The audit trail is required for Tuesday's primary vote to ensure that election officials adhere to a state law passed in 2005. The statute requires that the ballots of 1 percent of the votes cast in each precinct be manually tallied to ensure the accuracy of e-voting systems.
The new law expands on an earlier statute that requires voters using optical scan devices to also register their votes on paper so they can be audited. Now, all machines, including touch-screen systems, must compile a paper trail of votes.
A spokeswoman for California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said that 37 of the state's 58 counties use touch-screen systems.
"Every voting system in California will have a paper trail in 2006," the spokeswoman said. "Voters will have the opportunity to verify their vote via a paper record, which verifies that their vote cast was indeed the vote that was recorded."
As California has moved to implement the new law, it has also been working to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act, which requires the establishment of a statewide voter registration database and that every voting precinct have a handicapped-accessible e-voting system. "These are sizeable mandates, and it is no easy task, but it is also a duty we do not take lightly," McPherson's spokeswoman said.
San Diego County already successfully completed an election -- a special election held on April 11 -- with a paper trail for every vote cast, said Mikel Haas, registrar of voters.
Haas noted that the statute doesn't require that voters receive personal paper confirmation of their vote. It only requires that a printed record be retained in the voting machine for use in audits.
The latest California effort is placating some critics of e-voting, who have argued that touch-screen technology is open to tampering and fraud.
"California's June primary ushers in a new era of accountability and transparency in state elections," said Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit voting-technology advocacy group, in a statement last month. "Election officials rely on proprietary software produced by private companies to count the votes," and a paper trail can ensure that election audits are possible, said Alexander.
Others, like Brad Friedman, whose BradBlog.com Web site covers electronic voting issues, say the California measure remains too weak. Friedman describes the audit of 1 percent of precincts as a "ridiculously" small sample.
"I think it's clear that paper trails are the absolute minimum requirement for valid and accountable elections at this point," he said.
California state Sen. Debra Bowen, a Democrat who is running in a primary election for the right to take on McPherson, a Republican, for the secretary of state post, agreed that the new audit requirements remain inadequate. For example, some counties aren't including absentee ballots in the manual vote requirement, which she called a "huge loophole."