Two cities chosen as electric-vote test sites

By Glen Warchol    The Salt Lake Tribune   02 September 2005
 

Election officials who gathered at the Capitol on Thursday from every county in Utah for training on new electronic voting took a break to hear Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert's ion of cities to test the high-tech ballot boxes.
    Farmington and Brigham City will serve as test sites during their municipal elections in October and November, Herbert said, because voting in the two cities is concentrated in a small number of polling places.
    Utahns will find the new touch-screens user-friendly and error-proof, Herbert predicted. "And if there are any hitches in the git-along, we'll be able to fix them."
    The tests will prepare officials for statewide elections with the new ATM-like machines in June 2006.
   Meanwhile, contention over the transition from Utah's punch cards to electronic machines, built by Diebold Elections Systems, continued to swirl.
    All but five counties -Salt Lake, Emery, Summit, Grand and Weber - have signed agreements with the state to use the Diebold system. The state has a $27 million contract for 7,500 Diebold machines. But counties are free to choose their own balloting system, as long as it complies with federal mandate.
   A group of activists Tuesday sowed enough doubt among Salt Lake County Council members to delay a vote on the state contract until Tuesday.
   "That's why it's called a democracy," Herbert said of the naysayers. He maintains the last four counties will join the state by the middle of next week. The two-year process that ed Diebold was rigorous, he said.
   "It's not something we plucked out of the sky."
   If a county chooses to pursue its own system, it will forfeit federal money allocated under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), Herbert warned. For Salt Lake County, that comes to nearly $10 million.
    Kathy Dopp, founder of Utah Count Votes, said county officials have been misinformed on parts of the Diebold decision, including that they have to go along with the state's decision. "They were told they could not keep the punch cards."
    Dopp hopes to gather activists Tuesday to sway the Salt Lake County Council at its meeting.
    "Everything hinges on what these Salt Lake County officials decide to do," she said.
   Herbert and his staff also plan to meet with the council Tuesday to answer questions.
   Dopp and other activists say electronic voting machines such as Diebold's can be easily hacked into in order to manipulate elections. Nor does the Diebold machine provide a positive way for voters to verify that their votes are accurately recorded. Activists favor a system that produces a card that the voter can positively verify.
   Election officials say the Diebold prints out a hard copy of the ballot for the voter's inspection. That spooled copy also can be laboriously recounted by hand if necessary. Diebold has promised to develop a scanner by November 2006 that will make recounts simple and accurate.
    But Dopp says the electronic recount procedure would scan a bar code rather than the actual text the voter verified.
   Herbert noted paper ballots, including punch cards, have not had an entirely stellar history in American elections.
    "It's the people behind the technology who rig elections," he said.
   "This is a step up that will all but eliminate voter error," Herbert said of the touch screens. "If punch cards were all that good, why are we here today?"