Few wrinkles in paper ballot voting

Thursday, May 19, 2005
By Brian David, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The predictions had been dire: With the sudden, harried return to paper ballots in Beaver County and the heightened awareness of security, those waiting for election results would have to down a lot of coffee and get cozy with the late-night talk show hosts.

The consensus was that numbers would start trickling in toward midnight, and wouldn't be complete until the not-so-wee-anymore hours Wednesday morning.

The consensus was wrong.

Despite the use of a system dormant since 1998, the county elections department had the earliest returns posted on the county Web site before 10 p.m. two hours after the polls closed had more than half the returns posted by 11, and had the complete returns posted by shortly after midnight.

The count is unofficial, of course elections officials still need to audit the results, count write-in votes and count ballots that could not be scanned by machine but voters and poll workers appeared to have few problems with the paper ballots.

"We had the manpower on hand; we were prepared to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible," said County Commissioner Joe Spanik, the commissioners' liaison for elections. He said the "tedious task" of sorting ballots by party and aligning them to go through the optical scanning machines went as well as he could have hoped.

Spanik said he'd heard of only "minor glitches" in the voting, and nothing out for the ordinary.

"Everyone did a great job," he said.

Spanik said, though, that the typically low turnout for a local election about 33 percent made the scanning go more quickly. "If this had been a presidential election with 60 percent, it would have been a lot longer process," he said.

Spanik expects the general election to go even more smoothly assuming the county is still using paper ballots because workers won't need to sort them by party.

Beaver, Mercer and Greene counties were forced to use paper ballots after the state de-certified the Unilect Patriot electronic voting system, which was used in all three. The state found problems with Unilect's vote-recording after seeing discrepancies in the presidential vote totals from the three counties last fall.

Beaver hired Elections Systems & Security of Omaha, Neb., to bring in optical scanners and conduct the count. It was done in a storeroom in the courthouse basement, and the sealed ballot boxes are being stored behind a double-locked door for security.