Montco discovers quirks in use of voting machines

A test of the equipment that drew complaints found it works properly but could trip up voters.

By Jeff Shields

Inquirer Staff Writer

Montgomery County eased any fears yesterday that voting machines malfunctioned during the November election, but also revealed aspects of the voting process that could confuse voters across the state.

In a meticulous public testing of the electronic machines about a month before the primary, county elections director Joseph Passarella allowed a former North Penn school board member to test complaints made by two voters.

Democrat H. Bruce Gordon, who lost his seat on the North Penn School Board in the election and later reported concerns from Whitpain and Hatfield, said he was satisfied that the machines worked properly.

"We're very happy that the machines act as they are programmed to do," Gordon said.

Gordon went through a scripted set of scenarios to recreate what two voters reported.

In Hatfield, the voter - who did not come forward publicly - complained that her no vote on an open-space ballot question automatically lit up a straight-party Republican vote.

The retesting of the Hatfield machines showed no such glitch.

Reenacting the problem experienced by Whitpain voter Michael Orpneck indicated that the machines functioned correctly, said Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government who studies electronic voting issues.

"All the stuff he said happened did happen, he just didn't understand it," Mercuri said.

But the process illuminated a potentially confusing quirk of the machines - a quirk that results from state law that dictates their programming.

By law, the machines allow voters to hit a "straight party" button that lights up all the candidates for one party. But if a voter then picks a candidate from a different party, all the other votes in that particular race are canceled - requiring the person to cast his vote again.

Passarella said that aspect of the machines confounded both voters and poll workers. Mercuri said the state law should be changed to make the process easier to follow.

Gordon said the idiosyncrasies that turned up with straight-party voting and also with write-in voting - voters can't cast a ballot for anything else while in the middle of a write-in - showed "there is a very strong need for voter education."

"The way those machines work is not intuitive, and this may have caused the concerns that were raised to us," he said.

Mercuri, who took up Gordon's cause to have the machines tested, was present at the Montgomery County Elections Warehouse in Norristown to watch warehouse director George Saurman demonstrate how the Sequoia Systems machines worked. Mercuri's involvement has helped propel Montgomery County into the national debate over the security of electronic voting.

Afterward, Mercuri said she noticed several security concerns with the machines. She said she was particularly alarmed that the machines could be programmed by hand at the warehouse. Mercuri said an unscrupulous election worker or an intruder could conceivably alter how the machines operate.

Passarella and Saurman said it would be difficult to reprogram the machines, and any changes that were made would show up on a printout on election morning.

"I'm glad we had everyone come in today," Passarella said. "We proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the machines worked fine."