the most appropriate means for people with disabilities to cast secret ballots," Huckelberry said.
The state would reimburse the county for the machines, one of which would be placed in each precinct in time for the September primary election. Most voters would continue to vote on paper ballots counted by optical scanners, also produced by Diebold.
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But activists have charged the machines can be tampered with and don't provide a paper record that could be checked if fraud is suspected.
About a dozen people, including Democratic state Rep. Ted Downing, Pima County Democratic Party Chairwoman Donna Branch-Gilby and Democratic secretary of state candidate Bruce Wheeler, attended the board meeting to voice concerns about the machines and ask the supervisors to postpone the decision.
The supervisors said they have enough questions to wait. They'll take up the matter May 16, election day.
"This is a bipartisan issue," said Supervisor Ray Carroll, a Republican. "We need to have confidence in the votes."
Downing said he is in the midst of negotiations over legislation that would create an auditing system to provide a safeguard if electronic voting is adopted. The bill calls for electronic votes to be checked against a paper record in a random sample of 2 percent of precincts in each county. If problems appear, a wider recount would be conducted.
"The integrity of any election depends on our ability to reconstruct it," Downing said. "This machine will not be able to do this."
Brad Nelson, director of elections for Pima County, said the machine would keep a paper record of each ballot on a roll of paper inside the machine. That roll would be sealed and signed by Democratic and Republican polling place monitors.
But opponents said the paper, similar to the paper on which ATM receipts are printed, would not last long enough to be reliable should a recount be necessary. They pointed to concerns raised by the Republican governor of Maryland, where Diebold touch-screen voting machines will be used in every county for the fall elections, and the Democratic governor of New Mexico, where the Legislature decided to return to paper ballots.
Linda Lamone, administrator of elections for the state of Maryland, said she has confidence in the machines.
"Paper historically has been the source of most problems with elections," Lamone said. "There has never been a proven allegation of fraud with electronic voting."
Huckelberry said the concerns came from states where everyone cast their votes electronically, while most Pima County voters will continue to vote on paper. But Carroll said all votes should have the same safeguards.
