Articles on Electronic Voting
Broward city elections may be delayed over Oliphant problems
[Election Administrator]
Kempf reprimanded last fall [Election Administrator]
Broward official fears chaotic elections office will torpedo primary
Chaotic, close: Reno-McBride race undecided as poll problems anger voters
Here we go again: Confusion reigns in sequel to 2000 election
Long delays leave some black voters angry and suspicious
Voting Machines Cause Problems in
Touch-screen voting machines don’t solve
Miami-Dade votes still turning up two days after primary
Broward recheck finds about 200 untallied votes
Computer Voting:
When Humans are The Moth in the Machine
Election reform deal would send billions to states
Bill casts out old voting machines
Voting Machines Can't Help Disabled
[TX] County tries to prevent more ballot problems
Bush to Sign Voting Revamp Bill
New voting tools make
Will high-tech save or sink future elections?
Technology: Behind the balloting on election day
Glitches Hit High-Tech Voting Systems
Glitch bedevils Tarrant vote tally
VNS Unable to Deliver Exit Polls
High-Tech Voting Going Smoothly
Watch the Vote on VoteWatch
Broward vote total short by 104,000 in reporting glitch
Chip glitch hands victory to wrong candidate
2,180
Cost of Broward elections to rise by $1 million or more
A Vote for Less Tech at the Polls
****************************
Broward city elections may be delayed over Oliphant problems
By Scott Wyman
Sun-Sentinel
Posted
His warning of a looming catastrophe came as Oliphant's
tenuous grip on power loosened even further. The mayors of
"It is apparent to most everybody that this office is
in shambles and is not able to function," said Scott, whose stand is
significant because he is a confidant of Gov. Jeb Bush. Only Bush can oust
Oliphant, and Scott said he would tell the governor of his feelings.
Bush's spokeswoman, Elizabeth Hirst, said his office
continues to monitor the situation in Broward County and that he would likely
wait until prosecutors conclude their investigation of voting irregularities
and mismanagement before deciding if he should take further action.
Oliphant, meanwhile, gave the county an 84-page report that
she depicted as her plan for the February primaries in
The report was largely a step-by-step outline of how to
conduct an election, but contained no assurances that her office has the
capability to do it. It also contained her latest request for money: $191,676
for February election expenses that she didn't include in her annual budget.
Oliphant could not be reached Monday for comment.
County commissioners will discuss the election plan when
they meet today, but one measure that cities wanted to ensure a successful vote
fell through Monday. Joe Cotter, the election administrator Oliphant brought in
to run the November vote, and Election Systems & Software rejected the
Broward League of Cities' request that they serve as consultants to
troubleshoot Oliphant's planning.
ES&S, the maker of Broward's new voting machines, said
it was uncertain how it could help the cities since Oliphant is in charge of the
election process. Cotter, who resigned last month alleging Oliphant had
interfered with his work, said he feared he would become a lightning rod for
controversy if he got involved.
"It is not my intention to serve in any role which
might exacerbate the situation or be detrimental to the overall success of
these elections," he wrote in a letter to the League of Cities.
Oliphant and the cities have been seeking county help to run
the elections, but that became increasingly unlikely given Desjarlais' comments
to commissioners about the capabilities of her office. In addition to Cotter's
departure, Oliphant has fired her intergovernmental affairs liaison, lost her
lawyer and office manger, and put her computer technician in charge of election
planning.
The county would enter uncharted legal territory in any
effort to postpone the elections. State election officials said Bush does have
the power to do so in an emergency, as happened when Hurricane Andrew hit, but
they added the legal issues would be complex because each city charter would
have to be consulted as well.
Oliphant's legal problems also worsened Monday. County attorneys
said they are researching whether Oliphant can be held personally liable for
the $1 million deficit she ran up last year.
The accountants preparing the annual audit of her office
finances asked the county for advice on how to report the deficit, whether as a
liability against her office or as the responsibility of the
State law bans deficit spending and requires constitutional
officers like Oliphant to consult with the
Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle's and Davie Mayor Harry
Venis' stands come after Weston Mayor Eric Hersh urged the
"I wish she would resign," said Naugle, who has
been close to Oliphant since they attended
Venis said Oliphant missed opportunities to repair the mess
she has created. "Every day, we can't be reading in the newspaper about a
fiasco at the Supervisor of Elections Office," he said. "In the best
interest of the residents of
Other public officials remain more circumspect.
Hollywood Mayor Mara Giulianti said she supports major
reform in Oliphant's office by changing it from an elected to an appointed
position, but declined to call on her to step down. Pompano Beach Mayor Bill
Griffin said he feared Oliphant's resignation at this time could cause more
problems because it would come so close to the elections.
Lauderhill Mayor Richard Kaplan, Sunrise Mayor Steve Feren,
Pembroke Pines Mayor Alex Fekete, Plantation Mayor Rae Carole Armstrong and
Miramar Mayor Lori Moseley declined to take a stand on whether Oliphant should
go. Tamarac Mayor Joe Schreiber and Lauderdale Lakes Mayor Samuel Brown
defended her.
"Everybody is getting on the negative bandwagon seeking
her scalp," Brown said. "Somebody should tone it down and give her the
help she's been requesting to help out those cities."
Scott Wyman can be reached at swyman@sun-sentinel.com or
954-356-4511.
Staff writers Lisa Huriash, Jeremy Milarsky, Sallie James, Kevin Smith, Milton Carrero, Christy McKerney, Toni Marshall, Joe Kollin and Susannah Bryan contributed to this report.
******************************
Kempf reprimanded last fall
By John Zebrowski
Seattle Times staff reporter
Three months before she was fired for the near-collapse of
last year’s general election, the former
In a letter written last October, her former boss admonished
Julie Anne Kempf for creating an environment of “mistrust, apprehension,
favoritism and occasional fear” in her office.
“Your interaction with subordinates and colleagues has
contributed rather than resolved this feeling,” wrote Kempf’s former boss Bob
Roegner, the manager of
In particular, the letter accused Kempf of rewarding some
employees while punishing others, regardless of performance. In one instance,
Roegner said, Kempf worked to undermine the authority of another supervisor.
The letter was made public by the county yesterday.
Kempf was fired on New Year’s Eve for her actions during the
general election, when nearly a half million absentee ballots were mailed so close
to Election Day some residents lost their right to vote. Roegner charged Kempf
with lying to him, the public and county officials, jeopardizing the election
and trying to undermine his authority.
Kempf denies both the charges in the October letter and
accusations that she mishandled the election. She accuses Roegner of trying to
push her out as superintendent of elections by digging up grievances that were
old and unfounded.
Her claims come in a letter dated Oct. 10, in the middle of
the period when elections workers were making mistakes in getting absentee
ballots designed so they could be printed and mailed to voters.
But county officials said they didn’t receive the letter
from Kempf until Dec. 16, one week after Roegner testified about the election
before the Metropolitan King County Council, and after he had informed her he
intended to fire her. Kempf insists she mailed the letter in October.
In the letter, Kempf claims there was a general feeling
among staff that sooner or later an election would fail — and the blame would
be put on individuals rather than the state of the office.
“I admit that I am increasingly afraid that the scapegoat
will be me,” she wrote.
Kempf has until Monday to appeal her dismissal, which her
attorney said she will do.
John Zebrowski: 206-464-8292 or jzebrowski@seattletimes.com.
********************
Sun-Sentinel
Broward official fears chaotic elections office will torpedo primary
By Scott Wyman and Buddy Nevins
Even as election officials sought to reassure voters that next week’s primary will go smoothly despite turmoil over new polling places and inaccurate registration cards, the leader of the Broward County Commission charged the area is careening toward another election disaster.
