Goodbye, Chad

Chicago Tribune  June 3, 2005

Perhaps the only good thing about chads is that they sound kind of funny, what with all the various descriptions of the little paper dots that foul vote counting machines as dimpled, hanging, swinging, dangling and even pregnant.

Now Chicago and suburban Cook County, the two biggest election jurisdictions in the state, have decided to do away with the stale jokes altogether. By the statewide primary next March, the error-prone punch-card systems that produce chads will be replaced with a hybrid of new equipment that should not only be more reliable but easier for voters to navigate.

There has been a clamor to do away with punch cards ever since problems with them in Florida hung up resolution of the 2000 presidential election. The confusion that year was even worse in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs, where 123,000 ballots, 6 percent of those cast, didn't record a valid vote for president.

Election officials here should be commended for not being panicked into a quick fix despite widespread calls back then to immediately junk punch cards in favor of expensive high-tech voting systems that rely on computer touch screens and work much like ATMs.

Miami-Dade County officials are suffering buyer's remorse after spending $24.5 million three years ago on touch screens that proved balky and expensive to operate, and lacked a paper trail as a backup to use when machines malfunctionedwhich happened far too often. They are now talking about replacing them with less whiz-bang optical scan equipment like the centerpiece of the new voting systems on order here.

The new equipment in Chicago and Cook County will cost more than $50 million. But by waiting, officials were able to bankroll the purchase with federal money earmarked to upgrade the reliability of voting systems.

To voters old enough to remember the bygone days of paper ballots, the new system may have a retro feel. In the old days, voters marked X's next to their choices. In an optical scan system, which works much like a standardized school test, they fill in little ovals or rectangles next to their choices on a sheet of a paper. Instead of a ballot box, the sheets are fed into a scanner that automatically tallies the results. The optical scan machines will be supplemented with touch screens that may prove easier to operate for blind or disabled voters.

Chicago-area ballots are notoriously bloated thanks to the legislature's refusal to do away with the election of judges and go to merit ion, which would lead to a less daunting ballot and a higher quality judiciary. But election officials insist they can squeeze the entire roster of candidates and ballot questions onto both sides of one sheet of optical scan paper.

New technology isn't the only thing in store for voters to make the experience less intimidating and more convenient. Illinois lawmakers passed a bill this week to allow any eligible voter, not just those out of town on Election Day, to cast a ballot up to 22 days early.

Unfortunately, lawmakers also tied that reform to a more controversial one that will allow them to dispense voter registration material from their district offices, potentially blurring a long-standing prohibition on doing political work on state time.

The process of voting may be getting easier. Whether the choices will get any better is a whole different question.