County clerk seeks new vote-counting machines

By Steven Friederich - Journal Writer

POCATELLO - A vote counting machine erroneously picked up more than one ballot Tuesday, forcing the county to delay city election returns by about 15 to 30 minutes, said Bannock County Clerk Larry Ghan.

None of the erroneous ballots were included in the city's final results, Ghan said. The optical scanning machine reads ballots marked in pencil by voters.

Ghan said a machine, one of two used by the county, began acting up Sunday and a technician drove Monday from Missoula, Mont., and stayed until late Tuesday night trying to fix it.

The technician fixed the counting problem until the machine's computer memory failed. The memory stores vote totals.

Ghan said he would ask the county commission for new machines and hopes to have them within two years.

"We need to upgrade our technology," he said. "These machines were created before the Florida controversies developed in 2000. There are many new, better machines that we really should be using now."

The models in use here are about eight years old, and cost $40,000 to $50,000. The ES&S 550 machines were created by one of the nation's largest voting machine manufacturers. ES&S will now replace the internal parts of the machines, Ghan said.

"The one that broke is the strongest of the two machines," Ghan said. "I've never had a lick of trouble with it until this week."

Had both machines gone down, Ghan said the county was prepared to hand count each ballot.

The city contracted with the county to conduct Tuesday's election, featuring three city council seats and a referendum. The number of registered voters before adding residents who registered the same day is 25,945. Final election results showed 8,972 residents voting in the city's 17 precincts, about a 34.5 percent turnout.

Candidates present at the county courthouse Tuesday night were informed of the counting machine's problems, Ghan said.

Ghan said only four ballots had problems. Some voters thought the optical-scan ballots were punch-card ballots and used a pencil to poke holes where they should have filled in an oval. And instead of using No. 2 pencils, other voters used pens or markers to fill in the ovals.

The four ballots were duplicated by two witnesses who correctly filled out ballots with the exact choices of the incorrect ballots. The old ballots were also saved as evidence, Ghan said.

Steven Friederich is a county, state and federal political reporter for the Journal. He can be reached at (208) 239-6001 or by e-mail at sfriederich@journalnet.com.