Commission Chairwoman Lori Parrish, who serves on the three-member Canvassing Board that certifies the election results, said Thursday that the process has been too rife with problems to run properly on Tuesday.
She lost her last bit of faith when she learned that the
mayor of
“I have no confidence we can have an error-free election,” Parrish said. “We have a new supervisor of elections, new voting equipment and new precinct locations. I just have to hope that it isn’t a formula for disaster. I’m worried and concerned.”
Broward’s embattled supervisor of elections, Miriam Oliphant, faced another major blow in her election planning Thursday when the state Division of Elections said she misinterpreted state law on how to organize her polling precincts.
The Republican Party complained she would not guarantee that each precinct will be staffed by Republican and Democratic poll workers. She thought only that the overall makeup of the 5,000 workers had to reflect the community, but the state sided with the GOP.
The opinion could open the primary to a legal challenge unless Oliphant shuffles poll workers around between today and Tuesday to ensure a balance at each of the 809 precincts. Her spokesman said Oliphant was reviewing the letter late Thursday.
Republican leaders said they are exploring their options if Oliphant does not relent and said they will definitely head to court if the issue is not addressed by the November general election.
Despite that,
“Everyone just needs to take a couple deep breaths,” he said. “I think similar problems have occurred in other places, but for whatever reason, here it’s been more confrontational. People don’t realize how complicated it is to put on an election.”
Tuesday will mark the first major election since
Voters have complained about new polling places and inaccurate registration cards, and the concerns are continuing to mount.
Sunrise Mayor Steve Feren was stunned when he voted absentee last week and received a ballot that contained the legislative race for state Sen. Mandy Dawson. Feren, who lives about six miles outside her district, immediately questioned poll workers about the ballot.
Feren said a poll worker agreed he had been given the wrong ballot and then set up the right one on his voting machine. But Feren said he is concerned other voters are less astute about which legislative, congressional, school board and county and city commission districts they live in and would go ahead and vote if given the wrong ballot.
“It’s going to be ugly,” he said.
Similar problems were seen in this week’s testing of the new voting machinery by the Canvassing Board. The board determined the machines work properly, but two of the five errors that occurred while testing 100 machines happened because poll workers chose the wrong ballot.
Parrish attempted to raise questions about the possibility of similar mistakes, but lawyers told the board that it could only assess whether the machines work properly. Poll worker training, they said, was Oliphant’s responsibility.
Oliphant denied that Feren could have received the wrong ballot. She said the errors in this week’s testing were tracked and corrected quickly.
Voters attempting to vote early as Feren did are facing long
waits even though Oliphant urged people to take advantage of
The problem is that even though Broward is a heavily Democratic county, Oliphant set aside three machines at each office for early voting — one for Republicans, one for Democrats, and one for people of other parties or no party affiliation.
Aleida Waldman, of Coconut Creek, said it took her almost an hour to vote even though there were only two people in line in front of her. “It was a mess. They didn’t know what they were doing,” Waldman said.
Oliphant blamed the long waits on the
Oliphant urged voters who have questions or find problems with their new registration cards to call her office or check her Web site. Both options, though, continue to be problem-plagued themselves.
Voters report being unable to get through to the supervisor's office on the phone.
“I have been dialing them for a week, several different
numbers. Every number I call is busy, busy, busy,” said Ruth Cohen of the Palm
Aire condominium complex in
Cristina Pudwell lives in
Oliphant blames the phone problems on crank callers clogging her phones.
She also said inaccurate information on her Web site has been fixed, but a spot check Thursday afternoon of complaints reported to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of precinct changes and inaccurate registration information showed those details still listed.
And voters can’t expect the traditional sample ballot that many use to sort out who they will vote for before going to the polls.
Oliphant’s predecessor, Jane Carroll, mailed out a sample ballot, but Oliphant dropped it in a cost-cutting move. She decided the money could be better spent on demonstrating the new voting machines and sending educational material to voters.
“I didn’t know who to vote for. It took me much longer,” said Myron Ross, who voted as part of the early voting program. “I can only imagine what will happen Election Day.”
Staff Writer Christy McKerney contributed to this report.
Scott Wyman can be reached at swyman@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4511.
*******************************
Main Herald
Chaotic, close: Reno-McBride race undecided as poll problems anger voters
BY LESLEY CLARK, TYLER BRIDGES AND BETH REINHARD
Bill McBride appeared close early today to pulling an upset victory over Janet Reno for the Democratic nomination for governor, although rampant polling snags in Reno's South Florida stronghold left the final tally in doubt.
Returns from across the state showed McBride ahead with a small
lead -- but his margin was dwindling as results delayed by Election Day mishaps
trickled in from
By
If the margin of victory between McBride and
''The returns are still coming in,'' a hopeful
McBride, the Democratic Party establishment's favored son,
awaited the results in a
''I feel like throwing up,'' said McBride's campaign manager, Robin Rorapaugh.
McBride, on the verge of a political upset, told supporters early this morning that he expected to win, but that the results may not be known for several more hours.
''The only person more nervous than me right now is Jeb Bush,'' he said to loud cheers. ``If we win this thing, we'll slingshot out.''
The real show had been billed as the general election to challenge Gov. Jeb Bush, but Reno versus McBride assumed increased urgency in recent weeks as union cash and support from the party establishment propelled McBride in opinion polls to within two points of Reno's once seemingly insurmountable lead.
Miami state Sen. Daryl Jones, running a distant third in the race, may have eroded support from Reno and was showing better returns than strategists had predicted.
`ALL OPTIONS'
The mishaps at the polls in
Her campaign began laying the foundation for a legal challenge, given the chaos at the polls.
''We are leaving all options on the table until we see the full implications of today's screw-ups,'' campaign manager Mo Elleithee said.
The campaign launched more than 200,000 phone calls to
seniors and blacks after the governor -- following her request -- extended
polling hours statewide by two hours to give more time to people who had been
unable to vote because of glitches. Seven sound trucks lumbered through a
dreary rain in black neighborhoods in the two counties, pitching
Unlike
A nervous McBride, who has campaigned for two weeks buoyed by recent polls and attacks from the Bush campaign that he believes underscore his message that he is a more formidable opponent, watched the returns from in the company of friends, advisors and his two children.
''If I were the governor and I saw this many people hanging
around the campaign at
Reno's quirky campaign took her from the dance floor of a glam South Beach nightclub to the cab of a red Ford pickup, trekking from Pensacola to South Florida, but counting mostly on Broward County's massive condo communities and Miami-Dade County's black neighborhoods to lift her to victory.
McBride, a former managing partner at Holland & Knight, one of the largest firms in the country, garnered support from the party establishment, racking up union endorsements and cash, billing himself as the moderate Democrat who could best oust Bush.
Though the campaign began as a cakewalk for
A year ago, the woman who spawned a Saturday Night Live
spoof was a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Early polls showed the
former
But the Democratic Party establishment, wary of
McBride, too, showed tenacity, staying in the race while more popular and better known Democrats, former U.S. Rep. Pete Peterson and U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, among them, bowed out in the face of Reno's overwhelming edge.
It began to pay off for him when he successfully secured the
backing of key state legislators, party activists and, most importantly,
high-profile labor endorsements, including the influential Florida Education
Association, which considered the unknown lawyer more ''electable'' than
The endorsements boosted McBride's political legitimacy, provided him with a burst of favorable publicity and, most significantly, pumped union dollars into his campaign, along with an army of grass-roots activists.
Though she garnered celebrity endorsements -- touring condos
with Martin Sheen and confidently booking a post-primary, mid-September Elton
John fundraiser and concert --
McBride, who outraised her $4.2 million to $2.6 million, waged an air war, flying to far campaign events but appearing repeatedly on television.
