Bucks urged to vote out machines
Grass-roots group: Old lever-style boxes are trustier than new.

By Hal Marcovitz
Of The Morning Call    21 July 2005

A citizens group called on the Bucks County commissioners Wednesday to turn down state aid to replace the county's voting machines, and instead provide stopgap measures to make the Eisenhower-era devices comply with the 2002 U.S. Help America Vote Act.

''Voters are very scared about the integrity in our system,'' said Brad Kirsch of Warminster, a member of the Bucks County Coalition for Voting Integrity. ''I don't see why we have to go out and spend money for machines that may need frequent replacement.''

Members of the coalition have argued that electronic voting machines can produce questionable results because they do not create physical records of the votes cast on each device. On the county's lever machines, mechanical gauges record each vote.

About 20 members of the coalition staged a brief protest before the commissioners meeting, held at the Bucks County Horse Park in Nockamixon Township.

Commissioners have asked for a state grant of $3 million to offset the cost of replacing about 700 voting machines. It is expected that the grant will not cover the entire cost of buying new machines, and that the county treasury may have to provide as much as $8 million.

The county has used mechanical lever-style machines for decades. Many of the machines have been in use since the 1950s.

In response to the protesters' points, Commissioner Charles H. Martin said county officials doubt that the old machines could be brought into compliance with the requirements of the Help America Vote Act. Last week, county solicitor Guy T. Matthews drafted a memo for the board that reported the machines fail to meet handicap-accessibility requirements and are incapable of informing voters that they may have missed casting votes in all races on the ballot.

He said the commissioners would prefer to keep the old machines, but if the law requires them to be replaced the county would do well to seek financial aid to buy new machines.

''If you don't apply for the money you won't be eligible to get it,'' he said.

Mary Ann Gould, an organizer of the coalition, said her group believes that the law does not specifically require the county to replace the lever machines. She said that if the machines are inaccessible to handicapped people, the county could buy a small number of new machines and set them aside for handicapped voters.

She added that paper ballots or optical scanning devices that would read paper ballots might be sufficient to meet handicapped voting rules.

As for notifying the voter of a so-called ''undervote,'' Gould said electronic machines don't necessarily do a good job of alerting voters about missed ballots. She said studies have shown that voters cast ballots in as many as 97 percent of contests on lever machines, but some counties have found that on electronic machines, as many as 8 percent of the contests are missed by voters.

''Why replace something that works with something that has potential for going seriously wrong?'' she asked.

Matthews said state government's guidelines on the Help America Vote Act point out that the old lever devices do not create a paper record of the votes. The electronic machines that the commissioners ultimately buy would have to include the ability to produce a paper record, he said.

If the county fails to obtain machines that comply with the Help America Vote Act by next spring's primary, Matthews said, the law specifies that the U.S. Justice Department can seek a federal court order to provide machines for the election in Bucks.

''They would buy whatever equipment is necessary, put them in the polling places, and back-charge the county,'' he said.