County moves toward federal voting guides

by Ed Galucki    Cabot Star Herald   03 June 2005

Election night watch parties of the future will not mean an overnight stay at the courthouse, but for Lonoke County the hours-long wrestling matches with precinct boxes and a balky optical scanner will likely continue for some time to come. Budget constraints mean the county will have to continue with the current system, though with some improvements, JPs agreed at a failed special meeting on Thursday.
Charlie Troutman, county judge, and JPs Gina Burton, Joe Gunter, Richard Kyzer, Mike Dolan, Jeanette Minton and Sonny Moery attended the meeting. With 13 members on the court, a minimum of seven members must be present for a vote to be taken.

Prudie Percefull, county clerk, and election commission members Jean McCanliss, Larry Clark and Aljivan Martin reviewed the options open to the county to come into compliance with new federal election guidelines set out in the Help America Vote Act. The threat of pending costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars that hung over the 2005 budget considerations proved true, but help from state and federal levels will take most, and in one case, all, the sting.

?I really like ?B,? because we are going in that direction anyway,? Burton remarked. Option B sets up an electronic voting system.
Later in the discussion Clark pointed out that beside the half-million dollar price tag, other considerations make such a change rife for problems. McCanliss remarked that she ?shuddered? when she thought about training people to use the touch-screen system.

Ideally, Thursday?s meeting would have given the election commission a quorum court-approved choice from the options, but without a voting quorum there was no official action taken. Instead, the commissioners were given the blessings of a consensus, and the hope the absent JPs would agree with the choice when they meet for the regular meeting in July.

There were three options ? A, B, and C ? laid out for the JPs. Clark cautioned the JPs to remember that it is likely the county will receive only $157,000 toward the costs of the systems; the county would have to meet costs greater than that.

Option A, with an estimated cost of $358,000, would put an optical scanner to read and count the ballots in each polling station. Each polling place would also be equipped with electronic, ADA accessible equipment.

The benefit would be that each voter would feed their ballot into the machine and see their vote get counted, Clark said. Also, the voter would be there to correct mis-marked ballots, or to fill out a new one, he said.

?If we had this, we could be done by 9 o?clock,? Clark remarked. But, he continued, there are several drawbacks.

The county would have to run a mixed system of electronic and optical vote tabulation, Clark said. There is also the cost of storing, programming and transporting the machines, along with maintenance, he said.

Option B, perhaps the most popular, is also the most expensive. Under this option, the county would install a full electronic voting system of touchscreen units. However, the estimated cost is more than $500,000, Clark said.

Burton said she liked the promise of speed in computerized voting. ?Wouldn?t that be faster?? she asked.

Percefull replied that computers would be faster, but the idea of electronic voting is not comfortable for her. ?One of the things that comes to mind is one polling station had the transformer go out ? they were voting by candlelight,? she recalled from last election.

Getting started with the touchscreen system is likely the easy part, Clark said. However, the logistics of the system would be immense, he exclaimed.

There would one touchscreen for every 200 voters, Clark said. There are about 32,000 registered voters in the county.

Where would the touchscreens be stored? How would they be programmed? How would people be taught to use them, Clark asked. ?The cost of all that would come out of the county?s pocket,? he warned.

Option C, with a pricetag of about $171,000, would put one ADA accessible unit at each polling station, Clark said. However, to be fully compliant, the county would have to conduct a large-scale voter education program.

Such an educational program could provide great benefits, Clark said. Mis-marked ballots, under votes, over votes and many other mistakes by voters lead to delays on Election Day, he said.

The current system could be made to work well, or at least well enough to see the county through a gradual transition to electronic systems, Clark said.

Deadline for the county commission to notify the Secretary of State of the county?s choice of options falls before the next quorum court meeting, Troutman noted. He added that he believes the remainder of the quorum court will agree Option C is the best.