Beaver County voters to see voting machines
Several firms to show wares, commissioners to decide

Thursday, September 01, 2005
By Brian David, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The people of Beaver County will have ample opportunity to examine the candidates and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses and how accessible they are.

They will even get to touch them, see how easily their buttons get pushed and vote on them.

And then the Beaver County commissioners will choose the candidate they like best.

Sounds like old-time politics, but it's not. In fact, it's new-time politics. The candidates will be electronic voting machines, and the commissioners want to give voters a chance to try out different types before deciding which they will buy.

"We're inviting four companies, at least, to come to Beaver County and set up samples of their machines," Commissioner Dan Donatella said Monday. He said the machines would be set up in the courthouse and, possibly, in high-volume shopping areas to give people a chance to test them.

One of the companies will be Unilect, with an upgraded version of the system Beaver County used from 1998 through 2004.

That system, however, was decertified by the state in April after a retest spurred by a legal challenge in Beaver County and voting irregularities in Mercer County, which also used it. Those two counties, along with Greene County, the only other one in Pennsylvania with Unilect machines, used paper ballots for the May 17 primary, and all three are using paper ballots again for the general election in November.

Other counties around the state also are interested in computerized voting machines as they gear up to meet the Help America Vote Act, federal legislation that is requiring them all to make voting handicapped-accessible.

Counties are not required to make the full switch to computerized voting, but those not computerized can get $8,000 per precinct to do so. Those already computerized will get $3,000 per precinct to make the needed upgrades.

That has spurred 14 vendors to submit their systems to the state seeking certification. The 14 were on display at a conference in Philadelphia last week.

"They're pretty much the same except for the handicapped aspect," said Donatella, who was at the conference along with fellow Commissioners Joe Spanik and Charlie Camp.

The machines all have color touch screens and all provide printouts so voters can confirm the votes they cast. The lack of a paper trail with old systems, including Beaver County's old Unilect system, "seemed to be the biggest complaint everyone had," Donatella said.

Because the state decertified the Unilect system to which it had previously given a thumbs-up, it has promised Beaver, Mercer and Greene counties the higher $8,000-per-precinct HAVA grants. With 129 precincts, that's a bit more than $1 million for Beaver.

Donatella, however, expects a new voting system to cost between $2.5 million and $2.9 million.

That's one reason the new Unilect system will get strong consideration in the county. Beaver could reuse controllers with cost $2,500 per precinct, and could also reuse its voting booths.

Another machine likely to get a tryout in Beaver County is one by Accuvote, which is the only one of the 14 to have Pennsylvania certification already. The others are being negotiated between the commissioners and county Elections Director Dorene Mandity.

It's also not clear exactly when the machines will come to Beaver, when the state will complete its certification process or when the machines can go into use.

"They hope to get the certified systems by November," Donatella said. "I think that's cutting it thin. There's no way that these counties can go out and set up a certified system in time."

In fact, Beaver, Mercer and Greene have all committed to using paper ballots again for the general election in November. They've also agreed to send the state the bills for the extra work involved, and are prepared to fight to get the state to pay them.

The state did promise to pay the extra costs of using paper ballots in the primary, a three-county total of about $337,000, including the legal costs of a drawn-out recount that confirmed the election of Debbie Kunselman as the county's seventh Common Pleas judge.

Greene County, which bought its Unilect system in 1998, is taking a more wait-and-see approach to new machines. Their first choice is to get an upgraded version of the Unilect system.

"We never had a problem at all," Commissioner Pam Snyder said. "It is frustrating. It was a referendum on the ballot when we bought the machines, and the voters chose to buy it. The taxpayers paid for it once."

Greene, a smaller county with 44 precincts, submitted a $49,000 bill for costs of using paper ballots in the primary.

Mercer County is about the direct opposite. "I think you could say there is a lack of trust in Unilect," Commissioner Brian Beader said.

Mercer bought the system in 2001, looking ahead to the passage of HAVA the next year, and getting grant money to be proactive.

"If we had just sat out it would have been OK," Beader said. "But they said, 'Do this. You'll be a good example.' "

But problems cropped up in Mercer County in last year's general election. Despite the hotly contested race between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the results showed that 7 percent of Mercer County voters voted for neither man.

It was worse in ed areas. Beader said that in one Farrell precinct, 272 people came to cast votes, but 51 votes were recorded in the presidential race while an unopposed candidate for a state house seat garnered 199 votes.

"There's no way to re-create that" to be sure the vote totals are wrong, Beader said, because the electronic votes leave no paper trail. But the results defy logic.

Mercer Elections Director Tom Rookey, appointed to replace James Bennington, who resigned when the election problems cropped up, thinks the problems arose when the Health Care party qualified for the ballot in a handful of the county's precincts, including the one in Farrell. The system had to be programmed for the additional party, programming that was done locally with assistance from Unilect.

Rookey noted that it was also the first time Mercer had used the system for a presidential election, which yielded a much heavier turnout than it had handled before. Between that and the reprogramming, he believes, "things went bad."

In Beaver, meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by Sheila Green, of New Sewickley, an opponent of electronic voting in general, made claims of various difficulties in using the Unilect system.

And Beaver saw strange vote totals in the presidential election, with a higher-than-average 4 percent of voters not voting for either Bush or Kerry.

The Beaver commissioners have disputed those totals, noting similar voting patterns in other races, including the May primary.

But at this point, they're ready to move on.

"Everyone's out shopping around," Donatella said. "Everyone wants to have computerized voting in place by the primary."