Bracing for primary's torrent  (PA)

LOU SESSINGER   The Intelligencer    11 April 2008

Workers in Montgomery County's Voter Services Department know they will be very busy on April 22, owing to the large number of Democrats expected to cast ballots in that party's heated presidential primary race, but they're ready.

Poll workers have attended classes to prepare them. The department will increase the number of voting machines in districts with large numbers of Democratic voters and will have more phones and computers on hand than usual.

Department Director Joseph Passarella, who d the county commissioners sitting as the county Election Board on Thursday, said one of the biggest challenges for poll workers will be dealing with people who show up eager to cast their votes for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, only to be informed that they can't because they're not registered Democrats.

Signs will be posted prominently at all polling places indicating that primary elections in Pennsylvania are “closed” and that voters are able to vote only for candidates in the party in which they're registered.

“We feel that is the biggest thing to get over,” Passarella said.

Bucks County's Election Board Director, Deena Dean, expects that to be an issue, too.

Her office has handled numerous calls and e-mails from people asking if they were registered or in which party they were registered.

“Many people who've moved here from other states don't understand Pennsylvania's primary rules in which you can only vote according to your party affiliation,” she said.

Poll workers in Bucks, like Montgomery, have been taught in training classes how to deal with people who aren't registered or are registered, but not in the party in which they want to vote.

Both counties have been busy for weeks processing voter registrations.

Passarella said his department handled approximately 15,000 applications from voters who wanted to change their party affiliation to Democrat, as well as processing approximately 5,000 new Democratic registrations.
 

Dean's department has handled more than 13,000 registration switches to Democrat and more than 8,000 newly registered Democrats.

Montgomery County is also taking steps to speed up the counting of the votes. Additional drivers and security personnel will make special, early pickups of results from the county's eight satellite vote collection centers and bring them to voting services headquarters in Norristown for processing.

Passarella also reported that the county's 1,050 electronic voting machines have been programmed, tested and are ready to go.

A problem that some New Jersey counties had encountered in that state's primary with the same model Sequoia machines Montgomery uses has been fixed, Passarella said.

With both the Democratic and Republican ballots loaded on one machine, it was discovered that in some New Jersey cases, if the machine operator pressed a wrong button, the machine would “flip” to the wrong ballot, and an incorrect vote could be recorded.

Montgomery County, which has been using the electronic machines since 1996, had never experienced that type of problem in an election, he said.

During recent tests, a software adjustment was able to provide a “quick fix.” It wouldn't flip to the wrong ballot, he said, but the operators had to “activate” the vote three times.

To get around that, Sequoia installed a panel — a kind of shield — making it impossible for an operator to press a wrong button.