County to review voting machine proposals  
By NITA MCCANN
The Natchez Democrat    19 July 2005

NATCHEZ - County supervisors will review proposals from several voting machine companies before ing one from which to buy machines that disabled people can use more easily.

New machines are required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, a federal law intended to eliminate some of the election snafus that plagued Florida in the tight 2000 presidential election, according to the Associated Press.

The federal law says every precinct in the state must have at least one handicapped-accessible voting machine by next January. The federal government is paying 95 percent and the state is paying 5 percent of the $15 million tab to buy new machines and to provide training and technical support.

Late last month, the Mississippi Secretary of State's Office awarded a contract to Diebold for a mass purchase of touch-screen voting machines, enough to provide one for every 190 voters. Secretary of State Eric Clark said Diebold, the low bidder, was chosen after tests of machines from several companies.

But with Adams County's current system, paper ballots read by an optical scanner, "there's a paper trail, which is critical" to verifying election results, Election Commissioner Larry Gardner told supervisors in their Monday meeting.

Supervisor Thomas "Boo" Campbell also questioned whether voters who touched the wrong button accidentally on a touch screen could redo their votes.

Under the Help America Vote Act, Adams County is due to receive $210,000 to purchase and train on new voting machines. The Secretary of State's Office has said the couty will get that amount to help buy new machines even if they opt to go with systems other than Diebold's, Gardner said.

And ESNS, the company from which the county's current system was bought, has said it can provide one handicapped-accessible voting machine for each of the county's 20 precincts for the same $210,000, Gardner said.

That will result in no additional cost to the county in the short run. In the long run, the county would still be responsible for the cost of maintaining the machines.

The ESNS machines, like Diebold machines, would include headphones to help guide the blind in voting and would also be more accessible to voters using wheelchairs.

Grennell said that as of Monday afternoon he did not know when supervisors would set a process or timetable for soliciting and reviewing proposals from voting machine companies.

However, he did say the board was waiting to hear what Diebold representatives had to say regarding their system and to try the machines out themselves. County officials were set to hear a presentation by the company Monday night.