McBride, too, was initially aided by the man he had hoped to oust in November. The Republican Party of Florida launched a series of anti-McBride ads that McBride partisans said signaled the GOP's unease about facing McBride.
The ads might have began working in Bush's favor, as McBride's campaign began calling Democrats over the weekend, saying that the attacks on McBride's performance as managing partner were unfounded. They also forced the McBride campaign to spend far more on TV and radio than it had planned in the campaign's final days.
***************************
Here we go again: Confusion reigns in sequel to 2000 election
BY MARTIN MERZER, JONI JAMES AND ALFONSO CHARDY
Two years and $125 million after the 2000 presidential
election fiasco, a plague of inexperienced poll workers and malfunctioning
machines again enraged and disenfranchised thousands of
Election officials were compelled to extend voting hours
statewide. But even that aroused chaos Tuesday night in
Some poll workers in Broward abandoned their posts at
Then, early this morning, Broward election officials revealed that results from 140 precincts were still coming into the elections center. At several regional vote tabulation centers, faulty equipment prevented sending the information to election headquarters.
Several statewide contests were still too close to call, and the Broward returns could prove decisive.
Similar problems were reported this morning in Miami-Dade,
where returns from an unknown number of precincts never made it to election
headquarters. Police were dispatched to those precincts, and final results were
not expected until
Tabulation problems also occurred in
And so, the day ended much as it began -- in confusion.
''I'm livid,'' said Hope Cunningham, unable to vote in
Most voters elsewhere in the state cast ballots without difficulty, but it was a different story for many people in Miami-Dade and Broward.
Scores of precincts failed to open on time, and many limped along with only a fraction of their new touch-screen machines working.
The apparent reasons: inadequately trained poll workers and machines that may have been broken or were extraordinarily difficult to reset.
DADE TROUBLES
A measure of the tumult:
Shortly after
At
By
By
Perhaps more ominously, some
Others were handed improper documents by poll workers and had to argue for the chance to participate in their party's primary. Still others found that the precinct addresses listed on their new voting cards were incomplete or simply wrong.
In some ways, the problems exceeded those of two years ago, when virtually every precinct at least managed to open on time.
''I frankly think, what in the hell have they been doing for two years?'' said Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith, who announced the two-hour statewide voting extension.
The flood of complaints from
Some hardy, if unhappy, voters seemed determined to wait as long as necessary.
At
In Broward, where new Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant's grasp of her duties was questioned even before the election, the number of troubled precincts was difficult to obtain, but there appeared to be plenty of them.
At Sunrise Lakes Phase I in
''I've never seen anything like this,'' said Sid Liss, an
elections clerk who had trouble getting the machines to work. ``I've been here
since
''You tell Mrs. Oliphant she'd better leave for
Though most
The causes seemed to boil down to two familiar categories: poll workers and machinery.
Many
''How could this happen after what happened in 2000?'' said Lori Sugg, turned away from a polling place in Pembroke Pines after the precinct clerk, assistant clerk, registration book and machine activation devices were all missing in inaction. ``I don't understand.''
Election officials in Miami-Dade and Broward blamed most of the trouble on human error.
Gisela Salas, an assistant Miami-Dade supervisor of elections, said many poll workers simply failed to turn on the machines properly.
Each device must be booted up with an activator cartridge that must remain in the machine for six minutes. Many workers apparently pulled out those cartridges too soon, crashing the machines.
''A lot of the poll workers were not patient,'' Salas said.
Michael Limas, chief operating officer for Election Systems & Software, which made the machines, claimed that his equipment was blameless.
''When our technicians have gone to polling places, they haven't been repairing machines,'' he said. ``They've had to start the machines over for people.''
He said the failure to properly use the activator cartridges was like ``putting a floppy disk in your computer to copy a large file and popping it out before it's finished.''
David Leahy, Miami-Dade's elections supervisor, said ES&S had 64 technicians on duty in the county to handle problems.
Asked if that was enough technical support, Leahy smiled and said: ``Not given the problems we had. We didn't anticipate having these many problems.''
Even
The result: Bush declared ''a state of emergency'' allowing him to suspend state law and order the polls to remain open two extra hours.
In the
In tiny
Glitches were reported in other parts of the state, but
those problems seemed minor in relation to those that flared in
BUSH ANGERED
So, in the end, after $125 million was spent by the state
and counties on new touch-screen machines and other electoral changes,
''There has been ample time to prepare for this election,'' said a clearly angry Bush. ``There is no excuse for not having precinct workers in a precinct for voting. There is no excuse for not turning on the machines. It is shameful.''
Said U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek, a
``It seems that, no matter how many assurances we get of
safeguards and improvements, voting in
In Broward, even before the election, Oliphant had been criticized for confusion that surrounded the recruiting of poll workers, the selection of polling places, the duplicate mailing of voting cards to some residents and other apparent missteps.
To many, Oliphant seemed overwhelmed by her job -- and the events of the day did little to reverse that impression.
''What do I think about her efforts?'' said voter Ilene Sager. ``I think they're nonexistent. What ability? I don't see that she has any ability.''
Oliphant remained out of public view through much of the
day, but she surfaced at
``We got last-minute cancellations from our clerks.''
CHANGES PROMISED
Oliphant vowed to redesign her system of assigning poll workers in time for the Nov. 5 general election. A former member of the Broward School Board, she gave herself a grade ''B'' for Tuesday's work.
''Once we got the polls open, things started going smoothly,'' she said.
Not really. Some election workers said Oliphant's office never notified them of the voting extension.
One legal expert said Tuesday's poll problems could lead to legal action, especially by candidates who lost close races or by disgruntled voters.
''We should start hearing the rumblings on Wednesday
morning,'' said
The new machines and other changes were made necessary by
that ''hanging chad'' debacle, which called into question the integrity of
On Tuesday, 60 percent of the state voted on new equipment. And about one of every three voters in Miami-Dade and Broward voted at a new location this year.
Many elections supervisors had predicted some confusion, but nothing like this.
In
Without precinct clerks, registration books and activators, the place was chaotic.
''Nobody is more upset than we are,'' said Jacquelyn Simone, a first-time poll worker. ``We all went to our class, and it looked like everything was going to go smoothly.''
It did not.
**********************
Long delays leave some black voters angry and suspicious
After computer foul-ups, leaders see echoes of 2000
BY ANDREA ROBINSON
arobinson@herald.com
The snafus -- which some leaders predicted last week -- caused an angry state NAACP President Adora Obi Nweze to call for the removal of some county elections supervisors, in particular Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor David Leahy.
''Somebody else needs to be put into that job,'' Nweze said
late Tuesday. ``People ought to have had an opportunity to vote, both black and
white. They haven't had that opportunity in
State Sen. Kendrick Meek, who canvassed North Dade polls earlier in the day, said Leahy should resign and County Manager Steve Shiver should ``get someone who can run the elections. . . . What happened is unconscionable.''
State and national black leaders said it was too early to tell if blacks were disproportionately disenfranchised, but they charged that neither the state nor the counties had ensured voters that their rights were safe.
WORST CASE
The worst was seen at Precinct 507 in
There are 1,200 registered voters in the precinct, which is 90 percent Democrat and 95 percent black.
Many walked away angry and suspicious after their first attempt to vote failed.
''Voting in Miami-Dade reminds me of being in a third-world country,'' said retired teacher Wilhelmenia Jennings, 85, who came to vote with her 92-year-old sister, Witlean Butler. Both were turned away.
Emotions in black neighborhoods were high early Tuesday.
Gospel radio station WMBM 1490-AM was flooded with alerts from Broward and
Miami-Dade voters shortly after the
By
''One of [the poll workers] said the batteries were put in wrong. That's no excuse,'' Range said. ``I expected that things would go relatively smoothly. I expected a glitch or two but not a precinct down for several hours with no relief in sight.''
