Carteret commissioners seek voting machine test

  The Associated Press    10 August 2005

Carteret County commissioners, still smarting over a programming mistake that cost 4,438 votes in last fall's election, want to give their electronic voting machines another try before they abandon them.

Since the ballot malfunction was caused by human error, the commissioners said they would like to see a trial run of the machines before they adopt another means of tallying votes.

"If they test OK, I'd like us to use them. If they don't, let's get some other method of voting," Commissioner Doug Harris said Tuesday.

The Board of Commissioners authorized the county manager to ask the State Board of Elections about testing the machines and agreed to ask the county's board of elections to join the request.

The action was taken Monday night at the first county board meeting since a divided local elections board decided to abandon the UniLect Patriot voting system that ran into trouble last fall.

A programming error that limited the machines' memory storage resulted in the loss of several thousand ballots from early voting.

Harris asked the commissioners to get involved.

"If it's because of human error, I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater without testing the machines," he said.

In a letter sent to the commissioners last month, local elections board chairman Ed Pond listed alternate voting methods to be considered for this fall's election, including hand-counted paper ballots, or renting either an optical scan voting system or direct-reading electronic system similar to what is now used.

The board said it would need to pick a method by Sept. 1 and invited input from the county, which pays for elections. The board has yet to make a formal funding request with details on what option it would like to proceed with and exactly what it would cost.