New way to vote on horizon for county
Testing of electronic machines to begin Tuesday

By BERNARD SCHOENBURG   Springfield Journal-Register   October 09, 2005

The electronic voting machines that are likely to replace the punch-card system in elections in Sangamon County were designed with a nudge from a longtime member of the board of election commissioners of Peoria.

 
Gene Wittry said that a few months after the 2000 presidential election, he discussed the Florida "fiasco" in a speech to a service club in Galesburg.

That got him thinking about the problems that led to the prolonged recount in the Sunshine State - people who misread ballots, who voted for more than one candidate for an office or who left hanging chads on punch cards. He surmised that political pressure would build for a better system.

Not long after that speech, Wittry went to a funeral in Aurora and then ate lunch with a cousin and her husband - an inventor named Sanford Morganstein. Morganstein's commercial exploits include an invention called Automated Attendant - a voice that answers a telephone call and directs a caller to punch different numbers to talk to different people.

"I told him there's a special place in hell for him," Wittry joked.

But Wittry also told Morganstein he had "something new for you to invent."

"I said, 'If you get in the mood, come down to Peoria. We'll sit you down with the election commission.'"

Wittry, a retired information systems manager with Caterpillar, had a list of requirements for any new voting system:

Touch-screen technology;

A physical ballot, something the voter could hold and see, to avoid suspicion that the new system would allow votes to be tampered with;

Ways to prevent a voter from choosing an extra candidate for an office and to notify the voter if an office is skipped;

Usability by voters with disabilities;

And a guarantee of voter privacy.

Morganstein now is president and founder of Populex, a West Dundee company that convinced Sangamon County officials it has the best in new voting technology. (Wittry himself ended up buying stock in Populex and now serves on the company's advisory committee. He abstained when the Peoria city election commission voted recently to contract with Populex, and he will step down from the commission in December.)

The Sangamon County Board on Sept. 13 voted to authorize Sangamon County Clerk Joe Aiello to negotiate a deal with Populex. Aiello, working with a bipartisan election advisory committee that first met in June 2004, had recommended the firm's system.

Before voters step into a Populex-equipped voting booth, however, the Illinois State Board of Elections will have to approve the system. Dianne Felts, director of voting systems and standards for the state, said one to three weeks of testing of the Populex machines is set to begin Tuesday.

Populex's system has been certified by the National Association of State Election Directors and the federal Election Assistance Commission. The company also is certified in Missouri, South Dakota, Louisiana and Alabama, and applications are pending in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida, among other states.

The Wisconsin State Elections Board recently turned down a certification proposal because, in part, of a question of how balloting would be set up for that state's spring presidential preference vote. The company has sought to answer those questions and still is seeking certification in Wisconsin.

Sangamon County is in line to get more than $2 million in federal grant money to pay for a new voting system, the full cost of which is expected to be $2.5 to $3 million, said Stacey Kern, director of elections in Aiello's office. The state board is asking for signed contracts by Dec. 15.

In addition to Sangamon County and the city of Peoria, Dave Henderson, vice president of Populex, said the company also has responded to a request for proposals from Aurora. "We're reaching out to other jurisdictions" as well, he said.

Voting systems on the market include optical scan technologies, in which a voter marks an oval on a printed ballot that is then fed into a reading machine; and touch-screen systems, which directly record votes.

Illinois law requires a paper trail to verify votes. On some systems, that includes a printed tape - similar to a cash register roll - that the voter can see when his or her votes are cast.

Aiello and Kern said the Populex system is a hybrid - Kern calls it a "digital paper ballot" system. Although Populex uses touch-screen technology, the machine itself does not record votes. Instead, it produces a paper ballot, which is important, Aiello said.

"You can hold it, touch it," he said. "It's something tangible, and it's something that, if there ever is a recount, it's there for us to utilize. It's easy to read."

Many people who are dubious about electronic voting are particularly concerned about the possibility that computer hackers could get into a system and change vote totals. Populex computers, however, won't be connected to any other machines, and the voting machines in the booths will not keep track of how votes are cast.

With a Populex system, a voter will go to the polling place, and election judges will use a machine at their table to program a plastic "smart card," similar in size to a credit card, specifically for that voter. The smart card will identify the election contests in which the voter is entitled to cast ballots. (About a dozen re-programmable smart cards will be at each precinct, Kern estimated.)

The voter also will get a heavy-paper blank ballot, and he or she will take the smart card and ballot to the booth, where the voter will each into slots in the voting machine.

That's simpler in some ways than Sangamon County's venerable punch-card system. To use punch cards correctly, election officials have had to make sure the right voters go to the right voting booths, because only one ballot style - or combination of elections and other ballot questions - could be set on each voting machine.

Because the smart card tells the machine, for example, what precinct committeeman or school board candidates a particular voter has to choose from, the same Populex machine can be used in any precinct or any voting booth.

"We don't have to worry about the voter going to the wrong booth," Kern said.