Criticism also poured in from the NAACP and the People for
the
''This doesn't have to happen,'' said Vicki Beasely, a
lawyer who has monitored elections in
EARLY INDICATION
As early as last week, black community leaders had predicted problems would crop up, after U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek was turned away from casting an absentee ballot because of a computer malfunction at a Miami library branch. Some would-be voters left in frustration, but Meek called Leahy, who verified her information with poll workers so she could vote.
On Tuesday, Meek criticized Miami-Dade's process.
``I had hoped that the problems I had experienced . . . when I went to vote -- inoperable computers and backup systems that fail -- had been corrected, but the mess that has been reported this morning in dozens of Dade precincts shows that Dade's voting system is just as broken as ever.''
The incident involving Meek occured on the same day that the state settled a federal voting rights lawsuit. That lawsuit, filed by the NAACP and four other civil rights groups, alleged top elections officials, the departments of Children & Families and Motor Vehicles and Highway Safety and seven counties -- including Miami-Dade, Broward and Duval -- had disenfranchised scores of black voters during the Nov. 7, 2000, election that put George W. Bush into the White House.
The state agreed -- among other things -- to develop uniform, statewide poll worker training and voter education standards.
Staff writers Luisa Yanez, Jennifer Maloney and Erika Bolstad contributed to this report.
**************************
Voting Machines Cause Problems in
By Colleen Jenkins
Wednesday,
Returns in one of the most closely watched and hotly
contested elections in the nation were muddled last night when poorly trained
election workers in
The leading candidates in the 8th Congressional District
emerged shortly before
Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan acknowledged there were "some shakedown problems."
"We had problems opening up the polling places and
closing the polling places and getting the [computer] cartridges to the Board
of Elections,"
County officials said poll workers had to shut down each poll site, tabulate the precinct results on a paper printout and then drive the printout and memory cards from each unit to the county's election headquarters.
"That takes time," said
Harris acknowledged that the county needed to do more training of its precinct workers before November to improve their performance.
Joe Torre, a state elections board project manager, said
cars were lined up outside
"It's a slow process," he said. "It's brand new to them. Why wouldn't they release [the results] as soon as they start to get them?"
The other three counties juggling the new process had better results. In Prince George's County, the machines worked smoothly, said Charles Deegan, the Republican member of the county board of elections. At each of 204 polling places, election judges collected the totals from each machine into a single "accumulator" and then transmitted the totals via modem to election board headquarters in Upper Marlboro.
The first results were available at 8:21 p.m. – 21 minutes after the polls closed.
"Hey, if Prince George's can do it, anybody can do it," Deegan said.
Montgomery appeared to suffer, he said, because the county asked election judges to drive the memory cards from each polling place to a central location.
"In a county of that size, or in Prince George's, it's just not feasible," Deegan said. "We're 725 square miles, 204 precincts. It's a big county."
Deegan said some of Prince George's 2,100 voting machines were first used in a special election to replace a deceased county councilman earlier this year. General training for election judges across the county began in the middle of June.
The machines also worked well in rural Allegany County, where poll judges pulled memory cards from each of 202 machines and drove them into Cumberland from 36 polling places, said elections administrator Kitty Davis.
Allegany didn't try to use modems or to accumulate totals on a single machine in each polling place because "we wanted baby steps," Davis said. "The machines have a lot more bells and whistles, but we did not fully utilize them because we wanted our judges and the public to get comfortable with the new process."
In Dorchester County, election officials were finished tabulating results from the county's 38 precincts by 9:30 p.m. Some election judges had to drive an hour to bring their memory cards to the county election board, said election director Donna E. Rahe.
"Everything worked out just great," she said. "I'm very pleased with my chief judges and judges and the community."
Campaign workers waited in frustration for Montgomery's delayed results.
"I wish the Montgomery board of elections would tell us what they know," said Jonathan Cohen, 45, of Bethesda, at Chris Van Hollen's campaign party. "I've got kids at home with the babysitter and the babysitter has school tomorrow."
The late-night troubles in Montgomery followed a day alreayd rife with technological snags and confusion across the four counties showcasing the new touch-screen machines that Maryland officials plan to take statewide by 2006.
Early morning glitches frustrated some voters and marred the launch of the new touch-screen voting machines in four Maryland counties yesterday, but by late in the day, poll workers and voters gave mostly positive reviews of the system.
"I like it better," said Bernice Williams, who is in her seventies, as she voted at Leisure World of Maryland, a retirement community in Silver Spring. "It's faster. We won't have any hanging chads. It's the 21st century."
Instead of stepping into a curtained voting booth with punch cards or lever machines, voters in the four counties that had the most antiquated systems encountered machines that resemble automated tellers. Voters received a card encoded for their precinct and political party that they inserted into a machine to display a ballot, and touched a computer screen to make selections.
The four counties and the state split the $15?million cost of the new system for their sites. The machines are the Maryland General Assembly's response to the Florida vote-count controversy that delayed results from the 2000 presidential election for weeks. But the initial rough spots perturbed some voters.
Melba DeLope, 52, a cosmetologist in Silver Spring, had voted only for a gubernatorial candidate before her white, plastic voting card popped out of the machine. Perplexed and rushing to get to work, DeLope turned in the card unfinished.
"I feel like I was cheated," she said.
Margaret Dolan, 51, experienced a similar problem in Silver Spring about 6 p.m. Her Republican ballot let her vote only for the school board race, and when she reported the error to an election judge, she said he responded "that was just too bad."
"I was really annoyed because I had spent a good part of the day going over the ballot deciding who to vote for," she said.
Electrical problems halted voting for about 15 minutes at precincts in Chevy Chase and Silver Spring, said local poll workers. Some machines in Montgomery and Prince George's didn't work as soon as they were turned on.
Torre said the machines have a backup battery that should prevent votes from being lost.
Election officials tried to introduce the new AccuVote-TS system, manufactured by Global/Diebold Election Systems, in advance at events such as festivals.
Their preparation helped familiarize hundreds of voters with the new technology, but it didn't prevent complaints. Some election workers said there weren't enough machines to meet demand., although each county had twice as many of the new machines as they had of the old. Montgomery and Prince George's counties, the state's largest jurisdictions, each had more than 2,000 new machines.
Voting procedures and human error seemed to cause more trouble than the machines, officials and voters said. At Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, voters said poll workers had trouble turning on the machines and finding the cards that needed to be programmed.
It was 20 minutes before the first voter could be processed.
"It was like watching amateur hour," said Marcus Smith, a Bethesda resident who voted at the high school. "I got the impression they were slowly figuring out how it worked., but it looked like a real mess this morning."
Many senior citizens at the Leisure World poll site wandered from table to table, unsure of where to go. They were supposed to pick up a registration card from one set of election judges, get a ballot encoded at another table and then wait to be escorted to an open voting machine. But some residents said they had not bargained on the more elaborate process.
"Once you get to the machine and get it started, it's duck soup . . . but it's getting to the machine and getting it activated that's the holdup," said Joan Barry, a senior citizen and Democratic precinct vice chairwoman.
Some election workers in Allegany and Dorchester counties initially had trouble encoding cards, election officials said. But technical support people patrolled the 329 machines at the sites and quickly fixed problems, said Allegany election director Catherine O. Davis.
"We've learned a few things," Davis said. "In dealing with our judges, perhaps we weren't clear enough. . . . We're coming from 1950s technology."
"I liked the new system," said Larcenia Cromwell of Prince George's County. "It is very important that we come out today and vote."
The procedural mishaps somewhat overshadowed the new system's advantages. The machines featured large, clear print – in English and Spanish in Montgomery and Prince George's – and a safeguard against people voting for more candidates than allowed. They also featured an audio ballot, giving the illiterate and the blind their first opportunity to vote unassisted, officials said.
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Government Computer News
Touch-screen voting machines don’t solve Florida problems
By Trudy Walsh
September 12, 2002
It was déjà vu all over again. In a scenario reminiscent of the November 2000 elections, confusion and equipment malfunctions in Florida’s primary yesterday prompted Gov. Jeb Bush to keep the state’s polling places open two hours beyond their regularly scheduled closing times.
Bush said he was issuing the order because of “substantial delays in the opening of certain polling places in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.” Bush also attributed the delays to the “major technological and procedural changes” mandated by the revision of the state’s election code.
The state had spent what Bush called a significant sum of money on new voting machines and training.
Bruce Eldridge, assistant supervisor of technical services for the Broward County Elections Office, did not see the delays as purely a result of voting machinery gone awry. “Technology is not the answer,” Eldridge said. “Elections are a people-oriented process. I think the technology failed us in several instances, but the major problems were human factors.”
“I don’t know yet the exact incidence of equipment failure,” Eldridge said. “Once our tech teams have been out to the precincts to evaluate the failures, I’ll have an answer.”
Part of the problem was that some poll workers did not show up for duty, Eldridge said.
“You know how the stock market has what they call a ‘triple witching hour,’ where many events happen at once? Well, that’s what happened this year in Florida,” he said. Yesterday was the first statewide use of new election rules and procedures, new equipment, and new precincts. “We were really being stretched,” he said.
Broward County used iVotronic touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems and Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb. The company’s Web site says the equipment makes “election day operations and voting easy and straightforward.”
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Sun-Sentinel
Miami-Dade votes still turning up two days after primary
By ALEX VEIGA
Associated Press
Posted September 13 2002, 12:24 PM EDT
MIAMI -- Few answers have been given to explain why more than 1,800 votes in Miami-Dade County were only found two days after Florida's primary election.
The votes were found when election officials reviewed four precincts with unusually low voter turnout Thursday. Many of those additional votes would likely go to Janet Reno, who won Miami-Dade by more than a 3-1 margin in the Democratic gubernatorial primary but trailed Bill McBride statewide.
The votes have not yet been submitted to the state as part of Miami-Dade's vote total from Tuesday's primary.
McBride's unofficial victory margin was 8,196 votes, according to the state, while Reno needed a difference of 6,751 votes or less to qualify for an automatic machine recount.
Reno would need to cut McBride's margin by 1,445 votes to trigger the recount. The additional ballots from the four precincts would probably reduce the difference by several hundred votes, based on the margin of Reno's victory in Miami-Dade.
Reno will not concede the race because of balloting problems in her home county.
One of the four precincts was at Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church in Liberty City, with 1,633 registered voters. The first count showed 87 votes cast there, but the review found more than 610 votes.
``The first four (precincts) were just off the chart,'' said David Leahy, Miami-Dade's elections chief. ``This is an indicator that the system did not work as it was designed to.''
Leahy believes that in some cases poll workers failed to close down the touchscreen voting machines properly, leading the votes on those machines not to be collected Tuesday. But he added that it is possible some of the polling stations' low vote numbers are correct, reflecting delays and technical glitches that kept some machines from being used part of the day.
Dorothy Walton, precinct clerk at Pilgrim Rest church, said she wasn't told the proper closing procedures for the machines.
``I didn't know either that when they set them up, they didn't hook them all together,'' said Walton.
In her precinct, seven out of the 12 machines were working. But just two were linked, so results were only collected from those machines, she said.
Jaqui Colyer, a Democratic candidate for state Representative, also complained of voting problems in the precinct, which is in the district she ran in.
When elections officials first told her that less than 90 people voted in the precinct, she said she started calling her supporters. When she had talked to about 100 who said they voted for her, she became suspicious.
But when officials announced Thursday they had found 610 votes, she became incensed.
``Were they under the bed?'' she asked. ``If they can lose 600 votes in that precinct, how many more did they lose?''
She also complained that long lines at the polls sent home many potential voters.
One supporter told her: ``I had to go to work. I love you Jaqui, but I don't love you enough to make a lifetime job out of voting.''
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The Miami Herald
Broward recheck finds about 200 untallied votes
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD
September 13, 2002
Broward County election workers double-checking the machines used in Tuesday's primary found an estimated 200 votes that weren't counted Tuesday.
Of those votes, election workers said 137 were cast by voters in the 32X precinct in Pembroke Pines, where Supervisor of Elections Miriam Oliphant personally delivered the needed equipment to start the touch-screen machines around 11 a.m. Tuesday.
The precinct was among 247 that Janet Reno's gubernatorial campaign had asked the county to review either because turnout was unexpectedly low or because no votes were recorded. It's unclear how many of the ''found'' votes in Broward will be tallied for Reno.
Broward election officials refused to be more specific about the number of precincts reviewed or the number of votes discovered. They said they won't release that information until Tuesday, when they will retabulate all results for the county's three-member canvassing board.
''We won't release any data or any information until the process they're going through is complete,'' said Rick Riley, a spokesman for Oliphant.
CHECKING TAPES
The process is not likely to finish until today. Broward officials found the additional votes when they checked for irregularities while reviewing close-out tapes for all 769 precincts.
Election workers checked the tapes for the number of machines that were closed out at each polling place. If that number didn't match the number of machines delivered to the precinct or they noticed other irregularities, election workers flagged the precinct for additional scrutiny.
The process flagged more than 10 percent of the county's precincts for further review, said Bruce Eldridge, assistant supervisor of technical services.
''The problem in Miami really caused us to look deeper into this,'' Eldridge said.
WRONG CARTRIDGE
Election workers then retrieved the plastic shoe box-size containers that hold the cartridges used in the questionable precincts. In many cases, they found that poll workers failed to use a master cartridge to start the machines in the morning and shut them down at night.
Instead, workers used the ''slave'' cartridges which were to be used to activate machines for individual voters.
In those cases where the wrong cartridge was used to shut down machines and tally the final vote, votes had to be retrieved from the hard drives of the machines they were cast on.
All but a handful of those machines were retrieved Saturday and Sunday. Some machines were unavailable because they were locked up in schools and other polling places.
Typically, election equipment isn't picked up immediately after the election. The touch-screen machines are stored in hard plastic cases until they're retrieved by a trucking company the county hires to pick up the equipment.
Election officials would not say how many Broward precincts were reviewed over the weekend or how many machines had to be retrieved from polling places.
Unlike in Miami-Dade -- where election officials were forthcoming about the votes they retrieved throughout the day -- Broward's review process was largely secretive.
Oliphant's deputy supervisor, former Miami city clerk Walter Foeman, would answer few questions. Her spokesman, Riley, did not appear at the warehouse, either.
INFORMATION SCARCE
The only information came when reporters pressed workers as they left the main counting room in the warehouse. Workers were equally tight-lipped with monitors from Bill McBride's campaign and the state Republican Party.
On Sunday, some election workers were sent home midafternoon, but about 15 remained until they shut down for the evening at 5:30 p.m. No one is being paid overtime, one employee said. Instead, they are expected to take compensatory time after the election for the long hours they've put in the past several weeks.
''Too many hands, too many jobs, all the same job,'' said one worker, throwing up her hands in frustration as she walked through the warehouse Sunday afternoon. ``I've been in this organization 15 years, and I've never seen such a fiasco.''
Although Oliphant's employees toiled over the weekend, the embattled elections supervisor never visited the warehouse where about 24 people -- including her top lieutenants -- worked Saturday and Sunday.
