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Madison polling place machine was changing voter's choices  (WI)

Bill Lueders    Isthmus The Daily Page   04/16/2009

Ted Shultz of Madison was just checking. Though he's not himself visually impaired, he always uses the machine provided for those who are to make sure it's working properly.

"I want everyone's vote to count," says Shultz, a grad student in mechanical engineering at the UW-Madison.

Since 2006, federal law has required that every polling place have voting equipment accessible to people with disabilities. Madison and other local governments use the ES&S AutoMARK. It's equipped with headphones so voters can hear the choices, and it lets those with limited vision view a magnified ballot, which it then marks. The ballot is printed out and can be reviewed, like any other, before it's turned in.

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Using the ES&S AutoMARK last week at his polling place at Spring Harbor Elementary on Madison's west side, Shultz noticed the alignment was off. So when he tried to make a given choice, the machine would register a vote for the opposing candidate.

Shultz found this so jarring he filmed it with his cell phone camera. One clip shows his finger touching the oval that says "Kathleen Falk"; that causes the oval for "Nancy Mistele" to fill in. Another clip shows how his effort to Shirley Abrahamson became a vote for Randy Koschnick.

"It was that way for every single one," says Shultz, whose field of study includes man/machine interfaces. "To the candidates you wanted, you had to push right below them."

Shultz worries that people with visual impairments might not see these different choices being made. He adds that "some simple changes" in the software program, like putting spaces between the choices, could fix this problem.

Adam Gallagher, Madison's deputy city clerk, says the AutoMARK machines are calibrated before they're delivered to the city's 80 polling places. Sometimes the alignment can be off, but this is easily corrected, and the poll workers "know how to do that." The workers are urged to mark their own ballots with these machines — "anybody can use them" — to test them out.

But Shultz believes he was the first person to use the machine at his polling place that day. The AutoMARK jammed trying to print his ballot, something he's had happen before. So he ended up voting the ordinary way, making his own marks on a ballot.

Shultz reported the problem to the City Clerk's Office. Gallagher was not aware of it. He says it was a smooth election.

A number of polling places ran out of ballots and had to use photocopied extras, which must be tallied by hand, to the chagrin of some voters. And a counting machine in Madison's 2nd Aldermanic District, where longtime incumbent Brenda Konkel was defeated, became unplugged, so its memory pack had to be switched to a different machine to read the results.

Bob Ohlsen, the clerk for Dane County, was aware of the alignment problem Shultz encountered, but this is the first time he's ever heard of its occurring.

"Sometimes when you move these machines around, the alignment gets off," says Ohlsen. But he says the machines, which cost $4,800 each, are easy enough to recalibrate.

Shultz knows the machines are used by only a small number of voters, but he's still concerned: "[T]his voting equipment is notoriously poorly designed, and fails to meet user expectations."



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