Voting machines tie up Summit election board

Ohio secretary of state to review local impasse on Diebold, ES&S units

By Lisa A. Abraham

Beacon Journal staff writer

 

The choice for Summit County's new voting system is now in the hands of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell after a Board of Elections vote on what system to buy ended in a tie Monday.

There actually were two tie votes.

Republicans Alex Arshinkoff and Joseph Hutchinson wanted to purchase an optical-scan system made by the Nebraska company Election Systems & Software, while Democrats Wayne Jones and Russ Pry favored the touch-screen voting system made by Diebold Elections Systems of Green.

Arshinkoff made a motion to purchase the optical scan system, which ended in a 2-2 vote, while Pry moved to purchase the touch-screen system, which also ended in a 2-2 tie.

Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Blackwell, said the board has two weeks to forward the tie votes to his office for review. ``We will certainly review arguments made by both sides,'' he said.

Blackwell also may consider whether there was an overwhelming staff preference. Of the team of board staffers that reviewed the equipment, six chose the Diebold touch screen, five the ES&S optical scan, and one the Diebold optical-scan systems.

LoParo said Blackwell can either a system for the board or return the issue to the board for ``additional consideration.''

Both Diebold and ES&S set up their equipment to stage ``mock elections'' for the board Monday, going through the entire process of voting, tabulating votes and recounting votes.

So far, Diebold has the only touch-screen system with a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, which has been approved for Ohio voting. Both companies have approved optical-scan systems, which use paper ballots that are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil and then read by a computerized scanner.

ES&S even brought along a blind man a representative from the Disability Relations Group to demonstrate its AutoMark system an optical scan system that provides access for people with disabilities.

Board members were able to practice voting on each system they tested and attempted to trip up the machines to see how they would respond to errors such as someone trying to vote twice.

Hutchinson wrinkled his ballots before putting them into the optical scan readers, to see if the machines would accept them and count them correctly they did.

After more than two hours of demonstrations, board members were split in their preferences.

Hutchinson said he believed the touch screens were the technology of the future, ``but not the technology of today.'' He said he preferred the optical-scan machine's paper ballots, which are available for recounting if there are questions.

Arshinkoff, likewise, said he preferred the ``transparency'' of the optical-scan system.

Pry said touch-screen voting was the future of elections. ``It's not a perfect system, but we can work with it to accomplish fair and accurate elections,'' he said.

Jones said he believed the majority of Ohio counties can't be wrong about the touch-screen voting systems.

In Ohio, 41 counties will use touch-screen machines for voting Nov. 8, he said. Jones said he wished the board could wait to make its decision until after seeing how elections take place in those counties.

The board had to choose a new system by Thursday, a deadline that was the result of a lawsuit over an earlier deadline.

According to statistics from LoParo, 46 of Ohio's 88 counties have chosen the Diebold touch-screen voting system; 10 have chosen the ES&S optical scan, one has chosen the Diebold optical scan, one ES&S' touch-screen system, even though it has yet to achieve state certification.

Like Summit County, Licking County had a tie vote between Diebold's touch-screen system and Diebold's optical scan a tie that Blackwell sent back to that county's board for additional consideration, LoParo said. The remaining counties are expected to make their choices by the Thursday deadline.