Herald Capital Bureau chief Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.
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Federal Computer Week
Florida woes cast vote for caution
BY William Matthews
Sept. 13, 2002
The Florida voting fiasco of 2000 prompted the state to banish punch card ballots and their pesky paper chads, and buy $32 million worth of electronic voting machines.
The Florida voting fiasco of 2002 might prompt state officials to reassess their opinion of paper.
"There's a good lesson in Florida," said Stephen Ansolabehere, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. "Put a backup in place -- a paper ballot in case there is a problem."
On Sept. 10, thousands of Florida voters arrived at polling places to find new machines that wouldn't start, offered the wrong ballots, recorded the wrong votes or wouldn't record votes at all.
But the problems were more often blamed on human error and lack of training than on technology failures. So Florida's latest election troubles probably won't deter other states from switching to e-voting, election experts said.
"A lot of problems we heard about were poll workers being confused and unable to deal" with the new equipment, said Ansolabehere, a member of a voting technology project run by MIT and the California Institute of Technology. "Imagine a computer support staff that is all volunteer and mainly older people," he said.
Poll workers, particularly those in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, were stymied by troubles as ordinary as a nonworking electrical socket and tasks as arcane as inserting the correct definition card containing precinct data into touch-screen voting machines.
Hundreds of voters were turned away from Miami-Dade polling places because poll workers could not get electronic voting machines to boot up.
It was mostly a training problem, said Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, a Houston-based organization of state and local election officials. "My hunch is that the poll workers did not realize that it's not just a matter of turning the machines on." Depending on the type of machine, touch screens must be warmed up, precinct data must be loaded and vote recording devices must be inserted before voting can begin.
In addition to new voting machines, Florida poll workers had to cope with new election laws, new policies and procedures and new ballot designs, Lewis said. "When you've got that many changes, you're asking for chaos."
Florida wasn't the only state troubled by new technology.
In Montgomery County, Md., when the new electronic system balked, poll workers drove computer memory cards -- and results tabulated on paper -- to the election headquarters, said Robert Ritchie, director of the Maryland-based Center for Voting and Democracy.
Similar troubles were reported in North Carolina.
Ritchie attributes the troubles to multiple sources: Voting machine vendors are overextended and cannot provide adequate support. States and localities are suffering from the economic recession and lack money for training. And a House and Senate deadlock over election reform legislation keeps $3 billion unavailable to the states, he said.
But not everybody had problems with electronic voting, Lewis noted.
While the two counties struggled, 65 other Florida counties conducted relatively trouble-free elections, he said. And voters generally like the new machines. "There are all kinds of really positive comments from voters," Lewis said.
Two types of machines dominate electronic voting -- touch screens and optical scanners. Touch screens feature greater flexibility, making it easier to offer foreign language ballots and accessibility features for people with disabilities, Ritchie said.
But optical scanner machines offer the security of a paper ballot that can be counted by hand if the technology fails, Ansolabehere said.
Florida's troubles probably will make election officials more circumspect about the equipment they buy, but the switch to electronic voting machines will go on, experts agreed. California, for one, is under court order to replace its punch card machines, and New York is pondering touch screens, Ansolabehere said.
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Los Angeles Times
Computer Voting: Florida's System Highlights Glitches
September 16 2002
Gosh, everyone is so surprised at the latest Florida election fiasco ("Florida Vote Foul-Up Puts Reform Onus on Congress," Sept. 12). For hundreds of years, little pieces of paper with holes punched in them have had a pretty good record of providing pretty accurate results in thousands of polling places in thousands of elections. No system being perfect, "design flaws" may have caused problems in a handful of locations over the centuries. And yes, we all know of one possible biggie in that department--out of billions of "beta tests" of paper ballots.
But if anyone thinks that going high-tech is going to prevent or lessen this type of glitch, that person has never had a computer crash in the middle of a sentence, called a company for information only to be told the system is down, had a computer file lost in cyberspace or spent two lovely hours with tech support. Did people really think that having computers at polling places would solve the problems? Will California rethink the plan on spending hundreds of millions of dollars to follow Florida's latest lead?
David Goodwin
Los Angeles
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Spectrum Online
When Humans are The Moth in the Machine
October 2, 2002
Last month, in an attempt to banish the ghosts of elections past, the state of Florida rolled out tens of millions of dollars' worth of shiny new electronic voting equipment.
But rather than the exorcism that officials were hoping for, they got a séance. Instead of hanging chads and incomprehensible ballots, voters got touch-screen-based systems that crashed and froze.
A humiliating indictment of electronic voting? Not really. For while it did raise some of the big issues surrounding electronic voting—security and auditability [see "A Better Ballot Box?"]—the main culprit in Florida was old-fashioned human folly. The episode confirmed once again that common sense is never common, particularly when it comes to the procurement and deployment of new technology by government entities great and small.
Any IT manager worth her Porsche will tell you that putting a new networked electronic system of any sort and size into play requires systems management. Lots of it. Unlike rusty old polling booths, electronic voting systems can't simply be dragged into high school gymnasiums and put to work. They have to be thoroughly tested and monitored, debugged, and optimized—in short, professionally supported. The people who supervise their use have to be trained, and trained well, preferably more than a few hours before the voting begins. Whose idea was it that largely untrained, volunteer poll workers would suddenly be able to troubleshoot these sophisticated electronic devices on the fly? Was everyone involved unfamiliar with the terms "systems failure" and "operator error"?
There has also been some whining about the manufacturers' refusal to allow their machines and software to be scrutinized. To which we reply: whine away. But the next time you put nice, big, fat government contracts out for electronic voting systems, don't give those contracts to manufacturers who do substandard work and don't meet your project specifications, who refuse to allow adequate inspections of their machines and installation procedures, and who don't provide adequate tech support. And don't buy stuff in a mad rush just so you can say that you did, hoping to ward off, in this case, the blizzard of bad publicity that would have surrounded any decision to stick with the infamous butterfly ballots and bent punch cards.
A decade ago, when people began to imagine in earnest how electronic information devices would impact the election process, most of the speculation was optimistic. People foresaw the beginning of digital democracy, of a re-engaged citizenry (particularly in the United States) for whom civic responsibility and political discourse would take on renewed importance. Everyone, not just the stalwart few, would vote on matters of local and national significance. Such hopes should not be abandoned because some officials in Florida made bad decisions about technology deployment.
When the smoke clears, we might even be grateful that these election follies have reminded us yet again about a systems-management truism: people can be as big a bug as any software glitch when it comes to getting a new technology to work properly.
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Government Computer News
Election reform deal would send billions to states
By Wilson P. Dizard III
October 8, 2002
A long-awaited compromise over election reform procedures appears to have formed in a Congressional conference committee, and $3.8 billion in federal funds for new election technology could be on its way to states soon.
The legislation to overhaul election procedures, known as the Help America Vote Act (HR 3295), has been stalled for months as Senate Democrats and House Republicans sought a compromise over its antifraud provisions and other sections.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), chairmen of the conference committee, announced Friday that the panel had agreed on the outlines of a compromise. Conference committee staff members were compiling the details of the compromise this afternoon.
The outline of the compromise includes:
More than $3.7 billion in direct aid to states to improve federal election processes
Creation of an Election Assistance Commission to issue voluntary guidelines for voting systems
Antifraud provisions requiring positive identification and accurate voter lists
Provisional balloting procedures to allow voting while disputes are resolved
Improved voting access for the disabled, including more than $100 million in physical access grants
New voting procedures for military and overseas voters
Criminal penalties for vote fraud.
The original election reform bills passed each chamber by wide margins. The two lawmakers praised the compromise as bipartisan and bicameral.
