Elections board to attend optical scan voting conference

By Matt Suman, Seneca County Advertiser-Tribune   20 January 2005

The Seneca County Board of Elections will learn more next week about optical scan voting machines that will soon replace punch card ballots.
Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell directed elections boards to decide between two qualified optical scan device vendors by Feb. 9. Optical scan voting devices will be used by all county elections boards as the state's uniform voting system.

Diebold Elections Systems or Elections Systems and Software are the qualified vendors to offer machines.

The Diebold AccuVote-OS device costs $4,572 per unit while the ES&S Model 100 costs $5,499.

Seneca County Board of Elections director Janet Leahy said the board will go to a conference in Columbus next Wednesday and Thursday to learn more about the two vendors. She said the Help America Vote Act or HAVA, will cover costs for the new devices other than maintenance and storage.

Leahy said the board has not been given a date for when the devices would have to be in place.

"This is a pretty tight time frame we're working with," she said.

After the conference in Columbus, she said vendors will come and talk to elections boards individually about the optical scan machines.

With optical scan devices, voters mark paper ballots which are then ed into electronic ballot readers. Ballot readers alert voters of "over votes" and electronically tabulate the ballot at the precinct as required by HAVA.

Leahy said optical scan machines would read either a pen or pencil.

"They prefer a pen," she said.

Paper ballots are then available for recounts or auditing.

The secretary of state had previously given elections boards the choice between ing electronic voting devices and precinct count optical scan machines. The cost of electronic voting devices with legislatively mandated paper audit trails surpasses available and anticipated funding in light of Ohio's increase of about 900,000 voters since January 2004.