County mulls voting systems

By Michael Wright
The Facts

Published March 22, 2004

It all sounds so simple, so clean.

Just walk up to the voting booth, touch your finger on the name you want, or highlight it and it all goes through — no fuss, no muss.

But nothing is politics is simple or clean, and new electronic voting machines are raising concerns nationwide over security and backup mechanisms.

In the wake of the 2000 presidential election fiasco in which George Bush defeated then-Vice President Al Gore thanks to a thimbleful of contested votes in Florida, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act that requires electronic voting machines to be in place by January 2006.

The law requires the machines to have the capability to produce a paper record in the event a candidate requests a recount.

Brazoria County officials are looking at two types of machines, one with touch-screen voting, similar to what Bexar County has, and one with a dial, like Harris County’s, which voters use to highlight their choice on the screen.

At Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting, which starts at 9 a.m. on the third floor of the courthouse, Mary Ruth Rhodenbaugh will present a Democratic Party resolution asking commissions to proceed with caution when choosing electronic voting machines.

“We just don’t feel like it would be wise to invest millions of dollars of money into machines that don’t have any verifiable paper trail,” said Rhodenbaugh who lost a close vote for Precinct 4 commissioner on 2002 that included a recount. “It might just lead to challenges in the future. To me, this is a totally non-partisan issue. It’s an issue that affects every voter in Brazoria County, and every potential voter and every future voter as far as the sanctity of the ballot.”

County Clerk Joyce Hudman said the county will make sure there is recount capability on whatever machines the county buys.

“We have a presentation April 1 to get into those nitty-gritty things,” Hudman said.

Election officials in both Harris and Bexar counties say they can conduct recounts with their new machines.

“We have to print out a ballot image from the units and basically run a tally sheet on the image,” said Cliff Borofski, elections administrator for Bexar County. “You could call it a paper ballot.”

David Beirne, director of public affairs for the Harris County clerk, said the candidate is allowed to choose either an electronic recount or a hand count.

“All electronic voting systems do have to be able to support a recount,” Beirne said.

Michelle Schafer of Hart Intercivic, the Sugar Land company that manufactures eSlate, said the system records votes at three different places, matching ballots to an access number that protects voters’ identities.

“You can certainly run a recount on an electronic voting system,” Schafer said. “There are all kinds of paper trails and audit logs that can be run, not just from the individual machine.”

Janice Evans, who runs the Brazoria County elections division, said there is new legislation in pending in Congress that will put more stringent requirements on the paper trail, though the bill doesn’t seem to be moving forward.

While current systems might not conform with the bill, Evans said any machine the county buys will be able to be reprogrammed, at a fee, to provide any required new capability.

“It’s our understanding that it would be something that could be added at an additional charge,” Evans said.

While it might be distasteful to spend more money than planned, that would still be preferable to buying a system, using it for one election and then having to buy another one.