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Federal Computer Week
Bill casts out old voting machines
BY William Matthews
Oct. 22, 2002
Each state is guaranteed at least $5 million to buy new voting machines and improve voting procedures, and some will receive considerably more from a $3.9 billion election reform bill Congress passed before members went home to run for re-election.
The law targets punch card and lever voting machines for elimination, earmarking $325 million for "buying out" those machines over the next three years. Problem-plagued punch cards, with their troublesome chads, were at the center of the disputed 2000 presidential election.
"This legislation will help America move beyond the days of hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and illegal purges of voters and accusations of voter fraud," said Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), who sponsored the bill in the Senate.
Another $325 million is intended to improve election administration, and at least that much is expected to be doled out to states for developing computerized statewide databases to improve the accuracy of voter registration rolls.
The registration systems are expected to be able to compare voter registration data against other government databases, such as state driver's license databases, Social Security data and other electronic identification information, said Doug Lewis, director of the Texas-based Election Center, an association for election officials.
The computerized registration systems, which are to be in place in 2006, should substantially improve the integrity of voter rolls by keeping legitimate voters on the rolls, removing ineligible or deceased voters and making it possible to instantly check identifications, Lewis said.
By providing funding for new voting equipment and better registration systems, Congress hopes "to make certain votes are counted properly and to make voter fraud more difficult," said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) Lugar was instrumental in including the provision for computerized voter registration systems in the bill.
Lawmakers set aside another $100 million to be used by states to ensure that at least one voting machine per precinct can be used by people with disabilities. That probably means buying electronic touch screen voting machines, which for now are the most accessible type, Lewis said.
The election reform law allots $20 million for developing new voting technology and $10 million for testing it. And it calls for more education for voters, poll workers and election officials. Lewis said some money should be spent to study how people learn so that more effective brief training courses can be developed for voters and poll workers.
But the bulk of the $3.9 billion will probably be spent on new voting machines, Lewis said. "There's no question the nation has too much antiquated voting equipment."
The bill awaits President Bush to sign it into law.
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Washington Post
Voting Machines Can't Help Disabled
Lack of Staff Leaves New Technology Unusable for Now
By David Nakamura
Thursday, October 24, 2002; Page DZ03
Advocates for the disabled had hoped to unveil high-tech machines in the general election to make voting easier for District residents who are blind or have limited hand dexterity. But that will have to wait.
The 150 machines, costing $1.2 million, are in place. Volunteers needed to operate the equipment are not.
Several advocacy groups were supposed to recruit the volunteers under a court settlement this year of a lawsuit brought by the groups against the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics. The suit alleged that the city's current balloting system requires many disabled people to have assistance in the voting booth, denying them the right to cast ballots in private.
The city bought the machines, about 30 of which were used in demonstrations during the September primary elections. The machines were demonstrated more widely -- at all 140 polling places -- for the general election Nov. 5, but the advocacy groups could not find enough volunteers to run them, officials said.
So the machines will sit dormant this year. They are scheduled to be used for actual voting in the presidential primary of May 2004.
"We weren't able to reach as many people as we'd hoped," said Linda Royster, executive director of the Disability Rights Council of Greater Washington. "We're unable to pull together enough volunteers to make the demos worthwhile. The board will not assist or provide us with the people. To be fair, it's not malicious on their part. They just don't have the people."
Under the court settlement, which affects more than 16,000 District voters, the city was not required to recruit volunteers or train them for a demonstration next month, city officials said.
However, the city will be responsible for recruiting and training in 2004. Board of Elections spokesman Bill O'Field said city officials will try to demonstrate and publicize the new machines before the 2004 primaries.
Using them, voters who can see but cannot read or write English will receive audio instructions and make selections by touching a screen on a desktop-size computer that can handle as many as five languages. Sight-impaired voters or those with limited hand movement will receive audio instructions and make their selections by pushing a button on a separate electronic box attached to the computer.
Royster said her organization and the American Association of People With Disabilities, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, could not offer a stipend to volunteers this November. In contrast, the city will pay poll workers a $100 daily stipend.
"Oh, how I wish," Royster said. "We are a very small nonprofit. We don't have that kind of money."
Board of Elections officials said they will pay workers a stipend to operate the new machines in 2004 but cannot afford a demonstration next month.
"We have always been on the same page," said Kenneth McGhie, general counsel to the elections board. "We wanted further [voter] participation. To that extent, [the new machines] are what we both wanted. The only thing we ever disagreed on was the timing. The timing was a problem because we do not have enough money."
Royster said that both nonprofit organizations asked members to volunteer but that many people said they were too busy. She said she does not foresee a problem getting the machines running by the 2004 primary.
The District will be the nation's only jurisdiction to use both the optical-scan voting and computerized systems. The city replaced its punch-card system with optical-scan balloting last year.
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Dallas Morning News
[TX] County tries to prevent more ballot problems
Working to reduce the margin for early-voting error
Controversy over touch-screen machines still a partisan wedge
By ED HOUSEWRIGHT Staff Writer
Published October 24, 2002
Dallas County elections officials implemented safeguards Wednesday to address complaints that some ballots cast in early voting this week weren't being counted accurately.
The changes occurred amid escalating bickering between county Democratic and Republican leaders. The two sides met for more than four hours Wednesday - along with officials from the elections department and the voting machine company - and traded accusations of partisan strong-arming.
Bruce Sherbet, county elections administrator, said he didn't think any votes had been lost or miscounted.
Eighteen of more than 400 electronic voting machines were pulled out of service after early voting began Monday. Some voters complained that they selected one candidate but that the touch-screen machine marked a different candidate.
Mr. Sherbet said signs were placed in all 24 early-voting locations Wednesday urging voters to double-check the electronic ballots to make sure they accurately reflected their choices.
In addition, election judges will test each of the more than 400 voting machines before the polls open each day, and more checks are being done throughout each day, Mr. Sherbet said.
Finally, extra election workers have been hired to assist voters who might worry that their votes aren't being properly counted.
"The complaints dropped off pretty dramatically today," Susan Hays, chairwoman of the Dallas County Democratic Party, said Wednesday. "That tells me some of the procedures Sherbet put into place are really working."
Republican leaders accused Democrats of exaggerating the problems with the machines to discourage early voting and help their candidates. Early voting continues through Nov. 1. Early-voting totals won't be released until after the Nov. 5 election.
Democrats said that more than 60 voters complained this week that they tried to select a Democratic candidate, but that their vote registered a Republican candidate. Some Republicans also have complained that the machines incorrectly cast their votes beside a Democratic candidate, Democratic leaders said.
Republican leaders, however, said they were skeptical of the Democrats' assertions. Only one voter has complained to Republican headquarters that a vote wasn't registered as intended, said Nate Crain, chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party.
"We have full confidence in the early-voting system," he said.
Democratic Party leaders said more changes are necessary, though. They said they may ask a judge Thursday for permission to test the accuracy of the ballot machines.
On Tuesday, Democrats asked a state district judge to halt early voting. But they withdrew the request and said they would meet Wednesday with Republicans, elections officials and officials from Election Systems & Software, the Nebraska company that makes the touch screen ballots.
Mr. Sherbet said problems were reported in seven to 10 polling places, although Democrats said the number could be as high as 16. He said technicians were able to "recalibrate 15 of the 18 machines taken out of service and return them to use. The other three were replaced, he said.
"Every election, we have machines that have to be recalibrated," Mr. Sherbet said. "Touch-screens have pluses and minuses.
"We want to be sure no votes are missed."
He emphasized that a voter's choice isn't immediately logged into a machine's memory when he or she selects a candidate in a particular race. The votes aren't counted until the voter reaches the end of the ballot and pushes a red button to indicate that he or she is finished.
