Back to the e-voting drawing board?

Fact or Fiction

Chris Graham    Augusta Free Press    17 April 2005

The question on the minds of those in the electronic-voting machine know in Augusta County in recent days has been ... will we still be able to use the UniLect Patriot e-voting machines that were supposed to be ready for the November state elections in the wake of what has been transpiring in Pennsylvania?

The answer is an unqualified yes.

"We have been in contact with the State Board of Elections and the folks at UniLect, and we have been assured that what has happened in Pennsylvania in no way jeopardizes the certification of UniLects in Virginia," Augusta County voting registrar Susan Miller told The Augusta Free Press.

The AFP first reported the issues in Pennsylvania related to the UniLect Patriot machines last week.

The report focused on the decision of the Pennsylvania Department of State on April 7 to decertify UniLect Patriot machines that were at the root of major voter problems in three counties in the state last fall.

Augusta County election officials decided last year to go with UniLect e-voting machines to replace the lever machines that have been in use in the locality for decades.

The touch-screen-based UniLect Patriot machines - 80 in all - are to be used in the county for the first time in the November Virginia state elections.

Election officials in Pennsylvania examined UniLects used in Beaver County, Greene County and Mercer County in the November 2004 elections to try to discover why those three counties recorded significantly more undervotes last year as compared to previous years before the machines were put in place.

During a Feb. 15 evaluation of the machines, the UniLect system failed to sense screen touches multiple times, according to a Department of State spokesman, and did not register or record votes.

The screen also froze up and stopped accepting touches during the examination, which was led by voting-machine expert Michael Shamos, a consultant hired by the department to look into the problems said to have been associated with the UniLect Patriots.

"The machines are all called UniLect Patriots, but because election codes are different from state to state, the machines that we're going to use here are not at all like the ones used there. The hardware and software are both different from what was in use in Pennsylvania," Miller said in an interview conducted on Thursday, the day that the report on the Pennsylvania matter was published in the AFP.

"One example of the differences is that we don't have registration by party here in Virginia, while they do in Pennsylvania. As a result, the machines there were equipped with an option for voters who wanted to cast a straight party-line ticket. We wouldn't need that here, so that option has been kept out of the software," Miller said.

Miller said the county is "pleased with the UniLect Patriot machines, and we're absolutely confident that we made the right decision to purchase them."

"We're 100 percent confident in the UniLect Patriot machines," Miller said.