California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ended five months of speculation and announced Friday that he was decertifying all electronic touch-screen voting machines in the state due to security concerns and lack of voter confidence.

He also said that he was passing along evidence to the state's attorney general to bring criminal and civil charges against voting-machine-maker Diebold Election Systems for fraud.

"We will not tolerate deceitful tactics as engaged in by Diebold and we must send a clear and compelling message to the rest of the industry: Don't try to pull a fast one on the voters of California because there will be consequences if you do," he said.

Shelley said the ban on touch-screen machines would stay in effect unless and until specific security measures could be put in place to safeguard the November vote.

"Revelations regarding touch-screen machines have shaken public confidence in this voting technology," Shelley said, referring to four computer-science reports released in the last year that showed the machines to be badly designed and vulnerable to hacking. "It is my foremost responsibility to take all steps necessary to make sure every vote cast in California will be accurately counted."

At least four counties will not be able to use touch-screen machines at all in November because they purchased a type of Diebold machine that was never federally certified.

But Shelley held out hope for 10 counties that currently own other types of touch-screen machines by saying the state would consider recertifying the machines on a county-by-county basis for November if the counties could meet a long list of stringent security requirements. County officials also must adhere to a number of directives for Election Day. If they don't meet the requirements, then they will have to use a paper-based voting method, such as optical-scan machines, which use a paper ballot that officials then scan into an electronic reader.

Additionally, Shelley declared that no county or vendor would be able to make last-minute changes to voting systems. Such changes caused problems in at least two counties in the March primary where a malfunctioning Diebold device prevented hundreds of polling places from opening on time.

"That horrific process stops now. We saw what it resulted in on March 2nd," Shelley said.

Finally, all counties will have to provide voters with the option of voting on a provisional paper ballot if they feel uncomfortable casting votes on the paperless e-voting machines. Shelley said that voting companies would bear the brunt of the estimated $1 million cost for providing extra provisional ballots to every county, indicating that the vendors caused the erosion in voter confidence, so they would have to pay for the solution.

"I don't want a voter to not vote on Election Day because the only option before them is a touch-screen voting machine. I want that voter to have the confidence that he or she can vote on paper and have the confidence that their vote was cast as marked," Shelley said.

The state would bear the cost of some of the other changes, such as helping to replace touch-screen machines with optical-scan machines in counties that can't meet the stringent security requirements before November.

Counties will not be able to purchase any new e-voting machines unless the machines can produce a voter-verified paper trail that voters can use to authenticate that their vote was recorded accurately. This pushes up a previous deadline Shelley put forth in December when he mandated that all new voting machines purchased after June 2005 would have to produce a paper trail.

"There will be a paper trail for every single vote cast in the state of California and it will happen on my watch as secretary of state," he said.

To that end, Shelley announced that the state would have in place by May 30 a standard for a voter-verified paper trail on voting systems. He said the Federal Election Commission assured him that it would move immediately to create its own standards and testing procedures for such a function so that new voting systems that offer an audit trail could be put in place.

There is currently only one vendor that manufactures such a machine that is fully certified. The Vote-Trakker by Avante International Technology is certified by federal and state authorities. A second company, AccuPoll, just received federal certification for its system and is working on state certification. But federal certification authorities have never stipulated what standard such a function should follow.

Speaking assuredly and forcefully, Shelley said that in taking these actions he was accepting and expanding upon recommendations made by his Voting Systems and Procedures Panel earlier this week and last week.

The panel recommended that only one type of Diebold machine be decertified and that counties be required to take steps to secure remaining machines. In decertifying all of the machines and making counties prove that they can secure them before recertifying them, Shelley hoped to avoid conditions like those that arose in the March primary when several counties simply ignored directives that came from his office.

The decision means that Kern, San Joaquin, San Diego and Solano counties will not be able to use the 15,000 or so AccuVote-TSx voting machines they purchased from Diebold. They will likely use optical-scan machines made by Diebold.

In addressing the issue of Diebold's activity, Shelley described how the state had given the TSx system conditional certification in December only because Diebold had assured the state repeatedly that federal certification was imminent. But Shelley said the company lied and switched systems on the state. While counties had in their possession one version of the TSx that the company said was getting federally certified, the company had actually submitted a different, newer version of the TSx to federal authorities to certify. The system the four counties possess still is not federally certified.

"That was despicable and that was misleading," Shelley said.

Furthermore, the company had installed uncertified software on other Diebold machines in the state, violating California election law.

"Their conduct was absolutely reprehensible. Their conduct should never be tolerated ever again by anyone in California," Shelley said.