Voting woes mar debut of electronic ballots 
 
By: Rolando Garcia, The Enterprise 03/08/2006 
 
 
 Election workers apparently skipped a step in counting ballots Tuesday night, halting the public release of most vote totals until about 11 p.m.

Subsequently, touch-screen devices were counted again to ensure accuracy, Jefferson County Clerk Carolyn Guidry said.

By 10:55 p.m., only 67 percent of precincts had been counted.

Hotly contested local races boosted primary turnout in Jefferson County to a recent high, but voters encountered glitches with the new touch-screen voting systems and vote counts had sputtered as the night wore on.

This election was the first in Jefferson County to use the new voting system acquired to comply with federal law. The Help America Vote Act, passed in the wake of prolonged vote counting in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, required counties to switch to newer electronic equipment.

Jefferson County paid for the new system with $2 million in federal funds.

The county intended to use only touch-screen machines in early voting and give voters a choice of touch-screen machines or paper ballots on Election Day.

However, touch-screen machines were not programmed in time for the start of early voting. Problems also arose on Election Day.

It was not until about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday that early voting totals were released, a figure which generally can be expected no more than an hour after polls close at 7 p.m.

Further results didn't come until almost 11 p.m.

At a few polling sites Tuesday morning, election workers had trouble getting the electronic machines up and running and paper ballots were used, Guidry said.

The problems stemmed from difficulty in setting up the touchscreens, Guidry said. Before anyone can vote on the machines, poll workers must hook up the touchscreens to a printer to churn out a tally page to make sure no votes have been cast yet.

But at some poll sites, the printer was not connected properly or votes stored on the machine from a previous test run had to be erased, Guidry said.

"Some (poll workers) had a little panic attack because this is all new," Guidry said.

The new balloting system does not seem to have kept many voters away from the polls. Turnout in Jefferson County surpassed the projected 13 percent turnout statewide.

Statewide, the Texas Secretary of State's office had projected 13 percent of registered voters would cast a ballot in the primary.

Guidry said she had hoped turnout would reach 45,000, but that 35,000 voters might be more realistic.