Secretary of state touts one voting system

8/8/2005

BY BOBBY HARRISON    Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

JACKSON - Twenty-eight of Mississippi's 82 counties, including six in Northeast Mississippi, have agreed to accept the new touch-screen voting machines being advocated by Secretary of State Eric Clark.

While local boards of supervisors will decide which voting machines to use, Clark said Monday that it would be beneficialif the entire state were using the same type system.

Clark said he is confident the Diebold touch-screen system ed by his office will be the most efficient and most accurate. Plus, because there would be a statewide system, election results will be more timely, and people moving from county to county will not have to learn how to use new voting systems.

The Diebold system, Clark said, "is the best, it is the cheapest" and "extremely user friendly for the disabled."

Clark spoke about the voting machines and his efforts to "sell" the system at a luncheon meeting of the Mississippi State Stennis Institute of Government/capitol press corps.

Counties have until Aug. 19 to decide whether they want the machines.

The machines will be paid for primarily through funds from the federal Help America Vote Act, which was passed in 2002 in response to the chaos that resulted from the 2000 presidential vote in Florida.

Seventy-five of state's counties have to buy new machines by early next year to comply with the act.

There has been opposition to the machines on a number of fronts - primarily from those who say the computerized system does not provide a paper ballot trail. Clark said a paper ballot can be printed of each recorded vote made on the machine.

And if a final round of federal money is provided, Clark said printers will be bought for each machine so that a printed ballot can be seen by those voting.

However, some counties say the free machines will not be enough to handle local voting and they are unsure how much more they must pay to establish a countywide system.

The third-term Democratic secretary of state also downplayed problems with the touch-screen system reported in California. He said the problems during a test-vote of about 11,000 ballots were minimal with no votes being lost and voting being delayed for about five minutes on a few machines.