State could require county to
buy new vote machines - 11/23/05

Roxboro Courier Times 

Voting is a right and a privilege. Problem is, it may soon become a rather expensive right and privilege for Person County's taxpayers.

  
Person County Board of Elections Director Brenda Whitlow recently received notification from the North Carolina Board of Elections that the ballot-counting machines currently in use in the county possibly could be ?decertified? as soon as next month.

Person County Manager Steve Carpenter told the Person Board of County Commissioners during a Monday meeting that the cost of replacing the county's voting machines could run as much as $200,000. He estimated the cost of a single machine at $6,000.

Elections Director Whitlow, however, was unsure what the replacement cost might be.

"I really can't tell you what the cost would be," Whitlow said. "It would depend on what kind of machine we decided to get and how many we would have to get."

The county currently has one voting machine for each precinct. The optical scan machine works well, according to Whitlow, and only one is needed per precinct.

"If we went with a machine such as a touch screen, however, we would likely need more than one machine per precinct," Whitlow said.

The optical scan machine reads ballots that are marked by voters, Whitlow noted.

"With a touch screen machine, you are actually casting your vote right on the machine that is going to count it," Whitlow said.

The lone problem with the county's current voting machines, according to Whitlow, is that ballots cast during early voting, also known as one-stop voting, do not indicate the voter?s resident precinct.

"These machines are fine," Whitlow said. ?They are good machines and they have worked well for us.

"The only thing that the state wants these machines to do that they can't do is tell you what precinct a vote came from," Whitlow added. "With the one-stop voting, the machine has no way of knowing what precinct the vote actually came from."

While Whitlow is hoping that the state ultimately will decide against decertifying Person?s existing machines when the state elections board meets on Dec. 1, she said it is likely that the county could be faced with the problem of replacing voting machines prior to the 2006 elections.

"Our machines are on the list of those that could possibly be decertified," Whitlow said. "That doesn?t mean that they will be decertified, but I think they probably will be."

Whitlow said the Person County Board of Elections would seek new machines if the current ones are decertified, however, she said the final decision on what type of machine would be used in the county in the future would come from the Person Board of County Commissioners.

In alerting commissioners to the prospect Monday morning, County Manager Carpenter said he thought the county could devise some ?low-tech? ways to accomplish the voter precinct designation without the necessity of actually replacing the machines. For example, he suggested, different color precinct ballots could be used for early voting, or ballots could be marked with a number to designate the appropriate precinct.

But Carpenter said the county must wait for the state elections board?s decision on Dec. 1. But he wasn?t optimistic.

?I have every reason to believe that [the state board] will be totally oblivious to anything anybody? suggests. ?But they will probably tell us that we?ve got to have new voting machines.?

Carpenter said, however, that the state will pay about half the cost of the new machines. ?Those machines,? he said, ?are about $6,000 a pop.?

The manager said he had considered going to Raleigh to speak with state elections officials about the issue, but, he added, ?I would guess that would be futile.?

Commissioner Larry Yarborough wondered aloud if state Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, D-Orange, who also represents Person County, might be of assistance to the county on the issue. Yarborough noted that Kinnaird was sponsor of a bill approved by the General Assembly this year that sets standards for voting machines to be used across the state. A key in those standards is that electronic machines must provide a paper trail that can be checked in the event there may be problems with the electronic tally. The legislation stemmed from such problems, particularly in Carteret County as well as some other counties, in the 2004 elections.

Yarborough said he thought it would be wise for the county, if possible, to try to ?get ahead of it instead of waiting until December when the rule is handed down,? although he acknowledged that time to do that is short in view of the holidays.