January 11, 2005

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            The next election is the party primary on May 2.

            Monday about 100 election officials and interested residents saw a demonstration of the limited choices available.

            One of those choices, Wake County Board of Elections Director Cherie Poucher said Tuesday, is to use paper ballots counted by hand for the May 2 party primary.

            “The concern right now is time,” Poucher said. “Everyone talks about the May election, but we don’t have until then because absentee voting begins 50 days before an election. That doesn’t give you much time to get it [the new equipment] in here, learn it, program it and know what you’re doing.”

            She will present that option and others to the board of elections –chairman John Gilbert, Reginald Currie and Thomas Steed Jr. – when it meets at 9 a.m. Thursday (tomorrow).

            “Whatever way the board went, we would still have to purchase one piece of equipment for all disabilities,” Poucher said. 

            Poucher said the hand-count option may be viable because there are no high-profile statewide races. The only races in the county are for sheriff, clerk of court and county commissioners. There were 80,000 voters in the 2002 primary.

Only one certified vendor

Many of the people at Monday’s all-day demonstration were knowledgeable precinct officials, and several of them privately asked why the county could not continue to use the Optech III-P Eagle vote tabulator and optical scan machines it has used since 1992.

The Optech was decertified by the state board of elections late last year. Although the equipment was made by Election Systems & Software Inc. from Omaha, Neb., Poucher said ES&S sold the rights to the equipment to another voting-machine vendor, Sequoia, several years ago. Sequoia was not certified as a vendor by the state board last year. And, Poucher said, “Our current equipment really is not manufactured anymore.”

There is only one state-certified vendor – ES&S – and there are only two voting systems – an optical-scan system with paper ballots, the Model 100, similar to the Optech, or a direct record electronic (DRE) machine, the iVotronic, with a color touch screen and a printer for voters to verify their choices. The printer on the iVotronic is new to comply with the state’s requirement for a voter-verified printout as well as a paper trail. It was added six months ago.

            The new voting equipment Wake and other counties purchase has to comply with both the federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) and Senate Bill 223 enacted by the 2005 General Assembly.

            HAVA requires handicapped people have the same access to and privacy in voting as all others. ES&S sales representative Owen Andrews demonstrated two solutions to that requirement.

The AutoMARK is an optical scan machine equipped with Braille buttons, an audio/headphone function that reads the ballot to a voter, puff and sip technology for quadraplegics along with screen changes – larger type, white type on black background – that adapt to other disabilities. The machine prints out a marked ballot at the end.

The iVotronic can also be equipped for handicapped voters except that it does not have puff and sip technology and does not print out a marked ballot.

Poucher said her office sent letters to all local disability groups about the demonstration and to precinct officials. “No matter what our office does, it comes down to the precinct officials who are the ones who conduct the election on election day.”

259 ballots?

             “This was our first in-depth look at the equipment,” Poucher told the group Monday. “We’re all learning.” The board had seen a one-hour demonstration on Dec. 6.

            It was apparent during the questioning that the staff may recommend DRE machines ($3,395 for those equipped to meet HAVA handicapped standards) for the 13 one-stop early voting because the iVotronic can be programmed for the ballots for all the county’s 205 voting precincts. Those are the 189 precincts plus the absentee by mail, transfer, provisional and 13 one-stop precincts.

            If the Model 100 optical scan with paper ballots were to be used for the early voting, Gilbert said, the board would have to print 259 different ballots and have them available at every precinct. In 2004, he said, the board printed 59 different ballot styles. This year there is the requirement that provisional, one-stop and absentee ballots all be reported by precinct, meaning there would have to be a separate paper ballot printed for each precinct with the precinct number.

            Until this year, Wake County had been exempt from reporting those provisional, absentee and one-stop votes by precinct because of the additional cost of printing a separate ballot style for each precinct.

            The questions were varied, everything from what kind of ink the optical scanner can see – everything but lime-green marker – to how to handle curb-side voting – either with a paper ballot or by rolling out the iVotronic or AutoMARK.

            There were a lot of questions about the voter-verifiable printout for the iVotronic. The thermal printer beside the touch screen prints each voter’s choices on a 250-foot roll of paper, advances to clean paper for each voter and stores the choices on another roll. It will not display a new ballot for a voter if there is not enough paper left on the roll. Andrews called it a “real-time audit log.”       

            Gilbert wanted to know how many voters could use the iVotronic before the paper roll would have to be changed. North Carolina has long ballots because “we elect everybody but the dogcatcher.” Poucher and Andrews said one precinct staffer would have to be the official paper changer.

