Despite the glitches, election officials like voting machines
Posted on Thursday, November 9, 2006
Touch-screen voting machines have been used in Washington County since the May primaries, and election officials say that – despite a few glitches – they are working out well.
Tuesday's mid-term election was the first general election in which they were used.
"The hardware in them is accurate," said Nancy Varvil, election coordinator. "They will tabulate votes accurately, they run reliably, they're easy to use for voters."
There are technical challenges to using the machines, she said, such as knowing how to operate printers that go with them and being able to transfer the votes from the touch-screen machines to the main vote-counting machine.
There are two different printers associated with touch-screen machines at the polls, Varvil explained, one that keeps an ongoing audit of the votes and another that records the results at the end of the day. Knowing which printer to use is one facet of operating the machines at the polling places.
The main malfunctions reported from polling places Tuesday night, Varvil said, concerned paper jams and changing paper rolls. Operators also must ensure that electricity to keep the batteries on the machines powered is not interrupted.
"Given the magnitude of the task, the equipment we used served us well," said John Logan Burrow, chairman of the election commission.
Varvil said election officials were surprised Tuesday night at how few machines they had to "close"at the end of the night for poll workers; in other words, getting the results removed from the machines at the courthouse instead of at the polling places.
Another challenge had to do with recording the early and absentee votes using a personal electronic ballot device. The device can be used with field machines to record the electronic votes and transfer them into the main vote-counting machine at the courthouse.
When it came to counting early and absentee votes cast at the Washington County Clerk's Office from Oct. 23 through Monday, however, there were too many precincts to record (because early and absentee voters come from all 117 precincts, so the machines are set up to reflect that ) and it was expected before the election that the personal electronic ballot device would not be able to hold the data needed for counting.
To resolve this, representatives from Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., which makes the electronic voting machines, suggested using another method - computer flash cards already in the machines - to count the votes. This was attempted Tuesday night and, at first, did not work, Varvil said, so it was thought that workers would need to hand tally totals from each machine into the totals for each race.
To try to solve the problem, Varvil called ES & S on Tuesday night, and it was suggested she try something different. It turns out that she had forgotten to clear the audit log in the votecounting machine. When she did that, she said, the early and absentee votes were counted accurately.
With all of the technical challenges associated with electronic voting machines, one might think it best to forget them and stay with paper ballots, but Varvil said the government will not allow that.
The election commission is required by law to provide touch-screen machines for the disabled. They cannot limit the machines to the disabled, however, to avoid isolating those people's votes (making them more identifiable as a group ), Varvil said.
Besides that, she said, there are people who like using the touch screens. She also said that having two ways to vote helps, especially when election workers run out of paper ballots at the polls.
As for the problems encountered with machines, she said," We learn something every election."
Asked if he preferred paper or touch-screen voting machines, Burrow said," I've always preferred the paper ballots."
He said he likes them because people can sit down with the ballots and take their time voting, while there may be lines behind those using touch-screen machines.
The touch-screen method, he said, however, may prove to be the preferred system of voting in Washington County.
"People that vote on the electronic machines are delighted," he said.
Although people may be apprehensive about them, he said, voters have not been unhappy using them.
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