“ELECTION 2006: Oakland Mayor’s Race; Dellums still holds slim lead 2 days after election day; Counting continues in close race – 50% would avoid runoff”

The SF Chronicle offers this report. A snippet:

    On Thursday, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted to purchase new voting equipment in time for the Nov. 7 election to avoid a repeat of Tuesday night’s marathon 15-hour manual vote count.
    Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. of Oakland will provide 1,000 optical scanners and 1,000 touch-screen voting computers for each of the county’s 830 polling places at a cost of $13.5 million.
    Having been burned by faulty e-voting systems before, supervisors added a caveat to the contract: The new machines must first pass a professional hacker test before the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office accepts delivery. If they fail, Sequoia must pay for any fixes.
    If all goes well, voters in November can expect to fill in bubbles on paper ballots, and those ballots will be hand-fed through Sequoia’s scanners and recorded in a central database. Each polling site also will have at least one touch-screen voting computer for the disabled — or anyone else wishing to use them. Those machines will produce a printout on a paper roll that is saved inside the computer.

See also this NY Times story on the voting machine business.

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