Panel's list for improving voting-system ills finished
Committee proposals move on to General Assembly

By David Ingram
Winston-Salem JOURNAL RALEIGH BUREAU   26 January 2005

A legislative panel issued several recommendations yesterday for improving North Carolina's voting system, but not before tossing out the most controversial ideas.

The Joint Select Committee on Electronic Voting Systems suggested that state elections officials should have more authority to correct irregularities in voting, such as the loss of 4,438 votes in Carteret County last year.

It also recommended giving state employees up to 24 hours a year in community-service leave to work at voting precincts; allowing election officials more time to count absentee votes on Election Day; and expanding one-stop voting, in which a voter can cast a ballot anywhere in his county, not just in his home precinct.

Members of the group said that the changes would help restore trust in the state's elections.

"Despite capable, dedicated election officials, the system has malfunctioned just often enough and recently enough to create doubt in the public mind that the system is healthy," the members wrote in their report.

"Those malfunctions, together with questions raised by critics of electronic voting about what problems are possible, threaten to leave the state with an election system that does not have the public's confidence."

The proposals now go to the General Assembly for consideration.

Committee members tentatively agreed on their central proposal - a requirement that all voting machines include a paper trail that a voter can check before leaving a precinct. The group is scheduled to review the proposal one last time Feb. 3 before forwarding it on to the General Assembly.

The members said no to some controversial proposals. They declined to endorse a proposal to put all county election officials on the state payroll and under state authority. They also declined to require that all new voting machines have capacity for instant-runoff voting.

Sen. Austin Allran, R-Catawba and a co-chairman of the committee, said that the more modest approach would make the proposal more palatable to legislators.

"If we had done anything radical and extreme, it would have been very difficult," Allran said. "But we tried to do what was right, and we were conscious of the political realities."

Committee members were also careful not to recommend anything that would cost counties money. The state already has $50 million set aside for new voting equipment.

Election officials in Carteret County lost 4,438 votes last year after an electronic-voting machine ran out of memory to store them. An engineering flaw allowed voters to continue casting votes, but the votes were irretrievably lost.

The error has contributed to delays in certifying winners for two statewide offices, the commissioner of agriculture and the superintendent of public instruction.