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McCormick interested in new electronic poll booksOct 23, 2009 (The Charleston Gazette - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Click here to watch a video about the Electric Voter Identification system. CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick is interested in purchasing new machines to make it easier to process voters at the precinct and cut down on the number of provisional ballots cast during elections. The Electric Voter Identification system, or EViD, is a computer program that makes it easy to identify active and inactive voters by name, address and birth date, said Mike Sibley, president of Secure Elections Management for Charlotte, N.C.-based Decision Support. The firm makes the EViD, which also is called an electronic poll book, or E-Poll. At a local polling place, a poll worker can easily identify if a voter is in the wrong precinct, and EViD alerts the voter to his or her correct precinct. Today, poll workers still sift through the bulky poll books that list precinct voters by name. The EViD does not replace electronic voting machines, just the check-in process at the poll books on election days. "Your lines will disappear with this at the check-in," Sibley said Thursday. Gary Greenhalgh, an election consultant from Slatyfork, said the objective is to process voters more quickly and help eliminate the hassles involved with researching information for each provisional ballot, which often plays a big role in tight races. The machines leave a paper trail of ballots cast, and also have a feature where poll workers can compare a voter's previous signature with the signature they cast in person on a touch-screen monitor. To see more of The Charleston Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.wvgazette.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Charleston Gazette, W.Va. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |