Some questions still need answered before purchase of new voting machines

For months, Citizens for a Better Whitley County and community activist Paul Cummins have been pushing county leaders to purchase new voting machines that provide a paper trail to ensure the integrity of elections. It looks like the group is getting ready to get its wish.

The Whitley County Fiscal Court is currently accepting sealed bids for the purchase of 41 paper ballot scanning system voting machines, which are due by 10 a.m. Tuesday. The bids will be reviewed and awarded during the fiscal court’s monthly meeting that night, according to the county’s published bid notice.

For the record, I wholeheartedly agree with Cummins and Citizens for a Better Whitley County that electronic voting machines need a paper trail to ensure accuracy and to prevent tampering. However, I think fiscal court members need to get answers to several important questions before opting to spend well over $100,000 on new machines.
From what I have read about the E-scan machines being touted by Cummins and the Citizens for a Better Whitley County, it is a good voting system that Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson has endorsed.

Every county in Kentucky was given funding by the Kentucky Secretary of State’s Office last year to purchase voting machines with a paper trail. The amount, $4,500 a precinct, was enough to purchase one E-scan machine for every precinct in every county in Kentucky. This was provided that the machines were purchased last year. The prices are expected to go up this year.

By Mr. Cummins calculations at the fiscal court’s September or November meeting I believe it was, 34 Kentucky counties had switched over to the E-scan machines.

However, assuming my math is correct, this leaves 86 out of 120 Kentucky counties that were given enough money to purchase an E-scan machine for every precinct that opted not to do so.

For me, this raises an interesting question as to why about two thirds of Kentucky counties choose not to do so given that they were given enough money to purchase the machines without any out of pocket expense.
Here’s one possible answer.

In a Nov. 10 article in the Lexington Herald-Leader about early voting, the use of paper ballots and long lines at the polls, then Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins, who has since retired and has no dog in the fight over which voting machines are used in Whitley County, gave his take on the situation.

Blevins told the Herald-Leader that he didn’t accept the money because the standard for voting machines is under review, and he didn’t want to purchase new machines with paper ballots that might only be used last year.

“The Congress is going to talk about this,” Blevins told the Lexington paper. “There’s a solid potential the machines we use will be thrown away. I’m positive we’re going to use different machines in 2012 … The way you get rid of lines is you buy more voting machines. Before I buy more machines, I want to make sure the machines we have is the one we’re going with.”

There are other factors that the county needs to take a look at as well besides just the purchase of 41 new paper ballot scanning system voting machines.

A switch over to a new system requires additional training for workers in the county clerk’s office on how to work them. It also requires the training of every county election officer and back-up election officer on the use of the new machines, which costs money. Lastly, the public has to be educated on how to use the new system, which in fairness should be pretty simple.

Other questions include how much the paper ballots for these machines will cost the county every election, will the county be able to print their own, and how many will have to be printed?

One argument would dictate that you have one ballot printed for every registered voter in Whitley County, which is roughly 25,000 people. Another argument is that you print a little more than half that given that 52.4 percent of Whitley County voters went to the polls in November to cast their ballots in the presidential race. More people vote in presidential elections than during any other race. About 54 percent of voters cast ballots in the 2004 presidential election.

If you don’t print one ballot for every registered voter and have a few spares in the event some are spoiled, then what do you tell someone if you run out of ballots? “I’m sorry, but you can’t vote because we ran out. Try again next year and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to cast a ballot then.”
Don’t forget the purchase of plenty of pens or pencils for voters to use, since I’m sure that more than a few will walk off with voters.

In the event of a large election, are these ballots big enough to fit all the names of all candidates on there, without having ridiculously small print or a confusing butterfly type ballot? Anyone remember Dade County, Florida, and the presidential election in 2000 with Al Gore’s name next to Ralph Nader’s name. Ask just about any Democrat, and I’m sure they will be able to tell you all about it since they still blame it for Gore’s loss. (Incidentally, the ballot in that election was designed by a Democrat for all you conspiracy theorists.)

Speaking of Florida, I think it also bears mentioning that the push for the electronic voting machines, which we now have today in Whitley County, came about after the 2000 Florida election debacle, which was caused by paper ballots. I’m sure everyone remembers hanging chads as much as we’d like to forget them.

In fairness, the new E-scan machines being considered by the county are a vast improvement over the Florida paper ballot machines used in 2000, but it deserves noting that the E-scans aren’t completely without problems.
An Associated Press article that was published in late October noted that in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a software glitch made the ovals where voters mark their choices too thick for optical scanning machines to read.

The county had to reprint 19,000 ballots to solve the problem, but at least 10,000 ballots had already been returned. The county enlisted 200 staffers and volunteers to transfer the information from flawed ballots to corrected ones on Election Day.
If the fiscal court chooses to purchase the E-scan machines, then I think they could serve Whitley County well for years to come assuming Congress doesn’t mandate the use of something else.

If the fiscal court is able to purchase the machines for about $4,500 each, which they received from the state, and Congress mandates or allows use of these machines, then they have made a great decision. This is especially true if the price goes up on the E-scan machines later this year or next year.

With no regularly scheduled elections this year, if the fiscal court buys these machines, Congress mandates use of something else and the new machines can’t be used in the future, then we’ve spent roughly $184,500 on voting machines that won’t be used once in addition to having to purchase new ones.

For the record, I wholeheartedly agree with Cummins and the Citizens for a Better Whitley County that having a paper trail for voting machines is a great idea. I’m not saying the fiscal court should or shouldn’t purchase the E-scan machines.

What I am saying is I think the fiscal court needs to do its own homework, if members haven’t already done so, and not just rely on the advice of the Citizens for a Better Whitley County, no matter how well intentioned the group is.
I think the fiscal court needs to get answers to these questions and whatever ones they come up with themselves, and make an informed choice on whether to buy new voting machines. Hopefully, they have already done all that homework.

Personally, I’m not sure that the simple purchase of new machines, even ones with a paper trail, goes far to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election process.

For more on these thoughts, check out my blog at www.thenewsjournal.net.