City office workers test voting methods
By Galen Moore / Daily News Tribune    October 26, 2005

WALTHAM City Clerk's office employees on Monday got their first look at a voting machine that could be adopted statewide in 2006.

     One of three machines under trial in three communities this November will make voting possible for blind and disabled citizens next year to comply with the Help America Vote Act.

     "It's an easy machine to handle," City Clerk Russ Malone said after Monday's training on the AutoMark machine, manufactured AutoMark Technical Systems of Lombard, Ill. "It's designed for sight-impaired people, but anyone else can use it just as well."

     The AutoMark uses a keypad printed with braille guides, voice prompts and a touch screen. A final summary confirms ions, and the machine prints an ink-jet ballot card, which then can be fed into standard ballot-reading machines.

     "There's a paper trail," that is the same for every voter, AutoMark engineer Eddie Olivares said, "Just in case there's a need for a recount."

     One AutoMark machine will be in use at each of Waltham's 16 polling places, Malone said. Thirty-two volunteer clerks and wardens will receive training from Clerk's Office employees on how to use the machines.

     "These field tests in actual elections are an important step in bringing accessible voting machines to Massachusetts," said Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin in a press release yesterday. "I encourage voters with disabilities in Waltham, Watertown and Woburn to go to their polling place and experience voting on accessible equipment."

     The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, requires ballot booths and machines in every polling place nationwide be made accessible to all registered voters by Jan. 31, 2006. This Nov. 8, Woburn and Watertown will test two other machines under consideration.

     In Woburn, where City Clerk Bill Campbell also serves on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, voters will use a dial, instead of a keypad, to make ions guided by voice prompts and a monitor screen.

     "You don't need fine motor skills to turn that dial," he said. As useful as that seems, Campbell doesn't know whether these machines may be obsolete by next year. Therefore, only some of his employees will learn to use them in a training, this Thursday.

Watertown Town Clerk John Flynn said his city will be trying two new technologies this year. The trial of a third brand of handicap-accessible machines there comes in the same year as the town plans to implement new ballot counting machines across the board.

     Galvin spokesman Brian McNiff said federal monitors have certified the viability of all three machines.

     "That threshold is met before they ever go out to a field test," McNiff said. The current trials will determine which of the three works best, he said.

     Olivares said his company's machine, two years in the making, gained federal certification by scanning 13,000 ballots "without one error."

     The last statewide change in balloting machines occurred in 1996, when Galvin, in office since 1995, banned the punch-card style machines, "because of the problems that later became infamous," at the Florida polls in 2000, McNiff said.