Ohio voters, sharpen your pencils

By David Giffels   Akron Beacon   18 January 2005

Back in the fall, when I was traveling around the state writing about the upcoming election, I happened along an antiques store in Bolivar that had set up an old-fashioned polling room.

In a quaint re-enactment of a 100-year-old process, visitors approached a wooden table. They received a piece of paper and a pencil, marked the box next to the candidate of their choice, then ped the ballot into a metal barrel.

Guess what?

For more than $100 million, we're about to upgrade to pretty much the same system. Last week, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell ordered Ohio's counties to convert to optical-scan voting machines. These use the same technology as those Iowa Basic tests we took as schoolkids filling in an oval with a No. 2 pencil.

The change was necessary. Ohio is required to eliminate punch-card balloting by 2006, and the new machines, which use an electronic eye to read the ballot, are a safe option.

So this is not so much a backward step as a lateral step. Instead of using a pointy stick to punch out our choices, we'll use a lead pencil to scratch them in. (No truth to the rumor that chisel and stone were the next option.)

Lost in this shuffle is the opportunity to advance to more forward-thinking touch-screen voting machines.

Blackwell was working within immediate constraints. With the 2006 deadline looming, the touch-screen machines' function to provide a paper record hasn't been approved. In addition, the higher cost of the touch-screen machines exceeds the $106 million available in federal funding. The more primitive optical-scan machines can be purchased for that amount. So it's hard to blame Blackwell for being prudent.

But this may be a case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Diebold, the Green-based company that makes both machines, contends that the touch-screen machines performed smoothly in places that used them in November. It seems that the snag was really a matter of working out bugs in the relationship between Diebold and the state of Ohio.

Instead of representing the cutting edge, Ohio will continue to represent an anachronistic voting system.

The closest everyday parallel to touch-screen voting is the ATM, which has revolutionized personal banking. Most of us agree that bank machines make our lives better, and most of us trust them, even if we were skeptical at their inception.

We trust this technology with our money, but in Ohio we've lost the opportunity to trust it in advancing the democratic process.

Government is filled with tradition, and that's not always a bad thing. But some traditions go unquestioned, or resist bold forward movement.

We still hold our presidential elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. That tradition is based on reasons as relevant to our society as horseshoes and butter churns.

Elections were harnessed to November back in 1845, when the rhythm of the American year was based on farming. By November, the harvest was complete and people could tend to their civic duties. Tuesday made sense, because many people needed a day to travel by horseback to their county seat. The weekend, a time for rest and worship, was out of the question.

A truly modern election would consider voting on the weekends. Or in the summer. It would embrace computerized voting, to take advantage of the most important technological advance of our time.

This is not modernization for its own sake. (And believe me, it's not the ramblings of a futurist. I don't even own a cell phone.) It would simply acknowledge the rhythm of American life, just as the old traditions did.

Instead, on Election Day, we'll step into a polling room that looks like the one in that antiques store. Wooden table, slips of paper, pencils and a metal box. We'll vote, then return to the modern world.