Keep the touch screens

Palm Beach Post Editorial   June 05, 2005

While the elections supervisor in Miami-Dade County is ready to trade in that office's $24 million touch-screen voting system for optical-scan ballots, it's good to note that the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County is not.

Arthur Anderson correctly states that Miami-Dade is struggling with a different touch-screen system, one that puts more emphasis on poll workers, costs more to set up and ? most important ? underwent a one-machine breakdown in the November presidential election that resulted in the counting of 171 phantom ballots. That system is made by ES&S.
 

Palm Beach County's Sequoia system, however, has been easy for voters to use and for poll workers to set up. While Miami-Dade Supervisor Lester Sola argues that cost savings ? $13 million over five years ? not mistakes, justify the switch, Dr. Anderson correctly recognizes that ease of voting and continuity are equally important factors. Changing Palm Beach County's system just a few election cycles after dumping punch-card ballots would be very disruptive.

Still, Dr. Anderson hasn't dismissed his initial impulse to throw out the touch screens. A long-promised technical review committee, to begin meeting this month, will have until January to make recommendations. While Dr. Anderson is seeking $1.7 million for 500 additional touch-screen machines, he said he won't buy them until the review is complete.

The option he ran on ? adding printers to touch screens to create a paper trail ? begins to undergo state testing at the end of this month. In Miami-Dade, after a machine broke down, poll workers counted ballots from it three times, adding 171 votes to the precinct's total. The mistake could have been caught by comparing the number of voters who signed in at the precinct with the number of votes cast. In a warning that needs to be heard in all Florida elections offices, poll workers often failed to conduct the count or failed to reconcile differences, leading to nearly 6,000 cases where there were more votes than the poll workers' signature count indicated, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition found. Most were attributed to sloppiness.

Creating a printed record of every vote would add redundancy and could quiet concerns about votes lost in a computer's memory banks. That won't excuse lapses like those that happened in Miami-Dade County. Simple attention to detail doesn't capture the buzz of introducing printers or changing systems, but it helps assure that votes are counted accurately. If Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot in 2000 didn't scream it loud enough, voters don't need any more surprises from their elections office.