City's election network truly plugged in
System can, when it all works, produce results within 3 hours
By JESSE GARZA and RAQUEL RUTLEDGE
jgarza@journalsentinel.com
Posted: April 7, 2004

The city's 202 polling places use a network of technology that transforms thousands of paper ballots into eagerly anticipated results that are available - if all goes right - within three hours of when the polls close.
Election 2004

But the technology that has made the difference between rapid results and agonizing waits is dependent on hundreds of poll workers following the process to the letter.

"It has served us extremely well," Julietta Henry, executive director of the city's Election Commission, said Tuesday of the seven-year-old system of voting machines, microchips, computers and information transmitters that was upgraded four years ago.

Once registered voters enter a polling place, they provide their names and addresses; unregistered voters also must provide identification.

After a ballot is given to the voter, it is marked and cast into one of 205 voting machines throughout the city. Inside each machine, a small, preprogrammed, battery-powered device called a "prom-pack" reads the information from the ballot and transmits it to a memory chip.

When the last voters finish voting, an election worker pushes a button on each machine marked "print total"; then another button displays a message asking, "Would you like to close the polls?"

Once that button is pushed, the machine prints the results on a paper tape and - once the machine is unplugged - the prom-pack is removed.

"Some machines will have three wards on one prom-pack," Henry said, noting that all ballots are electronically coded by ward. "If we have a ballot sent to the wrong location, the machine wouldn't be able to read that ballot."

A poll worker will then read, out loud, the information on the tapes from each machine, which includes the total number of ballots cast on the machine, the total number of ballots cast in each ward and the total number of votes received by each candidate on the ballot.

The prom-packs, tapes and ballots are then taken to four remote sites where "smart pack readers" - laptop devices that look like small, metallic suitcases - transmit the data from the prom-packs, via telephone line, to computers at the Election Commission at City Hall.

The results are then compiled and transmitted to an overhead projector in a conference room filled with reporters and campaign workers.

Of course, occasionally things don't work quite right.

A poll worker might leave a prom-pack in a machine, or a prom-pack might be misplaced or taken to the wrong location, or a machine may not get unplugged before a prom-pack is removed, Henry said.

"One time a poll worker got into a car accident, and she had to give the results to a police officer," Henry recalled. "He brought it to us in about an hour."

Cities across the country struggle with similar problems.

It took the Boston election board until 5 a.m. to tally results from the 2000 presidential election, said Sabino Piemonte, a data technician with the board.

"It was horrible," he said.

That was before the city bought a Diebold scanning and tabulating system that allows them to complete the task in three to four hours. While that is an improvement, Piemonte said, Boston still relies on police from the 254 precincts to bring disks to City Hall, making results susceptible to delays because of traffic or weather.

Cleveland is ditching its 20-year-old punch card system for a $20 million state-of-the-art electronic system city officials expect to be running in May 2005. Cleveland officials said that now it often takes until midnight or later to count ballots from the city's 1,436 precincts.

Officials with the Indianapolis election board rave about their new $11 million scanning system by ES&S that uses modems to transmit data.

Polls close at 6 p.m. Results are in and posted on the Web by 8 p.m., said Jennifer Walda, chief clerk of the Marion County Election Board.

"We've had two elections so far (with the new equipment)," Walda said. "Both times results were in before 8."