Optical-scan ballots not too old/new; just right

By MARK LANE
FOOTNOTE

Last : 30 July 2004

Maybe it's a good thing Volusia County has such a rich electoral history.

It means we've achieved a level of election paranoia the rest of the state heck, the rest of the nation only arrived at after the 2000 election. It meant we were readier for the 2000 election. It means we don't have touch-screen voting this year.

The latest problem with the touch-screen voting surfaced this week when it was discovered that data from the 2002 general election and gubernatorial primary in Miami-Dade County no longer exists on memory cards. Computer crashes in 2003 turned the record into stray electrons.

This is no problem, said Miami-Dade Department of Elections and state officials, because the data disappeared months and months after it would have been needed in the event of a recount.

At first, they seemed to regard the voting data as though it were something that had gone bad in the back of a refrigerator. Well, who would want voting data that old and moldy? And even if it were a problem which it's not, really it is a problem that is now fixed.

Such is the efficiency of computers that they can toss out information that used to take hours to accidentally truck to a landfill. Is this progress or what?

The latest problems with state-of-the-art voting systems make it a relief that Volusia County started using an optical scanning system back in 1995 and Flagler County in 1998. New enough to keep. Old enough that the technology is as familiar as a Lotto machine.

Volusia and Flagler, it seems, learned what any consumer of electronics and higher-tech gadgetry learns eventually: Neither early-adopter nor tech-scoffer be.

The early-adopters are the guys and I'll admit it, they're usually guys who get the latest items of a gizmo nature as soon as they come out. They buy them before the price comes down, the kinks are worked out and the standards agreed upon. These people have very interesting attics, garages and closets.

The tech-scoffers are the other extreme. They hold on to stuff long after it makes sense and embark on insane retrofitting and patching projects.

Punch cards are retro technology, They create long lines in ballot places, count ballots slowly, and then there's the whole hanging-chad, dimpled-chad and chads-that-shake-loose-in-the-box issues. In true tech-scoffer manner, the Volusia County Council tried to patch the system and keep it going in 1993, only to relent in 1994 when somebody was found to take the old system off our hands.

The current mark-and-scan system is not foolproof. But voters can look at a ballot and hold it in their hands. It's not a wisp of an electrical field on a circuit board. When disputes break out, you can pass the actual ballots around a table and let everyone look.

You can audit and measure the output of touch-screen voting booths different ways under different testing conditions. By those measurements they do well. What is harder to measure is the public's comfort level with the technology, how well the systems recover from dumb mistakes, and how closely witnesses can look over the shoulders actually and metaphorically of counters, human and mechanical.

The new technology asks for a level of trust not easily found at election time in the Sunshine State. Only the cheeriest early adopter can believe in new machines too accurate to need a doublecheck.

People are not comfortable with touchscreens. And in a state with a colorful history of discomfort at election time, that means something.