Johnson County computer voting machines prone to take a 'time out'  (KS)

Kansas City Star Blog     10 September 2008

Fifty-five days before an election of a lifetime, a tiny bit of computer code is threatening to erode public confidence in Johnson County's election process.

An e-mail circulating in the suburbs is scaring some voters into thinking they must be speed readers this fall. It suggests that if you don't cast a ballot in 2½ minutes too bad. Your vote does not count.

Wrong.

Still, the confusion has prompted county election officials to make sure that voters are educated on Election Day.

It's caused one county commissioner to suggest that the dustup is a ploy to influence the outcome of a November ballot issue to raise taxes to fund a proposed  Johnson County Education & Research Triangle.

And it has left the county's election commissioner frustrated.

"This is hardly a crisis, but it can be a distraction to voters and impact their confidence in the election process, which, of course, would then be a crisis," Election Commissioner Brian Newby wrote in a recent e-mail to county officials.

In February, Johnson County upgraded touchscreen voting machines with a new software release from Premier Election Solutions Inc., based in Allen, Texas.

Buried in the release notes was a mention of a new "time out" feature that makes the voting machine eject a voter card if there has been no activity for 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

If a ion has not been made for two minutes, a screen pops up to say the ballot will "time out" in 30 seconds unless the voter touches a "continue" or "resume" button, Newby said.

Don't touch it and the voter card is ejected and the ballot is canceled.

That still doesn't mean a voter is out of luck. It just means you have to start over.

Newby said he was dismayed to see the "time out" pop up once in the April elections and about 15 times during the Aug. 5 primary. In all cases, voters were asked to complete provisional ballots and in all cases the ballots were counted, he said.

In November, Newby estimates it will take four minutes to vote.

He blames "lazy software development" for the time-out problem. The function can't be changed or turned off.

"I have notified Premier of our unhappiness," Newby wrote in an e-mail to county staff and commissioners.

Spokesman Chris Riggall said Premier, a wholly owned subsidiary of Diebold Election Systems Inc., is working to make the "time out" function optional.

But that would require federal recertification so the fix would not be ready for at least two years, he said.

The new software is being used without any other complaints from roughly 1,700 governmental entities in 34 states, Riggall said. Some customers requested the "time out" as a security feature should a voter leave the polling station before casting a ballot.

 Overland Park resident Janis McMillen, a board member of the national League of Women Voters, received an e-mail telling voters to cast an advance paper ballot to avoid a Nov. 4 computer time out. She then raised the issue with Newby.

Advance balloting is good, McMillen said, but not if it is motivated by fear and ignorance.

Newby worries that the voter "time out" could be seen by some as a deliberate attempt to sway the outcome of the election. "This could be spun" for political gain, he said.

It may already have.

Commissioner John Toplikar said in a recent e-mail to his supporters that he fears the concerns raised by McMillen are a ploy to engineer "yes" votes to fund the research triangle.

In the e-mail, Toplikar described McMillen as a roommate of former county commissioner Dolores Furtado.

Furtado, Toplikar said, is a former career microbiologist and researcher with KU Medical Center "who collects a nice pension from that entity which stands to benefit greatly" from the triangle tax.

Repeated messages left for Toplikar were unanswered.

But Furtado said Tuesday that Toplikar missed the mark because she has publicly opposed the triangle tax on the grounds that funding higher education is a state responsibility.

McMillen, a longtime civics watchdog, said she and others raised the time-out question with Newby to promote the integrity of the election process.

Newby said he plans to create a "time out" handout for voters to read before casting their ballots this fall. Ballot questions will also be printed for voters to read while they wait in line, and polling places also will be stocked with additional paper ballots if residents want to vote the old-fashioned way.

"We will be prepared," Newby said. "Under no circumstance will someone be unable to vote because they aren't speed-readers."