What will it cost?

            Poucher said Tuesday they still do not know the cost. She sat down Monday with the ES&S representatives and told them she needed the complete prices on each different scenario. “It takes a lot more than an optical scanner,” she said.

            For example, the cost of the Model 100, $4,995, does not include the modem, an additional $200, and its installation nor does it include additional program cards. Printing the ballots is an additional cost, and the printer must be certified and trained by ES&S in Omaha.

            The AutoMARK is $4,950 but its table is an additional $400, and Andrews was not able to say how much the sip and puff adapter for quadriplegics would cost.

            The modems are important because they transmit the election results almost immediately after the polls close. The alternative, Poucher said, is to have an official from each precinct call into the office, reading “an itty-bitty thing on a tape after having worked all day.” Then one of her staff would have to listen, hear the information correctly and give it to a data-entry person. It is a recipe for errors, she said.

            The modems are only plugged in to a telephone line when workers are ready to transmit the results, and the equipment in the elections office are not connected to any server or the internet, forestalling the possibility of a hacker entering the system.

            The state will use its share of the $3.9 billion Congress allocated to implement HAVA to help Wake and other counties buy the new equipment. The state formula is $12,000 per polling place and one-stop site and $1 for each person who voted in the 2004 general election. The state’s grant for Wake is based on 183 precincts for a total of $2.3 million.

No more arrows

            If the elections board chooses the optical scanners, the paper ballot will be similar to the ones used in the past, but there will be no more friendly incomplete arrows voters can fill in to indicate their choices.

            Instead there will be small, rather faint ovals to be filled in next to the voter’s choices. Andrews said the scanners can read a square 64-pixel field around each oval, meaning even incomplete marking in the oval would be read. The ballots for voters who do not read the instructions and do something other than filling in the ovals could be counted as blank. “There is nothing we can do about voters who circle the names,” Andrews said.

            Andrews also said he was confident ES&S could supply the needed equipment this spring in time for the May 2 primary. “We have inventory ready to come to the state.”

A history of problems

            Nine vendors were asked to submit proposals to the state for the new equipment, a field that was quickly narrowed to three: ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia. Sequoia did not meet certification, and Diebold decided to withdraw in late December because it could not provide the names of all those who wrote the company’s computer programs.

            All three companies – and others in the field – have been associated with a host of programming problems, computer glitches and failures and other problems in elections across the country and the world. Think of the 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida.

            Many of the problems have been associated with DRE machines and the lack, until recently, of a paper record that can be used for recounts and that voters may use to verify their choices. Andrews noted there is no history with the iVotronic’s printer, which was introduced six months ago.

            One problem occurred in Wake County, and Poucher referred to it Monday.

            In the November 2002 election, Wake was using some iVotronic machines for early voting, and they lost 436 ballots. Poucher said they realized the problem when the totals from the machines and the precinct poll book did not agree. She and staff began trying to contact the voters, identified through the poll book, whose votes had disappeared “by telephone, by paging, by fax, by smoke signal” to allow them to vote again.

            ES&S officials told her they knew the firmware (software) was flawed. The same problem had occurred in Jackson County.

            Miami/Dade County in Florida has been using ES&S iVotronics since the former top election official in the state lobbied the state legislature as a representative of the company and as the lobbyist for the county commissioners association. She received a commission from ES&S for any sales.

            In an April 2002 election in Miami/Dade, the software changed the order of the candidates’ names on the ballots as it computed the results. In September of that year, 1,544 votes were lost for various reasons.

            In Chatham County here in North Carolina in November of 2002 a programming error on a different ES&S machine, the Optech 3P, meant that every time a voter marked a straight Republican ticket, the Libertarian candidate for the state House received a vote.

            Late in December of 2005, California state election officials told ES&S to repair its software for the touch screen machines (DREs) and optical scan machines. The errors noted by state officials include one that has popped up in other states: a voter chose one candidate but the vote was recorded for a second.

            You can find what is called a partial list of documented failures of ES&S machines by typing “ES&S” into any search engine.

            There are a number of web sites which monitor elections and election equipment: www.blackboxvoting.org, www.electiononline.org by the Election Reform Information Project and www.votersunite.org are a few.

Wake County libraries have a book, “Steal This Vote” by Andrew Gumbel, which sketches election and voting scandals from the beginning of the country as well as information about the voting-machine industry, which has a cozy history.

            For example, brothers Todd and Bob Urosevich founded AIS, which later morphed into ES&S. Todd is still with ES&S as vice president of customer support, and Bob is president of DieBold Election Systems.