New vote machines, new set of problems?
By HOWARD TROXLER
Published September 27, 2007
At the bottom of one of the new paper ballots we might be using in 2008, there's this friendly little piece of advice:
"Turn Ballot Over To Continue Voting."
And on a different ballot we might be using, there's this instruction instead:
"Vote Both Sides."
What's more, at least one of the ballot styles has races stacked willy-nilly, in different shapes and sizes on the page.
After viewing a demonstration Tuesday of the four choices for replacing Florida's touch screen voting machines in 2008, I wondered whether we're just trading one set of problems for another.
All four systems work about the same. The voter marks a paper ballot with a pen or a marker that's provided.
The voter then walks to a central scanner and inserts the ballot. The scanner looks kind of like a fax machine sitting on top of a plastic bin. It records the ballot and drops it into the lower bin.
At the end of the day, each precinct's scanner is connected to a phone line to report results.
Make no mistake: We'll be better off with these machines in one sure-fire way. We'll have the paper ballots as a permanent record.
But there are downsides:
-No warning about "undervotes," or races in which the voter failed to make a choice. At least the touch screens asked for confirmation. (Of course, as we've seen in Sarasota, you can have an undervote problem with touch screens, too.)
-In three of the four systems, there's no ballot review, no way for the voter to confirm that the scanner has recorded the ballot correctly.
-There's a potential for bottlenecks at the scanner in each precinct.
-And if you were worried about security with the touch-screens, there's the same basic question here - can anybody monkey with the scanners at the precinct level?
I called Ion Sancho, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, well known in elections circles for allowing a successful test "hack" of his county's optical scan system.
Sancho surprised me with his total enthusiasm for optical scans. Each of these problems can be eliminated with good planning and good procedures, he said.
Every voter should be reminded by poll workers whenever the ballot has two sides, Sancho said. Ballots must be arranged for clarity, with races and constitutional amendments not jumping confusingly across columns or pages.
Precincts can be redrawn with the technology in mind to cut down on bottlenecks. Poll workers have to be trained to stand near the scanner, ready to fix each holdup within seconds.
In short, it's the design of the human element that makes the system work. Just spending millions on yet another new machine doesn't fix anything automatically.
As for the security issue, well, at least now we have the paper ballots.
Except there's a teeny, tiny problem there, too.
Sancho said that although the Legislature ordered this switch, it didn't update our laws on recounts.
We still have the old rules for an audit of just a tiny fraction of the votes cast. And our law still says that in a recount, we'll still count only overvotes, undervotes and provisional ballots.
I said to Sancho: "Seems like the whole point of having paper ballots is to use them in recounts." He said that he sort of thought so, too.