Ballots lost in voting machine draw state attention
July 05,2005
Barry Smith    New Bern Sun Journal
RALEIGH - 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 remains 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 the 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.

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

Testing of voting machines 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 throughout the state 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.

McLean said that 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 likely would cost between $3,500 to $4,500 apiece, she said.

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

Some cost estimates have been floating around. McLean said that an estimate by one group that equipment costs would be about $28 million doesn't appear to be realistic.

"It's probably going to be somewhere between $60 million and $80 million," McLean said.

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 that 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 the 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 that 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 that 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."