All punched out
On Tuesday, Sacramento County voters will mark the demise of the hanging chad
By Cameron Jahn Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Monday, March 1, 2004
Voters in Sacramento County on Tuesday will "say goodbye to Chad and hello to Mark."

At least that's the message elections officials are trying to get across on a large banner hanging in the registrar's office on 65th Street.

In the county's first "chad-less" election in more than 30 years, voters will use pen or pencil to choose their candidates instead of the punch cards and pokers discredited after the 2000 Florida presidential election fiasco.

Voters will now mark their ballot choices by filling in numbered rectangles with pencil or pen, similar to a scanned test form.

While paper-and-pencil may seem like an uncomplicated step backward in technology, persuading Sacramento County's 593,000 registered voters to use it correctly is shaping up to be a challenge.

Officials are crossing their fingers that voters pay attention to the large signs with a pair of boxing gloves that read "please don't punch the ballot," but old habits are hard to break.

Scores of absentee voters have already mailed their ballots back to the elections office complaining they are defective because the holes won't punch out.

And despite instructions calling for the use of pencil or pen, dozens of absentee voters have used razor-sharp knives to carve tiny rectangular holes in their ballots to choose their candidates.

"We had a woman call up to say she had to take her scissors and bend the ballot to cut the right holes," said Alice Jarboe, campaign services manager. "She ironed her ballot for us though because she knew that a wrinkled ballot would not go through our card readers."

The county's vote-counting machines cannot read ballots with holes, but elections officials don't throw those ballots away. Pairs of election clerks pencil in the voters' ions onto a fresh ballot, working in tandem to prevent vote tampering.

The county also requires its election clerks to take an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution before starting work and swear a second time at the end of the day that no votes were illegally altered.

"We had to take an oath this morning," Veronica Reyes, an elections clerk, said in surprise while verifying signatures on absentee ballots Wednesday.

The October gubernatorial recall election marked the last time that Sacramento County residents voted by making holes in perforated punch card ballots.

After slight tweaking, the county's optical-scan machines will now count the marks on a ballot instead of registering light beams that stream through punched holes.

Placer County's 165,000 registered voters also will candidates with pencil or pen when polls open at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Paper-and-pencil ballots are an intermediate step for Sacramento and Placer counties as they move to install touch-screen voting machines by 2006.

The explosive population growth in Placer County, home to communities such as Lincoln, the state's fastest-growing city, is complicating the changeover to touch-screen voting. Elections officials must have enough touch-screen machines in place to accommodate the projected 2006 population, as well as ensure the new voting technology is secure.

Placer county officials are considering an electronic voting system that would still use paper ballots, unlike many of the touch-screen systems currently in use statewide. Voters would slide ballots into the hybrid machines, mark their ions on a touch-screen and leave behind a paper record of their choices.

Those with disabilities would be able to vote independently using headphones, a wand, a mouth-controlled device or a keyboard.

"If we had a disputed election or if someone wanted a recount, we could go back to the paper ballots to calm the fears of some people who may worry that when they push the 'send' button, it may not have been recorded on the (machine's) hard drive," said Ryan Ronco, Placer County's assistant registrar.

At least a dozen California counties have bought touch-screen voting machines with their share of $2.3 billion in federal money and $200 million in state Proposition 41 money, which was approved in the wake of the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Elections officials in Sacramento, Yolo, Placer and El Dorado counties will begin spending their portions of the state and federal funds next year.

For now, voters in Yolo and El Dorado counties will still vote on punch-card machines, the same way they have for decades.

Although El Dorado County is moving toward touch-screen voting, it was only in January that William E. Schultz took over as county registrar of voters, and elections officials there did not want to change the voting system too quickly.

"We're just taking our time, and our registrar is looking into all the (touch-screen machine) vendors," said Norma Gray, elections supervisor for El Dorado County's 94,000 registered voters.

Yolo County's 81,000 registered voters also will not see anything new on Tuesday. Votes will be marked as they have for 15 years, with "inexpensive, high-tech hole punches," said Freddie Oakley, county clerk recorder.