Get Ready For Changes In The Voting Booth

Editorial    The Newton Bee   19 May 2005

Voting in an election is an act of trust. Voters trust that their votes will be counted.

In the last five years, that trust has been tested, most notably in Florida in 2000 where hanging chads and a hasty judiciary cast a shadow over the outcome of the presidential election that year. And last year in Ohio long lines and faulty voting machines, mostly in African American communities, again sent partisans to court to contest election results. After the 2000 voting fiasco in Florida, the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was enacted in 2002 to restore voter trust in the system.

A federal HAVA grant for Connecticut has earmarked $32.7 million to help implement the new requirements for federal elections for 2006 and beyond: accessible voting machines for persons with disabilities and a voting system that produces a permanent paper record that can be manually audited if voting machine tallies are ever questioned. The mechanical voting machines used by nearly all towns and cities in Connecticut for the past 50 years clearly will not pass muster under the provisions of HAVA. They are neither accessible to the disabled nor do they produce a paper record of votes. Consequently, the state has to make some changes - and quickly.

A bill is now making its way through the state legislature to address part of the federal mandate - producing a verifiable paper trail of votes cast - but not the accessibility issue. In addition, Democratic Secretary of the State, and gubernatorial hopeful, Susan Bysiewicz, HAVA grant in hand, has issued a request for proposals (RFP) to provide one fully accessible electronic voting machine for every voting precinct in the state. Granted, the pressure is on to have a system in place for the 2006 elections, but it seems that state legislators and the secretary of the state are rushing toward partial solutions that will ultimately cost too much.

According to True VoteCT, a nonpartisan group of Connecticut voters "dedicated to bringing accessible and verifiable voting to Connecticut," the secretary of the state's RFP is pushing the state toward a touch-screen technology - known as direct recording electronic (DRE) machines - that will in the long run cost the state and towns millions more to purchase and maintain than other more reliable technologies such as optical scanning machines for ballots filled out by hand. True VoteCT has calculated that the differential in cost to equip Newtown with DRE machines as opposed to optical scanners would be $155,000 above and beyond the available federal grant. The extra cost statewide would be about $18 million, according to the group. The more expensive touch-screen machines will probably prompt towns to purchase fewer of them, creating even longer lines and more frustration at the polls.

It is interesting to note that persistent problems with DRE machines in Florida - ground zero for this nation's lack of confidence in voting results - have prompted some officials there to recommend scrapping the expensive electronic machines and adopting a more reliable, efficient, and less costly system like optical scanning.

Connecticut legislators and the secretary of the state need to slow down in their rush to address parts of the federal act and consider all their obligations under HAVA to maintain confidence in the voting process. That means a full review of all voting machine technologies and an assessment of costs for their eventual deployment and maintenance before legislation is enacted and new machines are purchased.