E Voting Zaps Quick Totals
By The Morning News And The Associated Press
May 24, 2006
 
New electronic voting and tabulating machines delayed vote tallies by hours in Benton and Washington counties. Benton County election officials were still counting at 12:30 a.m. They had partial results from all precincts. Washington County finished unofficial counting about midnight. Election officials around the state struggled with a host of problems.

Benton County
Election officials in Benton County experienced more than a few hiccups:

? Jim McCarthy, Benton County election coordinator, said there were 17 iVotronic, also known as the electronic voting machines, that poll workers did not know how to shut down because they did not receive enough training. He said election officials had to go back and check the votes on those particular machines.

? Russell Odell, Benton County election commissioner, also complained of not having enough time to train the workers. He said there was not enough time between the filing dates and early voting for the primary election.

"The state legislature failed in giving us the proper time frame as far as getting the ballots for early voting," Odell said.

There were three training sessions for the workers, which Odell said was not enough.

? Odell said there was one precinct, located at the Church of the Nazarene in Rogers, that ran out of paper ballots during the day. He said the election officials had to turn away four voters. Odell said he did not understand why the precinct ran out of ballots because additional ballots and an electronic voting machine were delivered during the day. No other precincts called with problems throughout the day, he said. Election commissioners will look into the issue today.

? Odell also said election officials at the precincts had problems starting up the electronic machines because they did not receive the equipment early enough to do adequate training. Many of the electronic voting machines also ran out of the paper to print backup documents because Odell said there were more voters than anticipated. He said the precincts could not use the electronic voting machines until more paper was delivered, but paper ballots were available.

? On occasion the vote-counting machines would get jammed, causing election officials to remove ballots and put them back into their stacks to be counted. Officials said this was just part of the process and the counting ran efficiently.

? McCarthy reported that there were several voters who marked more than one box on their paper ballots for different races. He said in those cases election officials did not count the vote for that particular race if more than one box was filled.

? Lynn Chinn, a Benton County election commissioner, however, said he saw more undervoting than overvoting. He said there were about 15 ballots where voters did not fill in a candidate choice.

Washington County
Washington County used 57 electronic touch screen voting machines for the first time.

John Logan Burrow, Washington County Election Commissioner, said poll workers had to bring a majority of the machines to the courthouse before they were shut down, rather than poll workers shutting them down at the precinct.

All paper ballots were counted first and then the electronic machines were shut down and the votes tallied from the machines, Burrow said.

"I'm terribly dissatisfied with the process we went through tonight, especially in light of an old system that wasn't broke but was fixed by federal legislation," Burrow said pointing to the paper ballot counting machines.

"Voters love the machines, but it certainly complicated our lives here tonight," Burrow said.

The State
Cleburne and Phillips counties reported technical problems in tabulating votes. In Lawrence county, officials realized they had given voters ball point pens and began to overwrite all the ballots again with felt-tipped markers so the machine could read them.

Other counties reporting problems were among the state's most populous, including Pulaski, Jefferson, Craighead, plus Arkansas, Clark, Carroll, Pike, Howard, Independence, Polk and Woodruff.

In Pulaski County, workers had problems printing out election results from machines, said Susan Inman, director of elections for Pulaski County.

"There's an external printer that has to be attached (and) we've had some problems with these external printers failing today," she said.

Most of the problems were "issues that you would expect with first use of an equipment," said Jill Friedman-Wilson, a spokeswoman for Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., the company that provided equipment to 72 of Arkansas' 75 counties under a $15 million contract with the state. Three counties already had equipment that meets federal standards.

Some counties were being cautious and wanted to release all their results at once, said Ann Clements, education coordinator for the secretary of state's office.

"We've heard from several counties that they just wanted to do it correctly," she said.

The tabulation problems capped a day in which officials in four Arkansas counties were not able to use the touch-screen voting machines that ES&S provided to meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act.

The new equipment delayed reporting of results in two counties. Phillips County election officials said they would be unable to count ballots until Wednesday, while officials in Cleburne County hand-counted ballots Tuesday night.

The issue in both counties was the same, Deputy Secretary of State Janet Harris said: lack of a properly programmed chip for a tabulator used to count ballots.

Harris said ES&S technicians and state officials had been working on the Phillips County issue all day. She said the company planned to reprogram a chip and drive it back to the county Wednesday.

Earlier Tuesday, Secretary of State Charlie Daniels said he would ask ES&S about problems in fulfilling its contract.

"Whenever this election is over, we're going to sit down and we're going to visit with (the company) and revisit to determine why we weren't up and going on the first day of early voting," Daniels said.

"It is a challenging year for ES&S, it's also a challenging year for election officials, just because of the unprecedented nature of implementing the Help America Vote Act," said Friedman-Wilson. "Where we are responsible for regrettable delays, we assume the responsibility."

The complexity of reprogramming ballots for individual races helped create delays, said Mac Beeson, the ES&S state account manager.

"It's a lot of back-and-forth just to set up, getting the information that we need from the counties into the system," he said.

Because of technical problems, election officials in Desha, Jefferson, Sebastian and Stone counties reverted to the older voting systems before ballots opened.

Bill Conway, chairman of the Desha County election commission, said the machines arrived on time but since the software arrived late, the county decided to use lever machines instead. Other election officials had similar complaints.

Election officials had planned to have at least one of the machines in place in all polling sites by the time polls opened. The machines are designed to accommodate blind people and others with disabilities. For instance, voters can use headphones to hear an automated reading of the ballot. Providing voting access to the disabled was one of the provisions of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, adopted in response to the 2000 presidential election debacle.

The new federal law also requires measures to keep voters from ing too many candidates in a race, or "overvoting." In addition, the law requires a paper record of the vote in case an audit or recount is needed.

The lever machines used Tuesday in Desha and Jefferson counties don't comply with the act, Harris said.

The optical scanning systems in Sebastian and Stone counties are considered compliant with the law, Harris said, but precincts there didn't have one of the electronic voting machines to accommodate the disabled.

Polling sites in every other county were in compliance, Harris said. She said officials worked to ensure compliance with the law at every polling site in the 2nd Congressional District, where Tom Formicola and Andy Mayberry faced off in the Republican primary for the House of Representatives in the only contested federal race.

Jim Lagrone, a Republican who will face off against Daniels in the general election, said Daniels contributed to the problems by not starting earlier on the process of complying with federal law. "He put the county clerks and he put ES&S in a position where they could not be successful," he said.

Daniels said Tuesday night that he wouldn't respond. "There's going to be plenty of time for politics," he said. "Right now I'm concerned about the election, and he should be."

It's difficult to predict if Arkansas will be penalized as not having met the federal law's standards for the election.

Daniels and Department of Justice spokesman Eric Holland declined to comment Tuesday on whether they believed Arkansas was in compliance with the law.

When states are found out of compliance, Holland said, the department can seek a court order to enforce compliance or revoke unused federal funding. The Justice Department has sued New York and Alabama for noncompliance.

Meanwhile, Justice Department officials monitored voting in Pulaski County, Holland said, under a 2004 agreement with the county that ended an investigation into voting registration problems.