St. Charles County group calls for paper ballots, hand counting
By Mark Schlinkmann
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH    17 October 2005

St. Charles County group calls for paper ballots, hand counting

Opponents of St. Charles County's plan to shift to a new optical scan voting system next year instead want a return to hand-counting of paper ballots - a practice phased out in the county 25 years ago.

County Council Chairman Doug Funderburk predicted that the council would reject that request by a group called Missourians for Honest Elections, which contends that the new system would be more vulnerable to mistakes, hacking and fraud than either the current punch card procedure or hand counts.

Funderburk said he expects that the council instead will rely on assurances by county, state and federal election officials that optical scan is safe. The county is phasing out punch cards amid federal mandates adopted in 2002.

"Every system has the potential for error, but this seems to be acceptable, if not one of the best systems available," Funderburk said Friday. "We're making a progressive step further into the modern digital age."

The council voted last week to give the county elections director, Rich Chrismer, $600,000 to help buy new voting equipment but delayed a decision on a contract proposal for a specific type after hearing pleas from the opposition group. That is now expected to come up for a vote Oct. 24.

Judith Conoyer of St. Charles, a member of the group, questioned whether the testing of the optical-scan machines and other computer systems for a national association of state election officials was independent enough of the manufacturers of the equipment.

"The bottom line of it all is our democracy is at stake," Conoyer, who also is a member of the St. Charles County Democratic Alliance, told the council.

The Missouri secretary of state's office and its review committee also have approved the system Chrismer wants to buy. Under the system, voters use special markers on paper ballots, which are then fed into a computer that scans them and counts the votes.

The honest elections group contends that hand counting is the safest system. That was disputed by Chrismer, who said it would be impractical in a large-population area such as St. Charles County.

Agreeing was Paul DeGregorio, a former St. Louis County elections director who now is vice chairman of a federal commission overseeing the new voting rules. He said election judges counting votes one by one get tired after a few hours and "begin to make mistakes."

Conoyer said fatigue can be avoided by hiring more election-night staffers so those doing the counting would work shifts of no longer than four hours.

The new federal mandates, under the Help America Vote Act, don't actually require that punch cards be phased out but make it difficult and costly for local governments to keep that system.

Since the law was enacted in 2002, the past Missouri secretary of state - Republican Matt Blunt - and the current one - Democrat Robin Carnahan - have each urged that local election officials punch cards.

A main reason is that the law requires voters next year to have a chance to review and revise their ballots. That can be done in a punch card system only with added equipment that the federal government won't help pay for. Moreover, Chrismer says, fewer companies are making replacement equipment for punch card systems as more and more areas them.

The contract pending before the council calls for paying $832,050 for 180 AccuVote optical scan readers and tabulators made by Ohio-based Diebold Inc.

In addition, Chrismer plans to ask the council later to approve spending $810,000 for separate touch-screen voting machines, also made by Diebold. Those would allow the county to comply with a federal requirement that at least one machine per polling place be equipped for disabled voters, including those who are deaf or blind.

Missourians for Honest Elections, which Conoyer says has about 35 members across the St. Louis area, also has concerns about those systems - which are similar to bank ATMs.

Federal grants would cover about two-thirds of the overall $1.7 million cost of the changeover in St. Charles County. That total includes some support equipment.