New election laws to impact Craven
September 07,2005
Sue Book
New Bern Sun Journal

Getting the correct bottom line in elections will affect the budget bottom lines of North Carolina and its counties.

Restoring public confidence in elections, however, was thought important enough to get an often-changed bill through the General Assembly to ensure that voting systems create a paper ballot or paper record to check and verify votes.

Other laws also were enacted to iron kinks out of voting problems, like how to deal with provisional votes or allowing recounts of lost one-stop ballots for two week.

Craven County Board of Elections Chairman Bill Miner knows the law will require replacement of Craven County's more than 200 direct-record electronic voting machines, but he does not know the cost or who will pay the total bill.

Craven's Electronic Systems and Software machines produce a paper tape of results, but they do not produce a verifiable paper ballot and apparently cannot be equipped with printers to accomplish a mandatory hand-eye recount of about 3 percent of the total vote required by the new law.

The formula for dividing federal Help America Vote Act funds among the counties gives Craven $312,000 for hardware and $37,000 for software. That leaves about $15 million of the nearly $80 million in state elections board funds for other designated uses, and it almost surely means the county will be asked to ante up money to assist.

Meeting in the Craven County Administration Building Tuesday, Miner and the Craven board said they still need guidance on which electronic voting machines will meet new state criteria.

That guidance is not expected at the Sept. 20 State Board of Elections meeting at the Guilford County Courthouse but the requirements for a state Request for Purchase is expected this fall.

"It is easy to criticize the government, but we all want our operations to be accurate. Accountability is the key word at all levels," Miner said.

"Craven County is one of the more respected counties in the world of voting and we want to make it even better," said Minor, a Republican elected by a Democrat majority to lead the board.

The lack of uniformity played heavily in state elections problems, said Tiffiney Miller, Craven County elections director. But understanding the reasons for the detailed new law won't make it any easier to implement.

Miller is an officer in the state director's association that is eyeing more closely how to accomplish that at a two-day conference in Chapel Hill beginning today.

"The directors are pushing up our sleeves and working to make our state the forerunner in elections," said Miller, who will lead sessions on poll book authorization and one-stop voting.

The keen-eyed competence of poll workers also will play into the verification process that state board staffers called uncharted territory.