Elections officials aim to put out a request for proposals Thursday for a new voting system that would provide at least one touchscreen machine in more than 800 polling places for the Nov. 7 presidential election.

"We're working eight hours a day to go over every line" of the request, Jill LaVine, the county's registrar of voters, said Tuesday during the Board of Supervisors' first post-election status report on the purchase of a new voting system. "Timing will be short to get a successful bidder, and it will have to be done right to have a system in place by November."

The county has $11 million to buy new electronic voting equipment as a result of state and federal legislation passed after the 2000 presidential election contest in Florida discredited punchcard voting machines, the kind previously used in Sacramento County.

Touchscreen machines also would help the county comply with a federal law requiring that all voters, including the disabled, cast their ballots without help from another person by 2005. Such a voting system could cost as much as $25 million, leaving the county on the hook for as much as $14 million, officials said.

Voters in 14 counties statewide used touchscreen voting machines during the March primary election. If all goes according to plan, Sacramento County voters will have two choices during the November presidential election: a new touchscreen voting machine or a paper ballot such as those used early this month when voters filled in small rectangles with a pencil to mark their selections.

LaVine did not specify the number of touchscreen voting machines that Sacramento County needs or their anticipated cost, but she said not all of its voting machines will need to be replaced, given that 40 percent of voters cast absentee ballots in this month's primary election, up from 22 percent during the 2000 presidential election.

That trend suggests half of the county's 593,000 registered voters will vote absentee in November, LaVine said. If voters are moving toward absentee ballots in record numbers, Supervisor Roger Niello asked whether the county should spend so much on a new voting system. "This continues to frustrate me terribly," he said. "There has got to be a better way to handle the needs of disabled folks so that they can vote on their own without having to spend $20 million to $25 million to serve what could turn into 20 (percent) to 30 percent of voters."

With counties already under the gun to have touchscreen voting machines in place next year, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley upped the ante in November by requiring that all voting Machines, by July 1, 2006, be able to produce a paper receipt on which voters can double check their ballot selections before submitting them.

No such machine has been fully certified by Shelley's office for use in California. Two touchscreen machines have federal certification, and Shelley has conditionally OK'd one of the two. Disability advocates sued earlier this month in a bid to force four of California's largest counties Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Barbara to install touchscreen voting machines by the November election. That put the counties in a bind because any machine they select may have to be retrofitted to comply with Shelley's directive on paper receipts.