Cook dumps punch-card ballots

Friday, May 27, 2005

By Jonathan Lipman   The Daily Southtown

Six years after Cook County's punch-card ballots were held up to national ridicule, suburban county voters will use pencil and paper, and in some cases a computer touch screen, to cast their vote.

County Clerk David Orr announced Thursday he has ed a California company to provide optical scan ballot machines for the spring 2006 primary. All 2,402 county precincts also will have at least one touch-screen machine, as required by federal law.

"I think we're going to get a better system," Orr said. "While we did pretty well in the past years to make the best out of punch card, punch card has some inherent flaws."

Punch-card ballots have been headed for extinction ever since the contested 2000 presidential election and its infamous "hanging chads."

Cook County made headlines during that election, when critics of Florida's election system held up the long, crowded Cook County ballot as an example of how impossible punch cards are to use.

Orr said he doesn't care about "some flag waving by some politician five years ago," but he says the county's unusually long ballot will be made easier with the new systems.

"With optical scan, the ballot is right there in front of you," Orr said. "With punch cards, when you intentionally skip races, like the judicial retention votes, it's hard to see what you've done."

The $23.8 million in federal money Orr plans to use to buy the new machines is only available if he gets rid of punch cards.

No local money will be used to buy the machines. Sequoia Voting Systems was the lowest bidder among four finalists and the one that best met the county's needs, Orr said. The county board will be asked to approve the deal at its June meeting.

The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which went through a joint bidding process with Orr's office, is expected to announce a decision on the city's voting machines next week, spokesman Tom Leach said.

Most jurisdictions nationwide are doing the same as Cook County, Orr said, using a combination of optical scan and touch screen systems. The touch screens are necessary to meet federal disability requirements and are the easiest to use, but are too expensive to employ countywide.

Voters using the optical scan ballots will use a pencil to fill in a small circle next to the name of their chosen candidate, similar to a standardized test. Voters will enter their ballots into a scanner, which will give them a chance to correct any errors, such as voting for too many candidates in a single race.

Senior citizens and voters with disabilities will be invited to use the touch-screen system, which works like an automated teller machine. Each race will be presented on the screen one at a time, and voters will be asked to touch the name of the person they want.

The computer screens can be asked to display instructions in almost any language, Orr said. The paper optical scan ballots will be printed in English, Spanish and Chinese.

Touch-screen voting machines caused some controversy in the 2004 election in other states. Votes were lost in North Carolina when some touch-screen computers malfunctioned and no record of the day's voting remained. Many critics also worried results could be altered with no one knowing.

The Sequoia system Orr wants to buy produces a paper record that every voter can review and officials can use in a recount.

The printed record is displayed to the voter under a plastic shield so that the voter cannot alter it, said Steve George, a spokesman for Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller. Nevada used the touch screens statewide last year.

"It's self contained. It's basically like a cash register roll," George said. "The print record would be very hard to manipulate. The most important thing to provide to people, as an election official, is confidence."