Voting machines to cover Kansas

BY LORI O'TOOLE BUSELT

The Wichita Eagle  07 September 2004

The paper ballot is about to go the way of the horse and buggy and typewriters.

By 2006, all of Kansas' 2,200 polling places will need to have electronic voting machines to comply with a federal law that requires polling places to provide the handicapped a means to vote without another person's assistance.

"We've got a lot of work to do, quite frankly," said Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh.

About a fifth of Kansas' counties still use paper ballots.

In Sedgwick County, where voters have been using electronic machines for the last decade, about a quarter of the 850 voting machines will be replaced, making it easier for voters with disabilities to cast their ballots, County Election Commissioner Bill Gale said.

The new machines likely will be sleeker, smaller, laptoplike voting machines with an audio function, he said.

Thornburgh said the push for the change is unusual because the government is behind it, rather than emerging technology.

The federal government will pay for most of the new machines, with the state pitching in 3 percent and counties paying for 2 percent, Thornburgh said.

Sedgwick County may consider paying to replace all of its aging machines at the same time, Gale said.

But at a time when a new voting machine runs about $5,000, it's unclear whether that will be a viable option.

"It's not a small purchase when you look to replace these," Gale said.

The county's current stock of voting machines is a $3 million investment, voting machine technician Gary Mathis said.

Voting security is among the concerns emerging locally and nationwide as the country moves to all-electronic voting.

It's something the state will begin to research in September, Thornburgh said.

His office is assembling a team, including computer experts and election officials, that will develop a request for proposals to send to companies for the new voting machines the state will buy.

That request will go out in the spring, Thornburgh said, and the state will consider purchasing about 1,500 machines.

The state plans to narrow a list of vendors to three or four and let counties choose which ones they want.

One of the factors in choosing new machines will be how they balance new technology and security, Thornburgh said.

The answer might be machines that print a receipt of sorts, recording the vote cast that voters can take home for verification.

Currently, all polling sites in Kansas have a paper trail, and voting machines are not online.

Poll workers deliver results in person to the election office, rather than electronically, Thornburgh said, preventing accidental system failures or intentional hacking.

The machine Sedgwick County uses now has a roll of paper inside of it that tracks votes cast.

"Should something happen to a machine should it decide to take an early day off on election day nothing's lost," Mathis said.

To ensure privacy, Gale said, the voting machines' returns are printed out of order.

That record can be used as a backup counter if the machine's cartridge, used to tally votes, fails to operate.

It's happened before, Gale said, as recently as the 2003 city elections.