Voting method of choice: pencils
Friday, January 14, 2005
By TIM BOTOS Canton Repository staff writer

CANTON ? OK class, sharpen your No. 2 pencils, and get ready to vote.

Come November, you won?t recognize the voting machines at your polling place. The old punch-card counters are out. Touch-screen terminals, the anticipated wave of the future, also are history.

The buzz now can be summed up in two words:

Optical scan.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell says all 88 counties must buy optical-scan voting machines to replace whatever they?re using now.

?This is a very sophisticated voting device,? said Carlo LoParo, a Blackwell spokesman.

It?s the same basic technology used in taking and scoring some standardized school tests and in statewide lotteries. Voters will simply use a No. 2 pencil to color in an oval next to a candidate of choice.

For the first time, every county will deploy the same system. In November, 68 counties used punch cards, 13 used optical scan and seven used touch screens.

?Every county can use the same kind of ballot,? LoParo said.

County elections officials have until Feb. 9 to pick between two state-approved machines produced by Diebold Elections Systems and Election Systems and Software. New machines are to be in use for the November general election.

Although optical scan is generally regarded as a technological upgrade over punch cards, the machines aren?t the first choice of many election officials.

LoParo said the state has $106 million in federal grants to spend on new voting machines. It?s no longer enough to outfit counties with touch-screen systems, he said.

LoParo blamed that on several developments:

? Last year, the state Legislature required a voter verified paper trail for any new machine, increasing the cost of a machine by 20 percent.

? It takes longer to vote on a paper trail touch-screen machine, requiring a need for even more machines.

? Registered voters in the state increased by 900,000, requiring more machines.

With all those changes, LoParo said touch-screen machines will cost about $180 million, compared to $100 million for optical-scan systems.

Jeff Matthews, director of the Stark County Board of Elections, said the board hasn?t looked closely at optical-scan machines. He said they are more accurate than punch cards, but less so than touch screens.

?Elections require funding,? he said. ?Otherwise, you start making decisions that may not be best in the long run.?

Although optical-scan systems may cost less up-front, Matthews said it will cost Stark County more to operate them. For example, he said the board will have to hire crews to haul the cumbersome machines to and from polling locations ? a job previously handled by poll workers.

U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, R-St. Clairsville, sponsor of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, said this is not what he envisioned when the law was approved. The law is supposed to make voting easier, and provided $3.9 billion in funding.

?My state is having a train wreck,? he said.

Ney said optical-scan equipment is not his idea of modernizing voting in Ohio. However, he said lawmakers left Blackwell with few choices. If state leaders follow through on the plan, Ney said they will regret it within four years.

?Optical scans are going to be medieval,? he said.

Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University?s Moritz College of Law, said optical scan still is better than punch cards. Tokaji has litigated numerous voting rights and voting-equipment cases.

?We should have gotten rid of the punch cards ... a couple years ago,? he said.

The two styles available to Ohio counties are Diebold Elections Systems? AccuVote-OS at $4,572 per unit and Election Systems and Software Model 100 at $5,499 per unit.

LoParo said county elections officials can choose whichever units they want, regardless of price.

Each county also must buy at least one touch-screen terminal per polling location, to meet Help America Vote Act handicapped-accessible voting requirements by 2006. The optical-scan systems do not qualify as accessible.

The precinct count optical system allows voters to their ballots into a tabulator to be counted. It will not allow you to overvote (vote for more than one candidate per race) without warning you of that. After the polls close, a computer chip is removed from the tabulator and taken to the board of elections.

Two Ohio counties, Hardin and Lucas, leased Diebold AccuVote-OS machines for the last election. A Diebold Elections Systems official did not return a phone call Thursday.