Pencils sharpened for paper primary  

Cara Host    Observer-Reporter   17 May 2005

WAYNESBURG ? Greene County elections officials never intended to switch the voting system a little over a month before today's primary.

Nevertheless, they were forced to do so when the state outlawed the touch-screen system the county has been using for the past seven years. Today, voters may feel like they are taking a step back in time when they make their choices through a paper-based method.

"It's not exactly a step forward, but I think it will go fine," Scott Kelley, the county's information technology director, said of the optical-scan system.

The county has been using UniLect Patriot Direct Recording Electronic Voting machines for the past seven years. But the Pennsylvania Department of State decertified the system April 7 after it froze and malfunctioned during an examination.

The optical-scan process will not be as archaic as the hand-count system that the county used prior to 1998. Before the touch-screen system, poll workers often would have to work through the night, counting all of the ballots by hand.

For this election, two tabulating machines will automatically count the paper ballots. Voters will make their ions by filling in ovals beside the candidates' names. Once the polls close, election workers will take the ballots to be counted at Greene County Office Building in Waynesburg.

In previous years, the voting results were at each of the county's polling places the night of the election. That will not be possible this year, however, since the votes will be counted only in Waynesburg. Results the night of the election will be posted at Greene County Office Building and on the county's Web site, www.co.greene.pa.us.

Results will be posted at the individual precincts Wednesday morning.

"We developed a fine-tuned and smooth process to (tabulate) the returns under the old system. That is now all changed, so all we can to is wait and hope for the best," said election director Frances Pratt.

Counting the ballots with the optical-scanning equipment will take a bit more time than the UniLect system. Kelley said it took about 90 seconds for computers to count votes from each precinct under the UniLect system. He expects the optical-scan machines will need five to 10 minutes to count each pre-cinct's votes.

Pratt and Kelley expect to have all the votes tabulated by 11 p.m. Typically, all votes were counted under the UniLect system by 10:15 or 10:30, Kelley said.

"If we get a lot of overvotes or errors, that will slow the process down," Kelley added.

Overvotes occur when voters seem to too many candidates for a particular office. The machine will not be able to count those ballots, and election workers will have to determine how that ballot should be counted.

The county rented the equipment necessary to implement the optical-scan system. Election Systems and Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., printed the ballots, rented the machines and provided representatives to train election workers and help with the process on the day of the primary. The cost will be $29,000, but the state should cover all of it.