'New' voting machines aren't
County gets used units from Nevada

Saturday, March 11, 2006
By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It's a three-way trade involving Chicago, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh and almost $70 million.

But the commodity at the center of this web isn't a group of star athletes. It's voting machines, all manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. of Oakland, Calif.

As part of the deal, Allegheny County is getting approximately 2,000 pre-owned, deeply discounted, electronic push-button machines from Clark County, Nev., where some units have been in use for almost 10 years.

The Nevada county, in turn, is getting about 4,000 almost-new touch-screen machines from Chicago and Cook County, Ill., which will then receive a brand new version of the touch-screen unit.

Larry Lomax, Clark County's registrar of voters, said Allegheny County voters had no reason to worry about the reliability of the machines they are getting, the AVC Advantage.

Unlike touch-screen models, which require voters to scroll through a ballot on an ATM-like computer module, the Advantage allows users to see the entire ballot at one time. They press buttons to make their choices.

"I think they'll like this," Mr. Lomax said. "I've had no complaints."

The cross-country exchange is part of a nationwide scramble to meet the stringent requirements of the Help America Vote Act, a law passed by Congress after Florida's 2000 election debacle.

Under the law, known as HAVA, many of Pennsylvania's 67 counties risk losing millions in federal aid if they don't upgrade their voting machinery by the state's May 16 primary election.

Although Allegheny County officials have not yet signed a contract with Sequoia, the elections board last month approved an $11.8 million purchase of 2,800 Advantages that will replace the county's lever machines, in use since the 1960s. A $12 million federal grant will cover the cost of the change.

County officials had considered a different deal at an almost identical price for new touch-screen machines from Diebold Inc., of North Canton, Ohio. But during a series of recent elections board meetings, voting rights activists and local computer experts slammed Diebold's record in other states and raised concerns about a former CEO's ties to the Republican Party.

New Sequoia Advantages would have cost almost $20 million. Instead, the county will buy machines that are four to 10 years old, many of them used in the Las Vegas area and others from Baltimore.

The company's contract with Allegheny County will include an option for a $2.4 million upgrade to completely new machinery in about two years, County Manager Jim Flynn said.

The Advantages will be thoroughly tested before each election, he said.

Sequoia, which has been in the voting machine business for more than a century, had to engineer the complex three-state swap to meet HAVA's tight deadlines.

"It works out well for everybody. It's a good trade," said Howard Cramer, the company's vice president of sales.

Clark County first purchased Advantages in 1996. Explosive population growth in Las Vegas compelled Mr. Lomax's department to keep buying more machines every two years.

After the 2000 census, the county's Spanish-speaking population reached a critical mass, legally requiring the use of bilingual ballots. Mr. Lomax found that Sequoia's Edge, a touch-screen machine resembling a bank ATM, could easily switch between Spanish and English display screens, an improvement over the Advantage.

The county's almost 800,000 registered voters have had the option of using either machine for the last several elections, and many preferred the Advantage, Mr. Lomax said. Now, for the sake of simplicity, the county is moving to a single system. About half of its 2,186 Advantages already have been shipped away by Sequoia.

More than 1,500 miles away, local officials in Chicago and Cook County are working furiously to prepare for a March 21 primary, the first without punch-card ballots in several decades.

Under an almost $54 million deal with Sequoia, the city and county will use a mixture of touch-screen machines and optical scanners, which read fill-in-the-bubble ballots. Sequoia will then ship about 4,000 touch-screen machines from Chicago to Nevada, which doesn't hold its primary until August.

Chicago and Cook County Sequoia's biggest customers in the country will then get the latest model of the Edge.

After the Chicago primary, Sequoia will turn much of its attention to preparing for Allegheny County's May primary.

Mr. Cramer said Advantages could start arriving here in several weeks. At that point, company and county officials could start training poll workers and educating voters about the new equipment.

First, however, Sequoia must modify the machines to make them accessible to handicapped voters, a HAVA requirement. Then the machines need to pass a state certification test in Harrisburg at the end of the month.

Not all of the Advantages were owned by Clark County, Mr. Cramer said. Several hundred units previously were used by Baltimore's board of elections.

Maryland recently compelled all of its local election departments to use one voting system.

Neal Jones, Baltimore's deputy director of elections, said he was sorry to see the Advantages go. The city had been using them since the 1990s.

"That's the best system there is," he said. "It's still good equipment. We would have kept using it."