Questions remain over new voting machines

By BUTCH WEIR   Picayune Item  Saturday, August 20, 2005 5:56 PM CDT

POPLARVILLE - Despite approval by county supervisors last Wednesday afternoon to accept the new touch-screen Diebold voting machines, Circuit Clerk Vickie Hariel said questions about cost and efficiency still remain.

According to press releases from the Mississippi Secretary of State's office, replacing antiquated voting systems state-wide is mandated as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. Currently only two counties, Hinds and Rankin, are using touch-screen systems.

Last Wednesday, Diebold representatives made a presentation to the board, Hariel and county election commissioners about the new voting machines.

Following the presentation, supervisors Wednesday approved an initial receipt of 84 machines and are looking at needing 20 more, according to information from the meeting. Hariel said Thursday that 25 more machines would be the minimum number she would recommend, but 50 would be a better number given voter turnout in recent major elections.
  

There are 34 precincts in the county and figuring two machines per precinct means 68 machines, Hariel said, leaving only 16 extra for the entire county. As some precincts have over 2,000 voters, Hariel says there should be more than 16 machines available as extras.

"If you get in a seven o'clock rush hour and the polls just opened, and a system goes down, you have nothing. You never put yourself in a position where you don't have a backup in any one precinct."

Hariel said that at meetings earlier in the year, circuit clerks were led to believe there would be one DRE (Direct Recording Electronic Solution) machine per precinct. She said the state was figuring some precincts being given only one voting machine and "you can never do that in any election."

She said the state determined the county's 84 machine figure by averaging the number of voters in the last two presidential and gubernatorial elections and came up with a number of 190 voters per machine. The industry standard of voters per machine is closer to 150 voters per machine, she said, although in his comments county administrator Adrain Lumpkin mentioned a voter per machine number of slightly more than 200 .

Hariel said in past large primary elections the county has utilized as many as 254 of the punch card voting machines county-wide. With the 77 percent turnout in the 2004 election, Hariel fears a new system will see congestion at some polling places. If, during an election, a particular precinct needed an additional voting machine, time spent transporting the additional machine and setting it up would add to voter's inconvenience.

"I believe ... this being a new system, it's going to slow down the voting process," Hariel said. "The individual is not going to be able to walk in there and comfortably - and confidently - on a first time that they use this system without a slowing down of the process.

"That's going to cause lines to form at those precincts," she said. "We've never had that in the past because we've had a sufficient number of machines throughout the county."

She said information made available to her from a test performed in California on the Diebold TSX system showed a 20 percent failure rate.

Lumpkin said Thursday Diebold has said it will have a technician responding within an hour to repair machines should problems arise.

Hariel said another system she saw demonstrated might have been a possible option instead of the Diebold system, but Lumpkin said in his opinion if the county opted out of the state's accepted system, it wouldn't be in compliance with federal guidelines. He also said with a different system that was not compliant, the county would be liable if a lawsuit were to arise.

Lumpkin said that federal law under the HAVA Act has said these changes have to be made.

"Let's take the 84 machines and make it work," Lumpkin said, adding, "I think the (Diebold) machines are pretty decent."

Funding for the initial group of 84 comes from state or federal monies, Hariel said, but where funding for the extra 20 to 50 machines would come from is unclear. She said Secretary of State Eric Clerk has requested an additional five million dollars from the legislature to assist those counties needing additional voting machines.

The additional 20 to 50 voting machines cost could be $3,100 per unit with the added paper trail feature, Hariel said. The average price per machine without a paper trail falls somewhere between $2,750 and $3,291, depending on the number of counties that opted in to the system, she said. The initial cost estimates for the machines did not include the "paper trail" feature, which added $212.50 per machine to the price, Hariel said.

A total cost estimate of the new system could be as low as $148,125 to as high as $175,000, she says, and does not include memory cards and other accessories, an additional $5,000 to $7,000 for the system as a whole.

Hariel said the county has to be in compliance with the Federal HAVA voting law, which the new machines are a result of, by January of 2006. The first election in the county for the new system will be June, 2006.