Elections office getting e-voting machines   
06 May 2005 
By Marvin G. Cortner    Osceola News-Gazette

Osceola County?s share to upgrade its voting equipment with 115 touch-screen machines to comply with Florida statute is $154,266.

The County Commission Monday approved the purchase of the new equipment by Supervisor of Elections Donna Bryant. The state?s share of the $456,796 cost to comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and handicap accessibility laws is $302,530. The federal government provided $4 billion nationwide to help states replace old voting systems.

The price tag for the equipment includes an upgrade to the elections office server, training and staff support, carts for transporting the voting machines to and from warehouse storage and various accessories and security equipment.

According to Bryant, the touch-screen machine is the only state-certified device that complies with the state statute, which requires the county be in compliance by July 1.

Diebold Election Systems Inc., of McKinney, Texas, will supply the equipment and training. The voting equipment company is a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., of North Canton, Ohio, whose primary business is making automated teller machines, commonly called ATMs.

?We?ll still use the optical scan equipment that we have now and we?ll have one touch-screen machine per precinct,? said Bryant, a Democrat re-elected in November to a four-year term. Diebold provided the county with its current optical scanners.

The use of touch-screen voting machines and the lack of paper trails has prompted lawsuits in some states such as Ohio and California. Some Democrats following the most recent general election argued that no recounts are possible with the touch-screen system.

With electronic voting machines, voters simply touch the screen beside candidates? names and then confirm their choices. Votes are stored on memory cards. Handicapped voters in the past needed poll workers to use pencils or special pens to fill in the ovals on their optical-scan ballots.

To combat worries over the lack of a paper trail, Diebold announced in late January that it had completed the design for a prototype printer that would give its touch-screen equipment a paper trail.

The printer, which has been submitted for federal government approval and which is not yet available, would produce a paper printout that would show how a ballot was cast and that could be used in a recount. Voters could view the printout through a transparent surface but could not remove it.

Critics charge that if someone were able to manipulate an electronic-voting machine to tabulate more votes for a certain candidate, for example, he also likely would be able to manipulate how that machine might make a printout.

Connie Click, assistant supervisor of elections, said voters would be able to use either the touchscreens or the optical ballots when they go to early voting sites or to the polls on election day.

?No matter what the concerns over the security of touch-screen machines, we are required to have them,? said Click, adding that neither the federal government nor the state have certified the Diebold printers. ?The new equipment should be here by June 1, and we?d have it in place by the next election.?

The first opportunity for voters to use the new equipment would be the March municipal election in St. Cloud. The first countywide election will be the primary in September 2006 and then the general election in November of 2006.

Like computers, the electronic voting machines would have back-up batteries so they could continue to be used in a power outage. Also, voting results would not be lost if the unit?s battery power failed as well.

Touch-screen voting machines also can provide the voter with a ballot either in English or Spanish. The machines also have special keyboards and headphones to allow sight-impaired voters to cast their ballots unassisted.

According to election officials, voters like the touch-screen machines because they are easy to use, much like similar screens used by banks and retail stores. However, optically scanned systems still have the lowest margin of error for recording votes.

The danger with the touch-screen machines is that if votes are lost or changed, there is no voter-verified audit trail that would be needed for a recount. Plus, the evidence of tampering also could be erased.

Most touch-screen systems run proprietary operating systems in the voting booths and Diebold machines run on Windows CE. The concern is that nearly all systems used to collect votes at election headquarters are personal computers and that these PCs have not gotten the latest security upgrades and therefore might be vulnerable to viruses if connected to the Internet.

Also, there has been some criticism that the people who create the ballots for the electronic voting machines don?t have enough experience and that poor design can result in lost votes or a premature end to a voting session.