Extra equipment will help count ballots
By GRETCHEN LOSI in the Victorville Daily Press   18 August 2004

SAN BERNARDINO — The Board of Supervisors approved $370,000 on Tuesday to purchase four additional machines that will assist in counting ballots during the November election.

The county has four 400-C optical scan counting machines that Registrar of Voters Scott O. Konopasek fears will be inadequate with the new provisions set by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.

All voters must be offered the option of voting a paper ballot at their polling place, as an option over electronic voting, according to the new requirements.

"The new machines will help keep our head above water and meet current expectations, with time," Konopasek said.

Shelley has estimated that up to 20 percent, or 105,000 projected voters in San Bernardino County, will choose the paper ballot option.

In addition to counting paper ballots, the Sequoia Voting Systems' optical scan voting equipment also will be used for absentee and provisional ballots, the same way they were used in the October gubernatorial recall election.

The machines also will help count twice the amount of paper ballot pages, which will be used as a result of the large number of local contests and ballot measures. Two paper pages will be required in the November election, as opposed to the single page used in previous elections, totaling approximately 615,000 pages, Konopasek said.

The additional machines will cut the counting time in half, allow the election-night paper ballot results to be completed on election night instead of the next day, and allow the remaining paper ballots to be counted in a timely manner, according to county documents.

The registrar of voters estimated that during the March Primary Election, his staff was able to count approximately 2,000 pages an hour, meaning it would take 30 hours of counting with the existing four machines.

"It will reduce our counting time from 30 (hours) to 15 (hours)," Konopasek said.