She said Diebold has been "extremely responsive" in addressing problems with its system used in the March primary, which forced at least 6,000 of 316,000 voters to use backup paper ballots. "I think we avoided a major crisis -- it would have been much, much worse had we not had those paper ballot backups," Ginnold said. Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned one Diebold voting system unless counties met a host of conditions, including precautions to prevent tampering and giving paper ballots to voters who prefer them. In the March primary, 573 of 1,038 polling places in San Diego County failed to open on time because of computer malfunctions. A software bug in North Carolina's 2002 general election deleted 436 electronic ballots from six paperless machines in two counties. Some people are critical of the use of the whistleblower statute with its reward system for plaintiffs.