In the booth, one election contest at a time will appear on the screen in front of the voter. Votes are cast by touching the screen, using a stylus attached by a cable to the machine. Fingers won't work.

The name of each candidate will be next to a square and also aligned with a punch number. As the stylus is used, the square next to the chosen candidate turns completely black. A voter can even change candidates at the last minute - a touch of the stylus changes the vote, and the box next to the newly chosen candidate will be filled in as the one touched earlier is cleared.

Once the voter's mind is made up in one contest, he or she touches a "next page" indicator on the screen and the next contest shows up.

Toward the end of the voting process, the screen will highlight any contests in which no votes were cast, giving the voter one more chance to decide on those races.

Voting systems from other companies have systems that alert voters to "overvotes," cases in which they have voted for too many candidates. In some of those systems, an overvoted ballot is ejected from the counting machine in front of other voters or election judges. That violates a voter's privacy and can be embarrassing, Kern said.

With Populex, a voter can return to a contest to change a vote while still in the booth, and a summary of votes is displayed to the voter before the ballot is completed.

Once the full ballot is cast, the machine prints punch numbers from each contest at the top of the ballot. The same information is included in a bar code in the center of the ballot that will be machine-read when the ballots are counted.

Bar code scanners also will be available - probably one in each booth, but at least one in each polling place - that will give voters one last chance to verify that their ballot was filled out the way they wanted.

Before taking a ballot back to the judges, the voter will put it in a paper "privacy sleeve" that covers the printed numbers but exposes the bar code - which is unreadable by a human eye.

The voter will give the ballot to the judges, who will scan the bar code to tabulate that vote, and the ballot in the ballot box.

At the end of the night, the judges will take absentee and other early-voted ballots, sent in a sealed envelope to each precinct, and scan them into the tabulating machine as well.

The precinct tabulating machine will print a paper report with a bar code for each ballot style. That report will be delivered to the county's counting center - probably the Sangamon County Building.

There's no physical reason why the paper reports from each precinct couldn't be faxed to the central counting center, said Harvey Thomas, vice president of Levi, Ray & Shoup, the consulting firm that has helped Aiello's office with voting systems.

But Kern said that in the primary, the time-honored tradition of election judges ping off results at the county building will likely stay in place.

"I think they've got enough changes to deal with," she said of election judges.

She also said judges, at the end of the day, may have more to do this election. In the past, most precincts had only a handful of absentee ballots. But a new Illinois law will allow voters to cast ballots not just on one Election Day, but as early as 22 days in advance. That could mean many more ballots to be processed after the polls officially close.

Aiello said some disabled people have complained in the past that they did not vote because they had to have help filling out ballots. Populex machines all but eliminate that problem, he said.

The visually impaired can listen to voting choices through earphones and make their ions by touching the screen at appropriate times or using a telephone-like key pad. There also is a "sip-and-puff" system that will let people with certain physical handicaps to vote using only their breath.

"To me, this is the final chapter with regard to voter equality," Aiello said.

Voters will be able vote for write-in candidates by using the stylus to touch "typewriter keys" that appear on the screen.

So far, the only actual balloting that has been done using Populex machines took place Aug. 2 in part of Webster County, Mo. In an election involving about 800 registered voters, residents of a proposed new fire protection district were asked if the district should be created, and if so, to five of six candidates for the district's board.

Stanley Whitehurst, Webster County clerk, said 127 people voted that day - and because it was a big change, a type of paper ballot also was offered. Only one person refused to use the new machines, Whitehurst said, and he also refused to vote at all in an apparent protest. (The fire district was overwhelmingly approved.)

There was no strong resistance to the new technology, he said.

"What we thought would happen was the opposite of what actually happened," Whitehurst said. "We thought the elder generation would be more resistant. What we found was they were more trusting and accepting of new technology. The ones who were suspicious were the younger and more computer literate."

Their concerns included who did the programming and similar "conspiratorial-type issues," Whitehurst said.

"We tried to prepare for resistance from the public, and we just didn't find any," he said of the new voting equipment. "I think their type of system is the direction the technology is moving. I think they're just a little ahead of the curve."

In Missouri, the Missouri secretary of state hopes to contract for a single voting machine system that can be used by counties statewide. No deal has been struck yet, and Whitehurst is concerned that time is running short.

He also expressed concern that, with election authorities nationwide seeking new systems on which to spend their federal money, a glut of orders could stall deliveries.

"It has all the elements of a train wreck," Whitehurst said.

Henderson said that shouldn't be a problem for Populex.

"We're very confident that we will be able to deliver on orders that we have prior to the first of December," he said. "And we may even be able to deliver on orders we get after that."

The machine casing, which has an aluminum bottom and molded plastic top, is the only specially made part of the Populex machine, Henderson said. The main components come from Hewlett Packard - that company's tablet personal computer forms the touch screen - and they are readily available at market prices, he said.

Populex may well have "a number of assembly operations assembling these machines simultaneously," Henderson said.