County to have electronic voting by 2006
By Linda Bailey Potter Alpine Avalanche   16 December 2004

Brewster County Elections Administrator Alice Tidwell d the commissioners court about Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funding at the regular meeting Monday.

The federal program requires at least one electronic voting device to be in place for each polling area by the 2006 March primary elections.

The program provides funds to improve election administration and replace outdated voting systems with those that allow a voter to view and correct his/her ballot, to prevent or alert voters if they over-voted and to have accessibility for voters with disabilities.

For Brewster County, this means that $7,000 of HAVA funds can be used for education and training for voting systems with electronic and/or direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, as well as $9,000 to become HAVA compliant.

There are state funds available to counties in the amount of $24,000 for reimbursement toward the purchase of voting machines. This amount depends on the number of voters and precincts in the county. There is hope that the Texas 79th Legislative Session will increase this amount, Tidwell said.

She also gave a report on the Voting Devices Workshop held Dec. 9 in the county commissioners courtroom. Election administrators attended the meeting from Jeff Davis, Presidio, Terrell, Culberson and Hudspeth counties, as well as Brewster County political party chairs, Democrat Dale Christophersen and Republican Monica Quiroga, and Brewster County Tax Assessor/Collector Betty Jo Rooney, among others.

Three vendors from the Austin area touted their voting machines at the workshop. ES&S had two machines, Ivoteronic Touch Screen and AutoMark; Hart Intercivic had an eState electronic machine, and Scott Merriman had an Accupoll voting system.

The machines varied from electronic stand-alone systems, which are not connected to a phone line or the internet during the voting process, to computer-based systems where the voting process is actually tied into a computer system.

"The most impressive was the ES&S AutoMark electronic machine. You can still use a ballot and it can be used by the visually impaired," Tidwell said. "The voter s the ballot into the machine, and it walks them through it with earphones that tell you if you have over-voted and how to correct it. You can mark a straight party ticket and can crossover vote (between party candidates). The ballot then is returned (from the machine) with the markings, which the voter then puts in the ballot box," she said.

Tidwell told the Avalanche the machines and the ballots will have to be returned on election night to the central counting area, the tax office, to be counted. Each electronic ballot is counted by scanning it into a computer system.

The cost of the electronic machines runs from about $73,000 to $130,000, depending on the system, to be HAVA compliant, which means one electronic machine in each voting precinct in Brewster County, a total of nine, including Early Voting.

The preliminary plan for Brewster County is to have one in each precinct and to also use paper ballots for those who do not want to use the electronic machines. "In my view, there are a lot of people that don't want to give up the paper ballot," Tidwell said.

The electronic machines will not only be used for county elections but will be available to all voting entities in the county school districts, city and hospital board elections.

The cost of the machines to the county, after state reimbursement, will be somewhere between $49,000 and $106,000, depending on which voting systems they . The purchase of the systems was not provided for as a line item in the 2005 county budget, according to Carol Ofenstein, county budget officer.

There are many unknowns at this point regarding the purchase before commissioners can make a decision.