Commissioners OK electronic voting machine buy

Denton County: Purchase is to comply with disability law

By DAVE MOORE / Denton Record-Chronicle    12 July 2005

Some voters who cast ballots in the Nov. 8 election at six Denton County polling places will do so electronically, with machines that don't produce a paper trail.

On Tuesday, Denton County commissioners agreed to buy only enough electronic voting machines to satisfy a federal law that requires all voting places be accessible to people with disabilities.

The court is holding out for the state to approve a machine that will provide paper backup before it spends a $2.4 million federal grant for machines that comply with the Help America Vote Act, a law that requires accommodations for disabled voters at all voting places.

"I still want a paper trail because I think it's important for the integrity of the election," Commissioner Bobbie Mitchell said after Tuesday's meeting.

The court agreed to purchase the first installment of electronic voting machines to replace its 10-year-old Eagle vote-scanning machines. Thirty of the machines will be eSlate devices, which resemble clipboard-size personal digital assistants. The eSlates can be taken curbside to ease voting for the disabled. Those machines, however, produce no voter-verifiable paper trail.

The county also agreed to purchase 30 eScan machines, which scan and read paper ballots. The machines are more sophisticated than the Eagle machines in how many types of ballots they can accept, and the eScan notifies voters if they fill out their ballots incorrectly.

Those machines don't satisfy the Help America Vote Act, however.

Tuesday's decision will allow the county to purchase enough voting machines for a practice run in the Nov. 8 election, said Don Alexander, Denton County elections administrator. Three early voting places will be equipped with the electronic voting machines, as will three polling places on Nov. 8, he said.

And the commissioners decided to buy additional machines ? at least 125 eSlates and 140 eScans ? incrementally over the next eight months to ensure that the county will be compliant with federal election laws. The law states that the county must be compliant for its first election in 2006, which is the March 9 primary.

All voting places will have at least one eScan and one eSlate in time for the March 9 election, Mr. Alexander said.

The county plans to spend $1.8 million of the $2.4 million federal grant it received for compliance with voting laws accommodating the disabled, Mr. Alexander said after the meeting.

He had proposed spending the entire grant to buy 485 eSlate and 160 eScan machines, enough to equip Denton County with compliant voting machines to last it a while.

But Denton County Republicans and Democrats united to stop Mr. Alexander's push because Texas hasn't approved an eSlate machine that produces a voter-verifiable paper trail.

"The [eSlate printer attachment] could be approved by the secretary of state's office before next May," said Dianne Edmondson, chairwoman of the Denton County Republican Party.

If this happens, Ms. Edmondson said, she would support the purchase of more eSlates.

The order approved by commissioners Tuesday allows the court to review in June whether it should purchase more eSlates.