The future of voting

 July 04, 2005

By GARY HARMON   The Daily Sentinel

Voting is changing in ways not anticipated even five years after the disputed election of 2000, which made chads a household word.

Mesa County is considering using vote centers instead of precinct polling places for the August 2006 primary election, but even if the county chooses to stay with precincts, voters will see differences in balloting next year.

For one thing, all voting locations ? whether in precincts or vote centers ? will be required to have touchscreen voting machines. That means the end of optical-scan ballots in Election Day balloting, Elections Director Sheila Reiner said.

The Help America Vote Act requires that voting machines comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including audio capability, and so far that requirement can only be met with direct-recording electronic voting machines ? the touch-screen machines, Reiner said.

They?re also flexible, allowing voters to cast ballots early as well as on Election Day while meeting federal requirements for precinct tallies, she said.

The touch-screen machines to which many voters have become accustomed in Mesa County, however, no longer meet new standards.

Those machines don?t have what is known as a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, which legislation requires be in place for the November 2006 election.

The next generation of touch-screens will have a paper readout that voters can examine to make sure their votes were correctly recorded. Voters won?t be able to inspect other ballots, nor will they be able to leave the polling location with proof of how they cast their ballots.

Elections officials, however, will be able to check the electronic readout against the paper trail ?to verify the integrity of the election,? Reiner said.

No machines that will meet that requirement are currently on the market, but vendors said they will have machines ready for market by January 2006, Reiner said.

One thing that won?t change is that each touch-screen machine will operate independently of others and of any central computing system.

The records of votes cast on the machines won?t be tabulated until their memory cards are fed into a central counting computer in the clerk?s office after the polls close on Election Day.

It?s a far cry from the days of punch-card ballots to touch-screen balloting, Reiner said.

?The system we have now is much more accurate and secure,? she said.

The question that the county commission must tackle is whether to change from Election Day voting at precincts or in vote centers.

The clerk?s office estimates it will cost about $950,000 to equip 20 to 22 vote centers scattered around the county with touch-screen machines, while similarly equipping 82 precincts would run about $1.8 million.

Vote centers also would operate with a computerized pollbook, a connected system that would allow any voter registered in the county to cast ballots at any vote center in the county.

At a vote center, voters would present identification, and officials would determine whether they were registered, whether they already had cast a ballot, and decide which ballot style they would receive.

Ballot styles refer to various races in which voters are eligible to cast ballots.

For instance, a Fruita resident could cast ballots in a Palisade vote center on elections with national, statewide and implications only for Fruita. That voter couldn?t cast a ballot, however, in an issue before Palisade residents, even though the voting took place in the city limits of Palisade.

Elections officials would know which races to load into the touch-screen machine after consulting the voters? residence in the electronic pollbook, Reiner said.

Voter centers would allow greater latitude to officials to make the most efficient use of the machines, she said.

More machines could be located at centers in which the greatest numbers of votes were anticipated, while smaller centers would have fewer machines, she said.

The Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has voiced a misgiving that elderly or handicapped voters could be inconvenienced by centers.

The Mesa County experience, however, suggests elderly voters tend to vote absentee or early, rather than wait to cast ballots on Election Day in their precincts, according to statistics compiled by Ralph D?Andrea of a task force that studied vote centers in Mesa County.

The task force recommended the county try vote centers for the August 2006 primary election to prepare for the general election two months later.

Weld County already has decided to go that one better and will use vote centers this year, replacing 103 precinct polling places with at least 21 vote centers.