County elects to scan ballots
Official: Electronic system may be ready by November.
By Cathy Locke    Sacramento Bee    June 2, 2005
El Dorado County voters will abandon punching for penciling when they go to the polls this fall.

The Board of Supervisors last week agreed to contract with Diebold Election Systems Inc. of Granite Bay for a new electronic voting system.

 "This is the culmination of over a 1 1/2-year effort on our part," county Recorder-Clerk William Schultz said during a presentation to the board May 25. "It was a little bit more involved than I had anticipated."

Punch-card systems such as the one previously used by the county have been decertified by the state and federal governments. As a replacement, the county has ed an optical scan system, Schultz said.

Voters will use pencils to fill in ovals on ballots that will be ed into a scanning machine.

In addition, Schultz said, each polling place will have at least one touch-screen voting machine to serve those with disabilities.

To comply with legislative mandates, the new system must be in place by Jan. 1, but Schultz said he expects it to be ready for use in November. "I would like to get one election under my belt before we go to the primary," he told the board.

Schultz said residents will have an opportunity to try out the new system during the El Dorado County Fair, June 16-19. Two demonstration voting booths will be set up in the main building at the fairgrounds in Placerville.

The board authorized Schultz to sign a contract with Diebold Systems for up to $2.9 million. Noting that he had promised to implement a system at no cost to the county's general fund, Schultz said the amount of the contract would not exceed funding available through state and federal grants.

The optical scan system was recommended by a ion committee chaired by former county Supervisor Bob Dorr. Schultz said the panel, which devoted 570 volunteer hours to the ion process, included current and former elected officials as well as representatives of the League of Women Voters and people with disabilities.

Dorr said the committee narrowed its choices to the optical scan and touch-screen systems. Although not all members favored the optical scan system, they were unanimous in ing Diebold Election Systems from among four potential vendors, he said.

Schultz said the system can be tightly integrated with the registration system, an important consideration in a county where about 40,000 of the approximately 90,000 registered voters cast absentee ballots.

The same system will be used for absentee ballots and those cast at the polls, he said.

Supervisor David Solaro asked how the system would affect vote counting for his South Lake Tahoe district.

Schultz said the best option to expedite the process would be to transmit the South Lake Tahoe vote count electronically via the county's computer system to the central vote counting division in Placerville.

The process must be approved by the state, and the county is working to meet security requirements, Schultz said. "If we can, it will be the greatest boon to the voting in our county ever," he said.