BETTY IRELAND: Cabell has many voting system choices

Opinion    Huntington Herald-Dispatch   11 October 2005

West Virginia is going through a very important transition relating to voting machines.

In 2002, Congress passed and the president signed into law the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in response to the perceived failures during the 2000 presidential election in Florida. This is when we all first learned of things called "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads".  

The 2002 Help American Vote Act requires that every precinct in every county in the entire country have at least one handicap-accessible voting machine to allow disabled persons to vote privately and independently. In addition, HAVA requires that punch-card and lever voting systems be replaced, or certain federal monies will be lost.

When my administration took office in January, we started the process of implementing HAVA as it relates to purchasing new voting machines. It was not reasonable to expect counties to have to bear the lion's share of the cost of becoming compliant with a federal mandate. I had to, and did, come up with an option for every county in West Virginia to become HAVA compliant.

We will offer free of charge to every county a high-speed optical scan system in addition to the mandated one handicap-accessible touch-screen machine per precinct.

We did not mandate counties use the optical scan system, though. In fact, we have no preference regarding which voting system any county chooses. The county clerks and commissioners know their voters best and have to decide which system is feasible for them.

This might include the optical scan system, or staying with an electronic system, or going with a combination of both all of these are acceptable methods of meeting HAVA's requirements.

My role as secretary of state is to facilitate the process by which each county becomes HAVA compliant.

Cabell County has a unique problem in that its current electronic machines, which have not yet been paid for in full, are not handicap-accessible as mandated by HAVA, nor can they produce a verifiable paper trail as mandated by the West Virginia Legislature, nor do they meet 2002 federal standards.

If Cabell County wants to replace its electronic voting machines with new ones to become compliant with the federal law, it can. My office will apply toward the county's purchase of a new touch screen system the amount we would have spent on Cabell's behalf for an optical-scan system.

In addition, because Cabell County is in a unique position, it will have first dibs on a loan from the zero percent interest, five-year payback HAVA revolving loan fund.

I have met with the Cabell County commissioners and the clerk about HAVA, and we all realize it is not an easy decision facing them. Cabell County voters are used to a touch-screen system, but the county budget may not be able to support the purchase of a new compliant touch-screen system for a few more years.

We will work side-by-side with Cabell's leaders no matter what voting system they choose to make this as easy a transition as possible. It is important that we all work together during this process to bring about clean and fair elections for all citizens in West Virginia.