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Flagler votes for touch-screens

By SCOTT WYLAND    Volusia-Flagler News-Journal   June 21, 2005

BUNNELL Touch-screen voting machines soon will be installed in Flagler County, despite critics lambasting the devices as unreliable because they don't create paper ballots that can be recounted.

The County Commission voted 4-1 to buy 43 touch-screen machines from Diebold Election Systems for $174,000. The county will pay $29,000 and the state will chip in the rest.

Each voting precinct will get one machine, for the purpose of improving access for disabled voters.

The pending purchase was put on the consent agenda Friday, which meant commissioners could have approved it without any public discussion. But two commissioners requested that the Diebold machines be discussed, saying concerned residents had called them.

In the end, the majority of commissioners said they had faith that county elections supervisor Peggy Rae Border could make the machines work accurately.

"We are just enhancing the voting system that we have," Border said.

The state has set a deadline of July 1 for having machines in place to allow the severely disabled to cast votes unassisted, Border said. Diebold has the only devices that are state certified.

But one critic of the machines implored the commission to avoid locking into a contract with Diebold.

The county actually has until the first election after July 1 to have disabled-access machines in place, and it won't lose state funding unless it misses a Jan. 1 federal deadline, said George Griffin, an attorney with the Volusia/Flagler American Civil Liberties Union.

A company named Automark is developing a system that leaves a paper trail in case votes must be recounted, Griffin said. He recommended the commission wait until Automark becomes state certified.

Griffin pointed to Volusia County, which backed off from buying the Diebold systems after commissioners expressed qualms about having only one choice for equipment.

But Border said she needed time to train staff to use the new machines before the September election. Plus, missing the July deadline would give disabled advocates ammunition to sue, she said.

Border argued that the machines have an "electronic paper trail." Although they don't print out a vote immediately, they store the results in their electronic memory, allowing the voter information to be printed after all the ballots have been cast, she said.

Griffin, however, said that unless the votes are printed out after they've been entered into the system, there's no way to know whether the machine recorded each one correctly.

"It can still be corrupted on the memory card," Griffin said.

Commission Chairman Jim Darby said that even though Griffin offered new information, he thought Border, who had been overseeing elections for decades, showed enough confidence in the Diebold machines.

Commissioner Hutch King, who cast the lone dissenting vote, said he had the utmost trust in Border's ability, but that no system was failsafe.

"I've never been a fan of touch-screen voting," King said. "I'm personally not a supporter of a system that doesn't leave a paper trail."



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