N.C. voting machine committee pares down recommendations

The Associated Press   21 January 2005

  
A legislative committee examining electronic voting machine reforms pared down their recommendations Friday to present to the General Assembly when it convenes next week.

After meeting for four hours, panel members appeared to agree on legislation giving the State Board of Elections more power to decide which kind of machines counties can purchase.

Any approved electronic machine would be required to generate some kind of paper record of the ballot cast by the voter.

The demand for receipts grew after a touch-screen machine in Carteret County failed to record more than 4,400 ballots cast before Nov. 2. Their choices were lost, throwing the race for state agriculture commissioner into doubt because the two candidates were separated statewide by only 2,287 votes.

The State Board of Elections ordered a new statewide election, but a judge threw that out, largely on procedural matters.

In response, the committee also appeared to back a proposal that would allow the state board to call a "known group of voters" back to the polls to recast their voters in a two-week period after Election Day if it's determined their votes were lost. The law would apply to future elections.

In Carteret County, the displaced voters can be contacted because they participated in early voting.

Likely gone from the final package will be legislation that would have allowed people to vote in all races in which they are qualified, even if they showed up at the wrong precinct. County elections boards would have been required to provide enough ballot styles to ensure the person could vote in local races.

Some panel members questioned why the state should stop requiring voters to go to their correct precinct location.

The state Supreme Court is reviewing a complaint by Bill Fletcher, the Republican candidate for state school superintendent, over whether out-of-precinct provisional ballots cast on Election Day are illegal and shouldn't have been counted.

Other proposals likely to be in the panel's final recommendations include allowing:

- candidates asking for a recount to ultimately demand that some precincts be counted by hand to ensure that the previous counts aren't wrong. If the sample is sufficiently different from earlier precinct totals, the state board will order a hand recount of the entire race.

- state officials and political parties to review the computer source code for electronic machines to evaluate their security.

- several counties to experiment with one-stop voting sites on Election Day. The one-stop voting sites currently allow anyone in a county to register and vote only before an election.

The committee is expected to complete their proposals Tuesday, the day before the General Assembly convenes for the 2005 session.