Miami learns about new machines
Company reps on hand for class on voting booths

By Nancy Bowman   Dayton Daily News    03 August 2005

TROY | Miami County election officials have three months to learn the intricacies of an electronic voting system.
They were introduced to some of the challenges during a Tuesday kickoff meeting on implementing the $1.05 million touch-screen voting machine system.

Topics in a meeting whose participants included elections director Steve Quillen and Keir Holeman, Diebold Election Equipment county project manager, ranged from having enough power at 54 polling places to training poll workers and the public on the machines. The county has used an optical-scan system of paper ballots marked with pencil and read by a scanner since 1998.

The county in June bought the 388 touch-screen machines using Help America Vote Act money. As part of the state machine contract, Diebold will have personnel on hand to help with technical issues at two elections, starting with Nov. 8.

Holeman said the elections staff's biggest job will be devising a plan to store and deliver the machines to polling places. Local officials must decide who ? a contractor or county employees, among options ? will deploy the machines to polling places, and when.

Each machine will have a memory card on which ballots will be cast throughout the day. Holeman described the memory cards as "equivalent to your box of ballots."

Holeman suggested locking the cards in each voting machine once the ballot for its polling place has been tested, and before machines are delivered to polling sites. Presiding judges at each polling place would have the memory card door key, and the door could be covered with numbered tamper-evident tape for security, he said.

Quillen disagreed, saying he preferred the presiding judges put the memory card in the machine on Election Day, after machines have been delivered to polling places.

Holeman said he prefers pre-election installation to take that step out of the hands of poll workers who work only a couple of days a year. If cards and machines are mixed up and identification numbers on the memory card and machine do not match, "you won't be operating polls," Holeman said.

"It's your final decision, but I will never recommend that," the Diebold manager said of placing memory cards in machines Election Day. Quillen said he'd let the elections board decide what procedure to follow.

Diebold staff members assigned to Miami County will meet at least weekly with elections staff members starting Aug. 15 to continue Election Day preparations. A mock election will be held using 10 to 15 of the more than 300 machines to help figure out where there could be "hiccups" Election Day, Holeman said. Holeman said that mistakes will occur on the real Election Day, but said a post-election review included in every implementation plan is designed to identify problem areas.