County buys new voting system
By Kelly Hawes
The Daily News   

Published November 23, 2005
Galveston County commissioners voted Monday to spend almost $1.3 million on a new voting system.

The equipment, supplied by the Austin-based Hart Intercivic Inc., is designed to meet requirements spelled out in the federal Help America Vote Act. The act was aimed at addressing issues that surfaced as a result of the 2000 presidential election.

?This is a federal mandate,? County Judge Jim Yarbrough said. ?But unlike most mandates, this one actually came with some funding.?

State and federal funding will cover the entire cost of the equipment, which the county plans to have in place in time for the primary elections in March.

Yarbrough called the system a hybrid.

?It will include electronic voting machines,? he said, ?but for those like me who feel more comfortable with a paper ballot, we?ll have that, too.?

Voters who use paper ballots will run them through a scanner as they leave the polling place.

?If there are overvotes or undervotes, we?ll deal with those issues right there,? Yarbrough said.

At the end of the day, the totals for each precinct will be captured on an electronic card about the size of a credit card. Once the results have been tabulated, the totals will be saved on a compact disc, and the $50 memory cards will be available for reuse.

One thing the system will not provide is a paper trail for individual ballots.

?There?s an audit trail, but not a paper trail,? Yarbrough said.

The audit will compare the number of people signed in to vote in each precinct with the number of votes tabulated.

M.T. ?Bujo? Waddell Jr., who chaired a committee charged with examining the equipment available, said he believed the federal requirements had gotten ahead of the available technology.

?I don?t think anyone on the committee was completely satisfied with what?s available,? he said.

Yarbrough said the county saw the purchase as a first step.

?I think the commissioners court and the clerk agree that the technology will improve over the next few years,? he said. ?We?ll gradually move to an all-electronic system.?

The contract includes $18,000 of training for county election officials. It also includes a $4,000 voter education program.

County Clerk Mary Ann Daigle said the county was also buying eight demonstration units.

?We hope to have those in each county building so that voters will have a chance to try them out,? she said.