Wood Co. to purchase touch-screen machines

By JENNIFER FEEHAN   Toledo BLADE   19 May 2005
BOWLING GREEN - Wood County voters could be touching a computer screen to vote rather than punching holes in paper ballots as early as the Aug. 3 special election.

The Board of Elections yesterday voted 3-0 to buy "direct record electronic" voting machines from Diebold Electronic Systems. Board member Al Baldwin was absent.

The federal government has said it will provide $1,316,215 to Wood County to buy 487 machines. Elections officials intend to purchase about 16 more units for about $45,000 to ensure efficient voting in the county's 105 precincts, said Terry Burton, elections director.

Ohio counties have until Tuesday to choose either touch-screen or optical-scan voting systems to comply with state and federal mandates.

Board member Mike Marsh said that while the optical-scan system is less expensive to buy, it is more costly long-term to operate.

"What we save the first year will pay for the additional machines,'' he said.

Mr. Burton said the cost to print ballots for an optical-scan system would run between $37,000 and $55,000 per countywide election.

Also weighing in the board's choice was the requirement that counties have at least one touch-screen voting machine per precinct to accommodate disabled voters. If other voters used the optical-scan system, poll workers would have to be trained on both systems.

Mr. Burton said the board would like to have the new voting machines in place for the August election, which so far only involves the six precincts in the Eastwood school district. The machines could be tried out in September if the city of Perrysburg holds a mayoral primary.

Ideally, he said, the county would be ready to use the new machines for all voters in November, although federal law does not require the systems to be in use until the May, 2006, election.

Elections officials from more than a dozen northwest Ohio counties got to try out the touch-screen machines last week at a demonstration set up by Diebold in Bowling Green.

Described as "very user-friendly" by Wood County officials, the machines require voters to touch a candidate's name or a response to an issue on a computer screen and then verify their vote by looking at a paper receipt that prints alongside the screen. If there is a problem, the voter can touch "reject ballot" and vote again.

Mr. Burton said that after the county retires its punch-card voting machines, it would likely put them up for sale on the county's Internet auction site.

"A lot of civic organizations have already inquired about what we're going to do with them,'' he said.