Paper ballot is still king in some parts of the state
Despite new laws requiring more use of electronic voting machines, old-fashioned ballots remain an alternative.
Kevin Duchschere, Minneapolis Star Tribune  November 19, 2005

When it comes to voting, Minnetonka sometimes looks like a transistor radio in an iPod world.

Most communities in the metro area offered voters in this month's city and school elections optical-scan machines, which automatically tally votes and can report results in a matter of minutes.

But Minnetonka and a number of other suburbs handed out paper ballots and counted them the old-fashioned way: one at a time.

It will happen again Tuesday, when Minnetonka and Plymouth voters go to the polls to elect a new state senator. Despite laws that will require computerized voting systems for state and federal elections starting next year, it's often easier and cheaper for smaller jurisdictions to go with hand-counted ballots for local elections.

Minnetonka City Clerk Kathy Magrew said that programming computers for an election consumes about 100 hours of staff time.

If the vote is close, as it was for a City Council race in 2003, ballots must be recounted by hand anyway.

"I never once heard anybody say the goal here is to have instant results. The goal is to have a thorough operation," she said.

The League of Women Voters of Minnesota, one of the chief guardians of fair and clean elections, has no position on voting equipment or technology so long as it works, said Helen Palmer, the group's president.

Statewide, however, only one in five Minnesotans still use a paper ballot cast in a ballot box, said Kent Kaiser, a spokesman for the Minnesota secretary of state's office.

In Anoka County, only Columbus Township still uses paper ballots for elections, said elections supervisor Rachel Smith. Only two jurisdictions in Scott County used hand-counted ballots this year, according to elections supervisor Mary Kay Kes.

Ramsey County vs. Hennepin

Ramsey County is fully wired for election day counting. In part, that's because of the close relationship between the county and the city of St. Paul, which merged election bureaus back in the 1990s. The city and the St. Paul school district pay the county to handle their elections.

Ramsey County prints and programs all ballots, compiles the results and posts them on its website. Jurisdictions throughout the county use the same optical-scan equipment for their elections.

The optical-scan machines tally votes as they're entered, and, once polls close, instantly relay the results via a phone modem to county offices in downtown St. Paul, said Ramsey County elections chief Joe Mansky.

To ensure accountability, a paper tape with election results is printed before the results are transmitted, Mansky said. Whatever discrepancies emerge can be checked by examining the marked ballots themselves, he said.

"It's accurate, it's fast and it meets a lot of our goals," Mansky said. "It combines very accurate ballot counting and rapid ballot counting."

The process is different in Hennepin County, where cities and school districts are left to their own devices. That leads to a wide variation in how fast votes can be tabulated and reported.

While enough St. Paul ballots had been reported by 8:30 p.m. on election night to make it clear that Chris Coleman had won the mayoral race, Minneapolis returns from its optical-scan devices didn't appear until more than an hour later. After the polls closed, memory cards for voting machines had to be taken first to a warehouse in northeast Minneapolis before returns could be counted and reported.

But that's an unusual problem that will be gone by next year, said Susanne Griffin, Minneapolis elections director. Both Hennepin County (which owns the voting equipment) and the service provider promise an upgrade in cellular technology that will soon have Minneapolis processing returns as fast as St. Paul.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak suggested a while ago that the city look into paying the county to handle its elections, as in St. Paul, Griffin said. But the idea was rejected because it wouldn't save money or be more efficient, she said.

System s mandated

The new laws, which take effect Jan. 1, say that voting systems must enable voters to know when they've erred in marking a ballot (such as when they mark more than one candidate for a single office). Optical-scan machines meet that requirement by kicking back such ballots, Kaiser said.

Federal law also will require each polling place to have at least one machine enabling disabled people to vote privately and without help. Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer announced a few days ago that Minnesota has contracted with a Nebraska firm to supply touch-screen voting terminals to counties at a cost of $5,000 each. A federal grant of $35 million to Minnesota provides about $7,000 per precinct to cover expenses connected to the new voting law.

And after disabled voters enter their choices into the technologically-advanced machines ?

Election workers will have to tabulate them by hand.