Beaufort County still pondering voting machine upgrades

WASHINGTON, D.C. Although Beaufort County has not yet decided whether it will abandon its voting machines to follow the state's plan to move to a uniform electronic system, two studies released this week recommended increased security precautions to ensure the reliability of electronic voting.

Beaufort County officials have protested the announcement in April that South Carolina plans to buy electronic voting machines from a single vendor, which has not been ed. The local election leaders cited the lack of a verifiable paper trail as a security concern.

"We believe there is legislation in place that says the counties can choose which system to use," said Agnes Garvin, director of the Beaufort County Board of Elections and Voter Registration.

Beaufort County officials have not decided whether to go along with the state plan, Garvin said. If the county refuses to comply, it will continue to use the optical scanning machines it bought in 2000 and will not receive its share of the $1.2 million in federal money allotted to South Carolina by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to voting systems nationwide.

Beginning in August, the county's optical scanning machines will undergo maintenance to prepare for the upcoming elections. County officials have not set a date to decide whether or when they will upgrade with the rest of the state.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law released a report Tuesday that recommended ways to improve the reliability and security of direct response electronic voting machines in the 2004 elections.

Absent from the report is a recommendation to require a paper record for verifying voting results, the security issue in electronic voting that most concerns Beaufort County officials.