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Tuesday's paper ballots will be counted by hand
[November 06, 2011]

Tuesday's paper ballots will be counted by hand


Nov 06, 2011 (Herald-Times - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- When Bloomington residents vote in municipal elections on Tuesday, they'll be making marks on paper ballots, which they'll slip into a box. At the end of the day, the votes will be tallied by hand.



That's the same system local voters used more than 100 years ago.

In the November 2010 general election, Monroe County voters used electronic voting machines that automated tallying.


Even in the May 2011 primary election, the votes -- on paper ballots -- were tallied using a high-speed optical scanner.

Monroe County voters have been using voting machines, mechanical or electric, since the '60s, but on Nov. 8, 2011, they will use the same system used by America's founding fathers.

What happened? ES&S contract In December 2010, Monroe County signed a contract with Elections Systems and Software, of Omaha, Neb., for the purchase of digital scanners that would read paper ballots and tally votes. Such a system allowed verifiability: paper ballots, or a sample of them, could be compared to the machine's tally to ensure accuracy.

That decision came on the recommendation of a county Vote System Advisory Council, which had spent two years studying voting methods, procedures and available equipment.

County commissioners agreed to pay $951,827 for 69 DS200 scanners, 69 AutoMARK voter assist terminals, and support services, such as training and maintenance.

"This gets us what we wanted, which is a real, verifiable paper ballot," Commissioner Mark Stoops said at the time.

Commissioners agreed to reduce that bill to $709,637 by trading in the 250 no-longer-usable MicroVote 464 machines and 150 MicroVote Infinity units they owned.

The Infinity machines were still certified and usable by voters with disabilities.

Commissioners, the county election board and newly elected Monroe County Clerk Linda Robbins expected the new machines to be ready for use in this year's May 3 primary election.

On Jan. 12, the last of the old voting machines was shipped off to ES&S, opening up storage space in the Justice Building for the new machines, which were to be delivered March 4.

Certification problems According to minutes from the March 11 Monroe County commissioners meeting, county attorney Kevin Dogan told the commissioners that about three weeks earlier, on Feb. 22, Robbins got a phone call informing her that the Indiana state Election Commission had met the previous day and had raised concerns about some models of ES&S voting equipment, including machines the county had agreed to purchase.

"Certain glitches had come up," Dogan said, and the state commission was considering decertifying the equipment.

"If they decertify the equipment, we can't use it for elections," he said.

"I immediately contacted the company representative, the vice president who negotiated the contract with us, and told him that we needed to have a plan in place to deal with this potential decertification, which was going to be back on the agenda for the Indiana Election Commission at its March 14th meeting," Dogan told the commissioners.

Contract amended Dogan presented the commissioners with an amendment to the contract with ES&S that required the company to provide alternate, fully certified equipment for the upcoming primary election at no charge to the county.

The contract amendment also provided that if the decertification issue was not resolved before the 2011 general election, ES&S would again provide other equipment to the county at no charge.

The amended contract also gave the county an out: if the decertification issue wasn't resolved by Aug. 1, the contract could be terminated.

"That is an option we could have from Aug. 1st until the end of the year. We could wait until after the general election if we chose," the minutes show Dogan telling the county commissioners.

No certification The state election commission failed to certify the ES&S machines at its March 14 meeting, so ES&S came through with one high-speed digital optical scanner, which was used to process paper ballots after the May 3 election.

All three members of the Monroe County Election Board, Democrats Robbins and Jan Ellis and Republican Judith Smith-Ille, agreed that the election and vote tallying were smooth and efficient.

On Sept. 9, Dogan told the county commissioners that the state election commission still had not certified the ES&S machines, and he recommended terminating the contract.

"We allowed ES&S to take the old machines," said commissioner Iris Kiesling. "Do we have access to the old machines, or are they gone?" Dogan answered that he was in discussion with the company regarding the equipment.

"It would be anticipated that we'd get old equipment back," Dogan said, noting that their status and location was unknown.

Clerk Robbins said terminating the contract would mean hand counting paper ballots for the Nov. 8 election, but "I believe we can handle this for this election because it's small, and we anticipate small turnout." Monroe County Commissioners Stoops, Patrick Stoffers and Kiesling voted unanimously to terminate the county's contract with ES&S.

Dogan began negotiations with Hart Intercivic, another manufacturer of paper ballot voting machines that the Vote System Advisory Council recommended in its request for proposals process in 2010.

Timing Why did the commissioners terminate the contract with ES&S on Sept. 9 rather than waiting until after the general election? Dogan, the county attorney primarily involved in negotiations and contracts with voting machine manufacturers, was out of town and unavailable to answer that question for this story, but county attorney Jeff Cockerill said it was a matter of timing.

If the county planned to purchase new equipment from Hart for 2012 elections, it needed to place an order by Nov. 1, a week before the general elections. "We have a time line that required us to begin action to find an alternative," Cockerill said Friday.

"When the termination occurred, we were going to have to hustle in order to get the equipment in time for next year's election," he said.

The county could not ethically maintain a contract with ES&S through Nov. 8, knowing it intended to terminate it, and simultaneously negotiate a deal with a different voting machine manufacturer.

That left the county with no contract, and no ballot scanner lined up for elections two months away And those voting machines the county still owns, but handed over to ES&S, some of which were still usable? "The old machines are being held hostage," Robbins said Friday.

"We would have said don't give them the machines if we had got a call from the state sooner. That's a no-brainer. It really was a timing issue," she said.

Subsequently, Hart Intercivic has pushed the due date for an order to mid-November, and now, early December, while the county decides whether to order equipment to serve 81 precincts or a smaller number of vote centers.

If the county had made a decision about vote centers sooner, it might have had time to arrange for a ballot scanner in time for Nov. 8 elections.

Paper ballots, hand counted So on Nov. 8, Bloomington voters will use paper ballots that will be hand-counted, a primitive method of voting, but one not everyone thinks is such a bad way to go.

Retired IU psychology professor Jim Allison, who served on the Vote System Advisory Council, thinks paper ballots that are hand counted is the "gold standard" for accountability and verifiability.

"There's been a hue and cry nationwide about the weaknesses of direct recording electronic machines," he said, adding that such machines have proven to be easily hacked to manipulate elections, unreliable and useless for verifying vote counts.

Electronic machines provide no independent way of counting votes, no method for an accurate audit, he said.

"The general consensus is that the independent thing is the paper ballot that can be counted by hand and compared to totals counted with a machine scanner," Allison said.

He said the use of paper ballots is a growing trend, sweeping the country.

"We're not against voting machines. They can help to conduct an election and make it more efficient, but they need to be audited," he said. "You just have to have paper ballots to have meaningful audit." Allison helped design the labor-intensive vote counting system that will be used Tuesday evening.

He's confident that the results will be accurate because of bipartisan cross-checking throughout the process. He was optimistic after a dry run of the counting system Friday.

"I have great confidence in numbers we are producing. We made errors, but we saw them and corrected them. It is subject to human error, but it's also subject to corrective procedures. I think we'll get an accurate count," he said.

County Clerk Robbins said she is confident voting and vote counting will go smoothly. She said voters used paper ballots during the May primaries, and everything ran well.

Regarding counting the votes, "this time it is more complicated once it gets here," she said. Still, she's confident that process will be accurate and verifiable.

___ (c)2011 the Herald-Times (Bloomington, Ind.) Visit the Herald-Times (Bloomington, Ind.) at www.heraldtimesonline.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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