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Problems plague voting tabulations
By: Bill Viodonic, Beaver County Times
11/09/2005
 BEAVER - Problems with ballot-counting machines meant that Beaver County residents were waiting until the wee hours of the morning today for complete results from Tuesday's general election.

According to county Communications Director Brian Hayden and Financial Administrator Rob Cyphert, the county had four machines to count all the paper ballots cast in the election.

The counting started off slowly, Hayden said, and got even worse when one of the four machines stopped working.

Cyphert said that counting continued to go slowly with the three remaining machines. For example, Cyphert said, the machine would grab a ballot incorrectly to feed it through the machine and scan for each vote cast.

When the machine realized it had a problem with the ballot, it would automatically stop. Once the machine was cleared, Cyphert said, the process would start again, but a short time later, the same problem cropped up, and the machine would stop again.

"All the machines are subject to stop-start," Cyphert said.

By 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, county officials were predicting it would still take two or three hours more to complete counting the ballots.

Beaver County Commissioners Chairman Dan Donatella said the problems were just another example of why the county needs to go back to electronic voting machines.

Just before the May primary, the state decertified the county's Patriot touch-screen voting system, which had come under fire by state residents. New Sewickley Township resident Sheila Green led the move to have the machines decertified, saying they couldn't be trusted to count every vote.

Beaver County was forced to return to paper ballots, though Donatella said a new electronic system could be chosen by December and be in place for next May's primary.

"It's very, very frustrating," Donatella said just after midnight. "This is clearly a step backward for us. Even though it's a very light turnout (Tuesday), we're still waiting for results."

Donatella said some of the problems may have been because ballots apparently were sticking together. Voters received two ballots, one for their municipal races and one for the state Supreme Court justices retention issue.

Donatella said he thought he had only one ballot, and realized later that the second ballot may have been stuck to the back of the first. He said he suspected that happened to many voters.

"We've had all kinds of problems with this system," Donatella said. "It points out just how prehistoric this system is. Everybody's been complaining about this, and I can't wait to get back to electronic voting."

Because of the delays, only 69 of the 129 precincts in Beaver County were counted just after midnight. The delays meant the results could not be included in today's Times.

To see a complete list of election results, go to Beaver County's Web site at http://www.co.beaver.pa.us, and click on the elections link on the left hand side of the page.

Also, a complete wrap-up of the election and results will appear in Thursday's Times.



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