California Secretary of State Debra Bowen sparked national headlines last week when she decertified all electronic voting systems now being used across the Golden State.

Bowen said she would allow local election officials limited use of DVR systems from Diebold and Sequoia on a one-per voting place basis for disabled voters, as well as optical scan systems plus DVR from those two firms and competing systems from Hart.

Media reaction to Bowen's decision was mixed at best. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, headlined its story "touch vote machine ban hurts counties," and reported that "… Bowen has made it clear she doesn't trust touch-screen voting systems, and Napa and Santa Clara counties are going to pay the price."

Some weren't cheering Bowen. "The tests, run by computer scientists from the University of California, were "not objective or fair," said Steve Weir, Contra Costa County registrar and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Bowen "was on a mission and accomplished it. She created a feeling of crisis and mistrust, and now it's in her best interest to solve that."

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If you read the reports on her website, the justification seems obvious to me - as a technology professional, I can tell you that issues like these are critical: "The testers discovered numerous ways to overwrite the firmware of the Sequoia Edge system, using (for example) malformed font files and doctored update cartridges....At this point, the attackers controlled the machine, and could manipulate the results of the election. "The testers found numerous ways to overwrite the firmware in the AccuVote TSx. These attacks could change vote totals, among other results. The testers were able to escalate privileges from those of a voter to those of a poll worker or central count administrator. This enabled them to reset an election, issue unauthorized voter cards, and close polls. No knowledge of the security keys was needed.

"They also found an undisclosed account on the Hart software that an attacker who penetrated the host operating system could exploit to gain unauthorized access to the Hart election management database." But this isn't as much a technology problem as a political problem. We live in a politics that's divided on a razor's edge - where trust in each other, in the other party, and ultimately in the legitimacy of our government is becoming a scarce commodity - and so we need to have total confidence that the ref isn't shaving the score. You know I'm a big believer in the need to have good plumbing - I talked about that is an earlier piece here on voting.

Because the infrastructure - the plumbing - of our society is something we pay very little attention to. And yet when infrastructure fails - as we saw in Minneapolis last week or Manhattan two weeks ago - it fails spectacularly. Our electoral plumbing is also creaky and in bad shape; Florida in 2000 was bad - but at least the votes could be recounted (over and over again). With today's insecure DVR technology, the problem is that we will have more races like the one in Sarasota Florida in 2006 - in which there was a 15% under-vote possibly due to a glitch in the ES & S DVR systems. The final results in the race can never be audited, and the loser litigated to try and get the election run over again. Look, no voting system - no human system - is perfect, or exempt from error, fraud, or challenge. But just as our bridges need to strong enough to ensure that they don't spontaneously collapse, our voting systems need to be robust enough that we're not left in bitter dispute after an election on who voted and how. We don't need voting technology less secure than airport poker machines in Vegas and less auditable than Enron's books. This isn't a partisan issue. It isn't something that 'we can get to later.' A political system everyone agrees is legitimate should last us a long time. And if officials at all levels of government have to work a little harder and spend a little money to maintain and defend the fairness of our political system, I can think of nothing better for them to work on. Can you?

Marc Danziger is a member of The Examiner's Board of Bloggers and blogs at windsofchange.net.