Election boards scramble to hit deadlines
December 09,2005
BY Barry Smith     The Kinston Free Press

RALEIGH - Local boards of elections across North Carolina are in a race against time to purchase or retrofit voting equipment before the 2006 election season gets under way.

"I probably won't get any days off during the holidays," said Frances Pinion, director of elections in Gaston County.

We're on a tight schedule, but it's a doable schedule," said Keith Long, an independent contractor who the State Board of Elections has ed as its voting system project manager.

How tight is the schedule?

County boards of election have until mid-January to a vendor to provide its voting equipment. The vendor will have 30 days - or until mid-February - to deliver half of the voting equipment to the county and another 30 days - until the middle of March - deliver the balance of the equipment.

Then, in April, early voting opens for the May 2, 2006, primary.

"We obviously don't have a whole lot of time to drag our feet," said Tiffiny Miller, director of elections in Craven County.

The elections boards will be able to use either approved electronic voting machines, optical scanning machines or hand-counted paper ballots.

Gone will be punch-card ballots and lever voting machines.

Electronic voting machines, which elections officials call DRE (direct-record electronic) machines, will have to have a verifiable paper trail that the voter can see. The paper ballot would be printed out and used as a backup. It would like be under glass and wouldn't be given to the voter.

Long said that's for two reasons:

n The voter might forget to turn it in, thus thwarting the reason for the paper trail.

n The voter could use it to sell his vote.

Optical scan equipment - where the voter will fill in a circle or oval, like on a computerized multiple-choice test - comes ready-made with a backup paper trail. But they will also be required to have a mechanism to tell the ballot-caster of an over-vote. In other words, if the voter cast two votes in a race where he was only supposed to mark one, he would be notified of his error and given an opportunity to spoil that ballot and cast a new one.

All this will cost money.

For counties using optical scanners, they'll need to spend about $5,000 per precinct for tabulators and have a couple of backups available. Plus, there'll be some costs for programming software. And, they'll need to have voting equipment at each precinct to assist the sight-impaired, which could run into the thousands of dollars.

Counties using electronic equipment will have to pay less per machine - about $3,500 - but they'll have to purchase more machines. Long said that guidelines suggest that elections boards provide one machine for every 250 voters per precinct.

For a county with 50,000 voters, electronic voting equipment is likely to cost around $775,000 he said. For optical scanning equipment, the expense would be quite less - about $270,000.

"I think the majority of people will go optical scan," Long said.

The state has $50 million in what is called federal HAVA funds - for Help America Vote Act - to help counties purchase new equipment. But it likely won't cover all the costs. Counties receiving the money would, however, be able to cover most of the costs associated with purchasing optical-scanning equipment.

Some elections officials, however, point out that optical scan systems have other associated costs.

"I want to know long-term costs (for printing ballots) as far as optical scan," said Lindy Lewis, Carteret County director of elections.

Plus there will be more storage costs for optical-scan ballots. Law requires ballots to be stored for two years after an election.

Kathy Holland, elections director in Alamance County, said that there good things and bad things about both systems.

"When you get paper, you're going to get human error," she said.

She gave an example of Cleveland County, which during the 2004 general election, where about 120 ballots originally counted were lost when poll workers searched for a provisional ballot. The ballots were accidentally set aside and eventually thrown away.

While paper, hand-counted ballots are an option available to counties, most suggest that they'll be looking at the other two alternatives.

Lewis said that Carteret County's use of paper ballots during the 2005 municipal and countywide bond referendum worked well and could be used again if necessary.

But, she said, "we truly are looking forward to moving on ahead."

Lenoir County's Danahar 1242 electronic voting system will have to be replaced, Long said, as will Greene County's, Craven County's and Pamlico County's Votronic voting system. "It's not upgradeable," Long said.

It was an election snafu in Cleveland County that prompted the General Assembly to push ahead with new voting equipment standards. In November 2004, an early voting machine lost 4,438 ballots.

Miller said that she cannot even imagine having to hand count paper ballots on election night in Craven County.

"That would be a nightmare for me," she said. "It's easy to make a mistake on things like that. I don't want to move backwards."

Holland said that she hopes that the company that makes the machines currently in use in Alamance County will get certified so that its voting equipment can be retrofitted and used in upcoming elections.

"If that comes to fruition, then we will not have to buy new machines," she said. "If that doesn't happen with Microvote, we're going to the back of the line."

Long said Alamance would likely have to change voting machine companies since Microvote didn't even submit a bid to the state.

Caswell County would also have to change since it uses Microvote equipment.

The Optech IIIP Eagle system used in Cleveland and Lincoln county will have to be replaced, he said. "It's an old technology," Long said.

Gaston County, which uses the Diebold R4 touch screen system will also likely have to change, he said.

Onslow County and Duplin County will no longer be allowed to use their punch card systems, he said.

Will election boards be able to meet the tight deadlines before the May 2006 primary? Pinion is optimistic.

"We're used to tight deadlines with an election," she said. "So I'm sure we'll handle this."