There is time for a voter to change a selection if the machine makes a mark beside the wrong candidate, Mr. Sherbet said.
Officials with Electronic Systems & Software, the world's largest manufacturer of voting machines, defended their product Wednesday and said the problems being reported are minor.
"There are safeguards to let us detect this," said Ken Carbullido, senior vice president of software development. "We'd like to assure Dallas County that this is a solid process, and they can trust in the election."
The touch-screen machines have been used in more than 90 Dallas County elections in the past four years.
Isolated problems have occurred similar to the ones that occurred this week, Mr. Sherbet said.
The problem can occur after the machines are moved and locked up each night, he said. Pixels on the machines' screens get misaligned during jostling and do not properly read voters' selections. However, technicians can realign them within minutes, Mr. Sherbet said.
He said he's not inclined to scrap the electronic ballots.
"All large counties are going to electronic voting," Mr. Sherbet said.
The touch-screen system is not used on election days in Dallas County. Voters use a pen to fill in circles by candidates' names on paper ballots.
On Wednesday, the meeting among Democrats, Republicans, elections officials and company representatives broke up at one point amid partisan bickering.
Mike Atwood, executive director of the county Democratic Party, emerged from the closed-door meeting and told a large gathering of reporters that he wanted to demonstrate the problems with a voting machine. But before he could, Dallas County Commissioner Jim Jackson, a longtime Republican, stepped up to reporters and said, "Let me tell you what the truth is."
He said the problems being alleged are isolated and no more than occur in every election. Voters are reporting the problems as they occur and being directed to machines that are working properly, Mr. Jackson said.
"I think you will find that any person with any intelligence can vote accurately in Dallas County," he said.
Later, Mr. Sherbet showed reporters a defective voting machine and demonstrated how it incorrectly registered a vote. When he selected a box beside a candidate's name on the screen, a check mark appeared next to the name of the candidate above that one.
Staff writer Tim Wyatt contributed to this report.
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Associated Press
Bush to Sign Voting Revamp Bill
1 hour, 24 minutes ago
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ, Associated Press Writer
October 29, 2002
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush (news - web sites) is signing legislation to revamp the nation's voting system and protect against the kinds of errors that threw his own election into dispute two years ago.
The White House scheduled a morning bill-signing ceremony for Tuesday, starting Bush's two-day respite from campaigning for GOP House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates in next Tuesday's elections.
Under the Martin Luther King Jr. Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act of 2002, states will receive $3.9 billion in federal money over the next three years to replace outdated punch-card and lever voting machines or improve voter education and poll-worker training.
The new law's protections against voting error will not affect next week's balloting but are scheduled to be mostly implemented in time for the 2004 congressional and presidential vote, which will most likely include Bush's re-election bid.
It was Bush's bitter 2000 Florida recount battle with Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites) — with its confusing "butterfly ballots," half-perforated punch ballots and allegations of voter intimidation — that gave rise to the legislation. Bush's election was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.
The House approved election changes late last year and the Senate followed suit in April, but Republican demands for strong anti-fraud provisions stalled reconciliation of the two versions for months. Lawmakers did not send a final bill to Bush until last Wednesday.
"This has been a long marathon, but the finish line is finally in sight and the winner is the American public," said Senate Rules Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. "This landmark legislation will ensure that everyone not only has the right to vote on Election Day, but that their voice is heard."
Beginning Jan. 1, first-time voters who registered by mail will be required to provide identification when they show up at the polls.
By the 2004 vote, states will be required to provide provisional ballots to voters whose names do not appear on voter rolls. Those provisional ballots would counted once valid registration is verified.
For 2006 balloting, states will be required to maintain computerized, statewide voter registration lists linked to their driver's license databases. States will also be required to have voting machines that allow voters to confirm the way they marked their ballot — and, if necessary, change their votes — before they are finally cast.
Such voting software was tested in one jurisdiction in the 2001 Virginia gubernatorial election. The Century Foundation, which reviewed the results, found that the "lost vote" rate went from between 600-700 votes in the 2000 election to just one vote in 2001, said Tova Andrea Wang, a staffer to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform who later oversaw the foundation's study.
"The bill goes a long way toward addressing a lot of the problems, but the extent to which the bill works relies on what the states do because they are given a lot of discretion," said Wang.
"A new polling machine is fine and great as long as people know how to use it, and there's no specificity in the legislation on poll-worker training and voter education."
Wang and other election experts also worry that discriminatory enforcement of the voter-ID requirements could especially disenfranchise minorities, the poor, immigrants and students. She called the provision "something that may have to be revisited."
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Houston Chronicle
New voting tools make Texas a place to watch
eSlate draws attention of national monitors
By CYNTHIA LEE
October 31, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Wariness over Harris County's new electronic voting system has helped land Texas on a list of states a national group will monitor on Election Day.
The Washington-based Election Reform Information Project said Texas drew its attention because it will be the first time the eSlate electronic device will be used by so many voters.
"A lot of people will be watching to see what happens in Harris County, to see how those machines work ... when a very large jurisdiction switches from a punch-card machine to a much more modern machine," said Dan Seligson, whose nonpartisan group is affiliated with the University of Richmond.
The group said concerns about touch-screen voting machines in Dallas and problems related to the design of the ballot in Bexar County also made Texas a place to watch.
Election administration is changing rapidly across the country as jurisdictions seek to comply with a new law that requires electronic voting technology to be implemented by November 2004. States and municipalities looking to buy new voting machines also will be watching to see how new devices, such as eSlate, perform on Election Day.
Harris County has spent $25 million to buy 8,170 of the eSlate devices, which are about the size of legal pads. Voters turn a knob on the side to highlight their preferred candidates on a screen and push buttons to make their choices.
The new technology has worked fine during early voting, said David Beirne, spokesman for the Harris County elections office. He said the county has taken several steps to prevent any problems Election Day, including making video instruction available at the polling stations, training polling staff and launching an aggressive information outreach campaign.
Former Harris County election administrator Tony Sirvello agreed that systematic steps were taken to phase eSlate in, but he said some problems would be unavoidable.
"Most people in everyday life are so busy ... that they're not conscious of the voting process until it's actually right upon them," he said.
An official at the Houston-based Election Center, a professional organization made up of election administration employees, said a new voting system usually must go through three major elections before the voters get used to it.
"Most of these (old) voting systems last in jurisdictions for 25 or 30 years. By the time you get around to replacing them, you've really got to go through a fairly substantial learning curve," said Doug Lewis.
But he predicted the election in Harris County should go pretty well.
"You might have a hiccup here or there," Lewis said. "But the truth is, elections in America are under a microscope as a result of Election 2000, we're paying far more attention to it than in previous years."
In Dallas, 30 of the 400 touch-screen machines -- an older generation of election technology -- have been pulled from use in early voting after complaints that some machines had not accurately displayed voter selections for candidates.
Safeguards were put in place by election officials when the Dallas County Democratic Party said last week it intended to file a lawsuit over the complaints.
Election administrator Bruce Sherbet said any machine showing the slightest sign of a problem would be taken out of use and that all machines are being checked and recalibrated at least once a day, more than in other elections.
"This election is incredibly close and high-strung down here, more than I've seen in two decades," he said. "So we put in a bunch of different safeguards before voters would be confronted with this."
The Democrats are now appealing a state district court judge's dismissal of a lawsuit that asked that the machines be audited independently.
"We wanted to test those machines before early voting ended just to make sure ballots weren't being miscast," said Susan Hays, the party chairman.
State District Judge Karen Johnson threw out the suit because she said her jurisdiction did not include election procedures, which are under the supervision of the county elections administrator.
In San Antonio, Bexar County officials redesigned the election ballot after both major political parties and the League of United Latin American