Room to improve remains

Trumbull County's complete results were available later than normal.

By ED RUNYAN     Youngstown VINDICATOR    14 November 2005

WARREN ? The extent of technological and logistical changes with the new touch-screen voting system caught up with Trumbull County Board of Elections staffers on general election night.

Those in charge are pleased with the overall result from the Diebold AccuVote-TSX System, and so is the Ohio secretary of state's office. But county elections director Kelly S. Pallante and deputy director Rokey W. Suleman II said some fine-tuning will occur before the next election.

"Some things were not apparent until we went through them," Pallante said late last week.

Memory cards

One of the bigger surprises election night was that so many poll workers didn't get their voting machines turned off correctly, which slowed elections staffers in their job of taking the information from the memory card contained in each machine, Pallante said.

Between 22 and 29 of the cards were not immediately usable when they came back to the elections board from various points throughout the county, Pallante said, and had to be reed into a voting machine and closed out properly before they were usable. These cards hold all the votes from that machine for the whole day.

That process took about five to seven minutes per card. Because those cards were all corrected at the same point at the end of the night, they held up complete results by about an hour, Pallante said.

Complications

In a related matter, some vote totals that appeared on the board of elections' Web site about 11:20 p.m. were slightly off at first. Some incorrect reporting of write-in results also occurred on the Web site, but those mistakes were not related to technology, officials said.

Delays in opening some polling stations also occurred as part of the overall learning process poll workers went through leading up to and including election day, she said.

Pallante said the normal time for beginning to count results is 7:45 p.m. ? 15 minutes after the polls close. Last Tuesday, the first results didn't get uploaded into the computer until 8:20 p.m.

Pallante said she felt this delay was because the machines took more time to turn off and to deliver to the elections board offices. Because the touch-screen machines contain electronics, they were handled more gently, which took more time, she said.

One way to improve the timeliness of results for next election is to buy two more computers to download results. The elections board operated with four computers this week but will add two more, she said.

Transport

Another logistical issue is the transport of voting machines. Poll workers handle the equipment themselves using personal vehicles. The new machines weigh 27 pounds vs. the old punch card system's 19 pounds per voting unit. Trumbull voters had used the punch card/stylus system since 1980.

All of these devices on election night are returned to the back of the elections board offices and into a storage area, a large room with a concrete floor.

In Mahoning County, the machines are brought into the storage area on carts, and election-night workers can check in the machines and remove the memory cards from them from a standing position.

Trumbull elections workers had to get on the floor in uncomfortable positions to carry out this function. Pallante said to improve it would require an expensive cart purchase. She added she is not sure whether that issue can be resolved right away.

Web site

Another problem was with the elections board Web site that many people now rely on to get election results. The board's Web site host experienced some difficulties that night that were unrelated to the new voting technology. That problem was corrected with a phone call, she said.

The county's complete results were available a little before midnight, which is somewhere between an hour and two hours later than normal.

"I think we didn't do that bad," Pallante said of the first election night on the new equipment. She said she went home that night around 1:30 a.m. and turned on the television to find that Lucas County in Toledo had only 23 percent of its results available at that time.

Statewide review

In fact, James Lee, a spokesman for the Ohio secretary of state's office, said Lucas County had the biggest problems of any county in the state Tuesday. The county, which was one of 41 counties in the state using the new Diebold equipment, completed its results at 8 a.m. Wednesday.

However, by midnight, 68 of Ohio's 88 counties had reported final results. Lee said he didn't know how many of the final 20 counties to report were using the Diebold equipment.

Lee said he has heard nearly all positive comments statewide for touch-screen voting, adding that there will always be variances in the times when votes get back to the elections board because "people are involved."

He said his office holds to the philosophy that it is more important to "Get this right rather than quick."

Diebold, the manufacturer of the voting machines, provided technicians election night. But these representatives were instructed not to do the work of the elections board to ensure that Pallante and her staff learned how to run the equipment by doing, not watching.

The primary technician in charge "was not allowed to touch the memory cards at all," Pallante said.