Editorial for Jan. 14, 2005   Middletown Journal
Forget about touch-screen voting devices

Ken Blackwell?s ?Back to the Future? order Wednesday ? mandating that plans for computer-screen voting be scrapped ? caught many county election officials in Ohio by surprise and will undoubtedly touch off a new storm of controversy over the way we cast our ballots.

Secretary of State Blackwell, who has been steering Ohio counties toward touch-screen voting systems for months, threw in the towel Wednesday, postponing the inevitable transition to ATM-style voting. He ordered that county boards of elections switch over to paper ballots that will be optically scanned at each precinct. Oh yes, and try to have that done in time for the November 2005 election.

If you follow such matters, you know that the federal government wants states to abandon the controversial punch-card ballots that kept Florida?s results and the outcome of the 2000 presidential election tied up in knots for weeks ? and introduced the term ?hanging chad? into our national vernacular.

Facing a 2006 deadline under the federal Help America Vote Act, Blackwell abandoned plans to move most counties to high-tech voting systems ? some already have them in place ? and resorted to a less expensive and decidedly lower-tech solution. Think achievement tests, lead pencils, multiple-choice questions and ?don?t mark outside the box.?

In the end, too many questions still surrounded the use of touch-screen voting devices (?I just cleared the screen Did my vote count??) ? especially in our current overheated political climate. Fearing voters would lack confidence in the system (and apparently the integrity of election officials), the state Legislature last year ordered that any new voting system produce a paper trail, thus allowing for recounts. However, that requirement ? which, after 2000, should have been anticipated much earlier ? was going to add about 20 percent to the already-high cost of the computers.

Boards of elections, which have been wrestling with the type of touch-screen system to buy, now face a new deadline. They must toss out their earlier work and choose between two state-approved suppliers of optical-scan voting systems by mid-March. Blackwell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, will likely regret that he sprung this surprise on county election officials, without seeking their input first.

In addition to surly election officials, we?ll offer that many Ohioans are going to be disappointed that the best our state can do ? in the digital 21st century ? will resemble an SAT test.

Blackwell?s order is a step in the wrong direction, one that surely will be reversed when questions about reliability and security are finally resolved. It also suggests cynically that we can?t trust election officials to set up an honest system or that voters are too unsophisticated to understand how touch-screen devices work. (If we can trust ATMs to keep our checking accounts straight, we ought to be able to trust our votes with them.)

We know that Ohio will eventually come around and use the best technology available, but don?t be surprised this November ? while you?re in line at your precinct, listening to your MP3 player and text-messaging a friend ? if the voting booth includes a pencil sharpener and eraser.