California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has pulled the plug on Napa County’s electronic voting machines, but Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur is not ready to go back to paper ballots.

Late Friday, Bowen announced she had decertified the $2.1 million, 350-machine Sequoia electronic touch screen voting system for Napa County. She also decertified brands used by 20 other California counties.

Bowen hired a team of computer software experts and hackers to review the machines and penetrate their security. They were successful.

An official proclamation states the team “easily circumvented” Sequoia security measures “that are supposed to protect against unauthorized use of the Sequoia voting system’s central vote counting computers and polling place equipment.”

The team also found corrupted data could be “injected” into removable media, causing damage to the system when it’s loaded for vote counting.

“They found that on all of the machines that they tested that there were a lack of built-in technological safeguards,” said Evan Goldberg, a spokesman for Bowen’s office.

Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur says there is no reason to be skeptical of the touchscreen system.

“We’ve saved money in every election up until Secretary Bowen’s misguided edict by not using paper,” he said.

In a transcript of his July 30 testimony at a public hearing on the matter in Sacramento, Tuteur said Napa County’s voting system had withstood a 2004 local court challenge, a November 2006 recount and a pilot program designed to find bugs in the system.

“California’s post-election procedures, such as the 1 percent manual tally, have proven the final results of electronic and optical scan voting systems are accurate and able to withstand judicial scrutiny,” the transcript reads. “… The top-to-bottom review has no relevance to the real-world conduct of elections within the framework I have just discussed and has wasted almost $1 million of scarce federal funds. … Secretary Bowen, you should know better than to erode the public’s confidence in California’s fair and accurate process for crass political purposes. Shame on you.”

Tuteur said the $2.1 million capital cost of the machines has been reimbursed by federal and state tax money — and that Napa also has an optical scan paper system in storage.

Most counties use some form of touchscreen voting because of the federal Help America Vote Act, which requires disabled voters to be able to vote unassisted. Even if Napa County goes back to a paper ballot system, it will still have to have one touchscreen machine per polling place.

Goldberg said counties will have to implement security measures like security seals on the machines and chain of custody logs to make sure votes aren’t tampered with.

Tuteur said Napa county is consulting with other counties to review their legal options. That could be a prelude to a lawsuit counties might bring against the Secretary of State’s office to try to get state courts to re-certify the machines.

Goldberg said the office was ready for any legal maneuvers.

“The secretary is prepared to deal with any challenge that comes forward,” he said.