Officials tepid about ballot change
PORTER COUNTY: County must choose new voting technology in the coming year.

BY MATTHEW VAN DUSEN   NOrthwest Times (IN)
 November 7, 2004 12:16 AM CST

VALPARAISO | Down in the basement of the Porter County Administration Building, there is a room with huge stacks of gray attache cases that make up the technology of democracy.

On Wednesday, those cases, all 400 of them, became useless.

This past election was the last one for which voters will use punch-card ballots and the accompanying voting apparatus contained in the suitcases. The federal Help America Vote Act and state law say punch cards ballots will no longer be acceptable in Indiana.

It remains unclear what will replace the punch cards.

"There's nothing out there at this particular moment that I'd have," County Clerk Dale Brewer said.

Brewer said accountability will be her chief concern when she chooses $2 million or more of new voting machines.

Most electronic voting machines do not create a paper trail and computer experts and voters' rights groups have said these machines are susceptible to hackers changing vote totals.

County Board of Elections member J.J. Stankiewicz said the concern about paper trails has more to do with voters needing security than actual fraud.

"I think it's a public perception," Stankiewicz said. "If you can't feel it and you can't touch it, it isn't real."

Some machines do leave paper trails, though.

On Tuesday, most Nevada counties used Sequoia's AVC Edge electronic voting machine, which shows voters a paper printout of their choices they can approve before casting the ballot. The ballot is visible under a plastic screen, and voters cannot take it with them.

The paper ballots can be used to verify the electronic totals if there are questions about the count.

Even these machines have problems such as touch-screen calibration, however, and they tend to be expensive.

It's a tough time to be an election clerk, said Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation, a group critical of electronic voting machines.

Voting standards are still unclear, and the multimillion dollar investment in technology is lost if people will be able to cast votes on the Internet in 10 years.

"I'd say voting technology is in flux right now and it's difficult to see how things are going to shake out," Doherty said.

Doherty said the best type of voting machines right now are optiscans, an older technology.

Voters fill out paper ballots and then feed them into optiscan machines. The machines reject ballots that are not filled out correctly and the voter can correct the error on the spot.

But optiscans are not accessible for people with disabilities, Brewer said.

In the coming year, county Board of Elections member Patrick Lyp said the board will meet with vendors and ask interested members of the public to help choose the new voting technology.

Good thing there are no elections in 2005, Brewer said, because it might take a while.