Voting changes coming
July 03,2005
BARRY SMITH AND CHRIS MAZZOLINI    Jacksonville Daily News

The memory of the 4,438 lost ballots in a voting machine in Carteret County may have faded in some people's minds, but the effort to provide a paper trail for North Carolina voters is still alive.

In fact, a state Senate committee could soon go over a list of proposals that would require electronic voting machines - called direct record electronic systems in election lingo - to generate a paper record of each vote cast. It would be viewable by the voter before the vote is cast electronically so that the voter could correct any discrepancy between the paper and electronic vote.

"If we had the paper trail, maybe it would have been better," said Patricia Hardesty, director of the Carteret County Board of Elections, which had more than 4,000 no-excuses, early voting ballots lost forever in November by a computer pushed beyond its memory capacity.

The mess in Carteret County tied up two statewide races and sparked debate about computer voting. It's a debate that continued into this session of the General Assembly.

"We have tried to address everybody's concern," said Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, D-Orange, who has co-chaired a subcommittee addressing voting rights laws.

Voting machine testing would be required before and after Election Day, Kinnaird said. The State Board of Elections would be given more authority to certify and decertify equipment.

The proposed changes could send counties that use electronic voting equipment scurrying to purchase new machines for the 2006 general election.

"Currently none of the DRE equipment in North Carolina have the verified paper audit trail, none of them," said Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections.

No one is quite sure how much the new equipment will cost or how many will be needed.

Nagging questions

Onslow County is further behind the curve than many other counties. In Onslow's case, however, that's not a bad thing. For years, Onslow County has used punch-card ballots similar to those that created havoc in the 2000 presidential race. It's still using them.

So any computer the county might purchase would come after the lawmakers set the standard.

At the moment, however, Onslow is still browsing. It has budgeted $1.5 million to purchase new voting machines, but county officials are currently waiting for the Election Assistance Commission - a federal body created by the Helping America to Vote Act of 2002 - to release its certified vendor lists, which it will then pass to the states' election boards.

The states will then decide on their own lists, which they will pass to the counties.

The county Board of Elections has also tested a couple different kinds of machines since February, including direct-record electronic (DRE machines).

Counties with computer voting like Carteret have other options. McLean said local elections boards will likely try to retrofit machines they have with paper trail equipment if possible.

"Some of them can, some of them will not be able to," she said. "It depends on the technology."

Voting machines that could be retrofitted would likely cost between $500 and $1,000 to modify, she said. New machines would likely cost between $3,500 to $4,500 apiece, she said. The cost statewide could be between $60 million and $80 million, McLean said.

Confidence game

Kinnaird said that having a "verifiable paper trail" is a key to efforts to instill public confidence in elections.

Some federal Help America Vote Act money would be available to help purchase new equipment. Kinnaird said that about $37 million is available for voting equipment.

But that won't cover the cost, and counties could end up having to pay for new voting machines.

Kinnaird said counties that had worn-out equipment would likely not get assistance with purchasing new machines since they would have had to spend money to buy new equipment anyway. The money would likely go to counties that have purchased equipment in recent years and will have to get new machines to comply with the proposed changes in the law.

Kinnaird said that electronic machines with a paper trail along with the optical scanning ballots used by 47 counties in North Carolina would likely become the standard for the state. Plus, she said, a handful of counties still use the old-fashioned paper ballots.

Electronic voting and scanning equipment will have to let voters know if they over-voted (if they marked too many candidates for a particular office) and if they under-voted (if they didn't vote in a particular race).

Currently, about one-third of the counties using scanning equipment have tabulators capable of such requirements, McLean said.

Under such requirements, the tabulators would initially reject a ballot if a voter has over-voted or under-voted, and would relay a message to the voter as such. Then the voter could decide if he or she wanted to change the ballot before it is cast.

McLean said federal guidelines for having the new equipment operational are supposed to take effect next year. However, counties have not purchased new equipment because the federal organization that is supposed to set the guidelines has not finalized its standards. She suggested that it would be irresponsible for counties to spend a lot of money on equipment that might not meet standards.

That could be bad news for counties trying to purchase new equipment because there are a limited number of voting machine vendors.

"We're going to get caught in a backlog where everybody is going to try to get the same equipment," McLean said.

McLean said elections officials will make good-faith efforts to implement the changes by the 2006 elections.

"Elections officials are an odd group of people," she said. "They take whatever legislation they are given and they make it work."