E-voting ‘work in progress’
BY DAVID SINGLETON
STAFF WRITER  The Times-Tribune
05/21/2007

Electronic voting promised to usher in a sleek, new era of participatory democracy in Lackawanna County — simpler balloting, faster counting, better accuracy.

After three elections with Advanced Voting Solution Inc.’s WINvote touch-screen machines, the experience is still trying to catch up with the expectation, at least after the polls close.

“When I go to meetings, I don’t find anybody who is totally overjoyed with their machines,” said Cathy Hardaway, county director of voter education. “This has not been a perfect changeover for anyone. Everyone has their war stories to tell.”

No one disputes that voters weaned on the county’s old mechanical-lever machines have adapted quickly to the electronic devices or that problems associated with the new technology are becoming fewer as the public and election officials grow accustomed to it.

Yet Lackawanna County, which bought the AVS machines for $1.7 million in 2006 to satisfy the mandates of the federal Help America Vote Act, is still struggling with tasks most of its neighbors have mastered, including compiling near real-time vote results on Election Night.

Even smaller counties like Wayne and Pike had at least partial primary election results posted on their Web sites last Tuesday night.

“It’s a work in progress. Each election we’ve had has been a learning experience,” Commissioner Robert C. Cordaro said. “I have complete confidence we will be able to resolve these kind of issues.”

The underlying technology is not at fault. AVS spokeswoman Kimberlee Shoup-Yeahl said the county’s system is capable of tallying, collating and spitting out ballot results almost as quickly as open returns come into the Voter Registration Office.

“Can we do it? Yes, we can do it,” Ms. Shoup-Yeahl said. “But it really comes down to the election office and what they want to do... There are a lot of new things happening for them and they don’t want to bite off too much at one time.”

The concern for county election officials is accuracy. Even with the understanding any results reported election night are unofficial, the county cannot provide a full, timely accounting of the votes cast for two reasons, Ms. Hardaway said.

The first is incomplete data. After the polls close, each of the 163 election districts returns to the Voter Registration Office a master USB memory device containing a record of the votes cast on all of the machines in that district. Ideally, after all 163 USBs have been plugged into the system server and the information copied, the county would have a complete tally of all the votes cast in the election.

On Tuesday, 20 of the USBs came back to the office with no data, requiring election officials to manually add the results from those districts to the database. While disappointing, it was a marked improvement over the 2006 general election, when 38 USBs were unreadable.

Ms. Hardaway said the office is reviewing how poll workers copy the machine data onto the USBs and may further tweak the process before November.

The other impediment to real-time results is absentee votes, which are counted at each voting district but added — again manually — to the machine totals at the Voter Registration Office. Elections director Marion Medalis said she would be loathe to release election results that did not include the absentee votes.

“I know the results are unofficial, but they are really unofficial without the absentees,” she said. “It is not an accurate picture of the vote total.”

Even if the county can resolve the USB data-retrieval problem, Ms. Hardaway does not foresee the county releasing system-generated reports Election Night unless there is a way to meld the machine results with the absentee results.

An outgrowth of the disputed 2000 presidential election, HAVA required states to replace their punch-card and lever voting systems. The intent was to create uniformity in voting — not in tallying the votes, she said. The state’s voting machine certification process further limited how the technology could be used.

“Whether in all this anybody even thought about the end result of how you count I have no idea,” Ms. Hardaway said.

The issues are not unique to Lackawanna County, which is one of three counties that use the AVS machines.

In Northampton County, another AVS user, one of the county’s 149 master USBs came back Tuesday night with no data. Election officials determined 14 others contained only partial results.

By downloading the information from the 134 “good” USBs, the county was able to report the unofficial results from 85 percent of its precincts by midnight, county administrator John R. Conklin said. With county employees manually entering the missing results from the other 15 districts, full tallies were available on county’s Web site by 3 a.m. Wednesday.

Although some media grumbled that the process was too slow, Mr. Conklin said, “I think we did pretty good. We felt that was not bad.”

Northampton handled the absentee vote issue by ignoring it. The results reported Tuesday night and Wednesday morning carried a disclaimer that they did include absentees; those were manually added to the machine totals and posted on the Web site Wednesday.

“It was a gut call,” Mr. Conklin said of the decision to report preliminary results without the absentees. “It could have gone either way.”

Lycoming County, which uses Diebold Election Systems machines, had none of those problems Tuesday. Instead of USBs, the Diebold machines have memory cards, and the county uses an optical scanner to count the absentee ballots, said Sandra Adams, director of elections.

After merging the machine and absentee results, the county had complete unofficial totals on its Web site by 11 p.m.

Still, the notion that electronic machines has made life easier for election officials is a fallacy, Ms. Adams said.

“It’s made the election very accurate,” she said, “but it’s a lot more work for Voter Services.”

Wayne County has AVS machines but did not purchase the software to read the machine USBs. Instead, county workers compile unofficial results the old-fashioned way — manually tallying the votes reported on the open returns.

“In fairness to Lackawanna and Northampton, we do things on a much smaller scale, so we can adapt a lot more,” Cindy Furman, director of elections, said. “We can do things a little different.”

AVS machines are equipped with a wireless function that could let pollworkers tally all of the results from a voting district with the push of a button, eliminating the need to manually copy the machine totals to the USBs.

Mr. Conklin said the wireless feature — which is used in Virginia — would have taken “a lot of the kinks” out of the poll-closing process, which is where he suspects most of Lackawanna and Northampton’s problems originate. State officials forbade its use.

“So what we are still seeing is human factor error, and that’s a matter of training and repetition,” he said. “The system is what it is.”