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Computer voting gets fresh backing
By KATHRYN WEXLER
© St. Petersburg Times, TAMPA -- Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio is urging county officials to spend $12-million on a touch-screen computer system to replace the punch card system blamed for last year's election fiasco. "All the urban counties are moving toward touch screens because they can accommodate numerous ballot styles and multiple languages," Iorio said Wednesday. In making her decision, Iorio tested the computers as well as a paper-ballot system with a substantially lower startup cost of $3-million. She concluded that the touch-screen system, which makes it impossible for people to invalidate their ballots by voting twice in any one race, is needed in Hillsborough. Last year, a national crisis occurred when 110,000 voters in Florida punched more than one choice for president on their punch card ballots. Under a state law passed after the election, 41 Florida counties with outdated voting systems must convert to either the touch-screen or the paper ballot system by the 2002 September primary. Iorio said Pinellas and Pasco elections supervisors are leaning toward the computers. Smaller counties are expected to choose the paper ballots, known as an optical scan system, because they're much cheaper, she said. Nearly 700 people in Hillsborough were asked to test the two systems and 66 percent preferred the computers over the paper ballots, according to a report Iorio prepared. People of various ethnicities, ages and incomes participated, Iorio said. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was the only group with a majority that preferred the paper ballots over the touch screens. "I think people have a tendency to trust what they can put in their hand and hold," said Carolyn Hepburn Collins, second vice president of the NAACP. Collins was one of 10 NAACP members who preferred the electronic ballots. Eleven preferred the paper ballots. Iorio plans to take her recommendation to Hillsborough County commissioners on Tuesday. She is urging the county to quickly seek bids and decide on a vendor in the next three months in order to make the deadline. Her decision comes on the heels of a joint academic study that recommended paper ballots over touch screens, which were criticized as too complicated. The study, by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that voters who used electronic machines erred about as often as those who used punch cards. The scientists said the paper ballots had the fewest voter errors nationally, though they cited paper jams and costly ballots. Iorio said the study didn't consider problems specific to over-votes, which plagued Florida last year. It also relied primarily on equipment Hillsborough is not considering purchasing, she said. Paper ballots require voters to fill in ovals or arrows. Although the start-up cost is low, it would cost Hillsborough about $180,000 for ballots for every major election. The touch-screen system would require the county to hire an additional warehouse employee to maintain and distribute the computers at an annual salary of about $36,000. The state would pick up $1.2-million of the total cost of the computer system. The computers appear to offer other advantages, as well. They allow for immediate recounts and without human judgment to determine voter intent. The results for each ballot can be printed out, and software is written so it's impermeable to computer hackers, according to Iorio's report. Images of cast ballots are stored in multiple memory locations as backup. Collins, of the NAACP, said that when she tested the paper ballot system last month, she voted twice in one race to see what would happen. The ballot was rejected. Iorio's team gave her another one. "All those people come, stand in line, vote, and if they do it wrong, they're told they have to do it all again?" Collins said. "I don't think so." - Kathryn Wexler can be reached at (813) 226-3383.
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