Council debate urges paper backup as electronic voting systems considered
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Summary
Los Angeles City Council members debated touchscreen and electronic voting systems, with multiple members urging any system include a tangible paper ballot for hand recounts; county election officials warned that a new state 15‑day registration rule will increase provisional ballots.
Los Angeles — Council members spent the opening portion of the meeting debating whether to pursue touchscreen or other electronic voting systems and what safeguards would be required.
Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg said the city should examine systems that immediately produce a paper ballot that voters can fold and place in a box. “I think we will always need to have a paper backup that someone can hand count if there's a challenge,” Goldberg said, urging pilots that create an auditable paper record.
Several members raised security concerns. “If they can break into systems that have the type of security as the Pentagon … someone's gonna figure out how to do this,” said Councilman Holden, who also invoked past recount problems in Florida and cautioned about power outages and header‑card vulnerabilities that can misallocate ballots. Holden recounted early problems with punch‑card header cards that altered precinct allocations, saying the computers could not detect where votes actually originated.
A county elections official told the council the county has been placing registration forms at public counters and has partnered on a digitized absentee and registration system intended to speed processing. He also warned that a new state law allowing registration up to 15 days before an election is likely to increase the number of provisional ballots the county must handle: “My anticipation is that we're gonna have a considerably higher number of provisionals,” he said, and precinct workers must accept provisional ballots and sort them after Election Day.
Council members emphasized the two parallel goals of improving access and maintaining confidence in results. Councilmember discussion produced a motion to amend the committee report to include a local analysis of recent electronic voting experiences and the economics of piloting systems in Los Angeles; the motion passed on a recorded vote (14 ayes).
Next steps: the council asked staff to include a Los Angeles–specific review of recent electronic voting experiments and to analyze costs and safeguards, and asked that findings be returned to the committee for further consideration.