Beaver County delays testing leased ballot counting machines

Saturday, May 14, 2005
By Brian David, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Friday the 13th could hardly come and go without taking a chunk out of beleaguered Beaver County elections officials.

Already in a mad dash to make the switch to paper ballots from their decertified electronic voting system, county officials yesterday had to get court permission to delay testing their leased ballot counting machines because the company providing them did not have the software ready.

State law requires that vote counting systems be tested four days prior to an election. Beaver County had set Friday as the test date for the four optical scanning machines it was leasing from Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb. But early yesterday they heard from the company that the software was not ready.

County Common Pleas Judge John D. McBride signed a court order giving the county permission to test the machines at 11 a.m. Monday instead just 20 hours before the polls open for Tuesday's primary election.

County Commissioner Joe Spanik, who is overseeing the elections process, shrugged off the delay as just one of many hurdles the county has faced this spring.

"It's par for the course," he said, noting that he'd spent the day talking about sites for security cameras and checking deadbolts in the room set aside for counting votes.

Beaver, Mercer and Greene counties used the Unilect Patriot voting system, which was decertified by the state April 2 after tests showed the system did not reliably record votes. Beaver elections officials have been putting in long hours since preparing to use paper ballots instead.

"It's gotten kind of hectic," Spanik said. "But this is just part of the process."