Officials: State on target with U.S. voting law

By RUFFIN PREVOST    Billings Gazette  19 October 2005

CODY - Computerized systems will be counting every vote in Wyoming by the November 2006 general election, but voters in Park County will hardly notice the difference when they go to the polls.

Standards mandated by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 require every state to use computerized vote-counting systems, but Park County and many other election districts across the state have been doing so for years.

"What people don't know is currently that's what we've been doing since the '90s," said Park County Clerk Karen Carter, the chief election official for the county. "Our ballots are counted by computers and have been."
  

After the contested presidential election of 2000, Congress passed HAVA to set minimum standards for federal elections, including abolishing punch-card voting systems like those used in parts of Florida.

The law also requires establishment of computerized voter databases and the availability of special polling equipment for persons with disabilities.

Wyoming's voter registration database will interface with a number of state agencies - including records maintained by transportation, law enforcement and health agencies - to confirm voter eligibility.

According to Carter, the state is on track to meet by January 2006 most of its key goals for complying with HAVA.

Those goals include replacing all punch-card and lever voting machines, replacing central-count voting equipment and providing at least one touch-screen voting machine at each polling site for use by voters with disabilities or special needs.

Carter said Park County's touch-screen machine, called AutoMARK and supplied by Election Systems and Software, will enable people with special needs to vote independently.

Up to $20 million in federal funds has been pledged to Wyoming for making its election systems compliant with HAVA, and the state has appropriated $750,000 in matching funds.

Park County has not had to spend local funds on HAVA compliance, Carter said. The only expense would lie in training elections workers on equipment, a process required before every election anyway.

Carter said her office trains around 250 certified election judges in a two-week course before elections. She said the election process in Park County is more complicated than many might think.

"We have 120 different ballots. There's no such thing as one ballot," she said. "There are different ballots for every hospital district, school district, library district, conservation district."

She said computer voting equipment will assist election workers by helping them more easily ensure that each voter is given the correct ballot.

New equipment will also assist voters who may have forgotten to vote for a specific ballot measure or have voted improperly - for instance, by calling a voter's attention to an "undervote," as when only one candidate was ed from a pool from which three could be chosen.

Carter said while ballots are tabulated by computer, most voters will still cast their votes using pen and paper.

The paper ballots are optically scanned and tabulated by computer, but are saved and can be recounted by hand should questions arise regarding the computer tabulation.

"I don't even like to buy things over the Internet," Carter said, "so I understand people's concerns" about computers and voting.

Voter advocates have called for the use of open source software in election equipment, rather than proprietary source code, such as that used by Diebold and ESS, which provides Park County's equipment.

Amanda Brown, a spokeswoman for ESS, said although the company does use proprietary source code, "all election equipment in the United States is tested by independent testing authorities" and subject to "federal and state requirements on a number of fronts, including source code."