Touch screen system catapults election division into 21st century

On Tuesday night, things were pretty quiet at the Kern County Elections Division.

No boxes of ballots were being lugged in, as in past years. There were no IBM counting machines reading reams of punch cards. No stressed -out reporters were anxiously waiting to get the results in time for the next newspaper edition or television broadcast.

That’s because the county has an entirely new voting system involving touch screens, electronic transmission, and instantaneous results.

In the wake of the Florida punchcard debacle during the 2000 presidential election, the county began to switch to the new touch screen voting machines a year ago after a state law mandated it.

March 2 was first the election in county history to take place without a single punchcard machine, according to Auditor/Controller-County Registrar Ann Barnett.

“This is the first time that we’ve done this county wide,” she said, adding that it will take awhile to work out some of the glitches that surfaced on Tuesday.

Printing and booting problems were created when the machines were knocked around in transit, causing delays in getting some polling places up and running in the morning.

“That was something that caused a little panic the first 15 minutes,” Barnett said.

She said there were no major problems to report, although Scott Valline, information systems specialist for the county, had to interrupt a later interview with The Rip to deal with a website crash apparently caused by too many people trying to access the numbers.

The totals were sent to the office over secure phone lines from twelve machine collection sites. They were then posted online and updated every 15 minutes.

The new system was designed to eliminate the confusion and uncertainty of the old punchcard ballots. If a voter didn’t push hard enough on the punch lever, or if it wasn’t oiled properly, the result might be that the vote wouldn’t be recorded.

Barnett said that county never experienced anything like the problems seen in Florida.

“We serviced the punches before every election, ” she said, adding that the only problem was that the counting machines were hard to calibrate.

The touch screen system seems well-designed to eliminate the possibility of fraudulent counts. Before ever arriving at the polling place, officials make sure the machines have a “zero” vote count and then seal them completely, according to Valline. Once the touch screens reach the polling stations, the machines are rezeroed the night before the election, and those seals are then broken on election morning, when four poll workers must print the zero vote count on tickertape and sign it. They then lock up the machine until the polls close, at which time they print out the vote totals.

According to Valline, a person intent on changing the count would have to “physically destroy the machine,” because the totals are recorded on paper, removable memory cards and the hard drives themselves.

Valline broke off the interview at this point to get the crashing county website back online.

That was the only real excitement of the evening. A few computer technicians worked to fix the website in an office adjacent to the now empty punchcard counting room.

The few observers there to make sure everything was on the up-and-up looked bored as they watched three people working at a computer behind plate glass.

Shanna Davis, a 21-year-old Taft college student who was there to make sure that the memory cards came in, said this was her fourth year volunteering.

“I just like working here because I like the people,” she said, adding that “being patriotic” was also a motivation.