New election
systems caused
many problems
The difficulties occurred nationwide
By Craig Gima
with the unfamiliar machines
Star-BulletinA new election system is introduced on short notice with promises of faster returns and greater efficiency.
Instead, results are delayed and problems crop up because voters and poll workers are not familiar with the new ballots and machines.
Sound familiar?
It's happening all over the country.
In Rhode Island, primary election results were delayed until 11 a.m. the next day because of a computer glitch in its new $1 million system.
Detroit's new $4 million system did not get unofficial returns until the next afternoon, and it took two weeks for the results to be certified because inadequately trained election workers did not know how to use the new machines.
General election returns in Dallas had to be recounted after 41,015 votes were initially missed because of software problems in their $3.8 million system.
Hawaii's problems included an absentee-vote-counting machine that could not read pen marks, trouble feeding ballots into precinct machines, some mechanical breakdowns and an increase in spoiled ballots because people voted in more than one party during the primary.
The difficulties encountered by jurisdictions switching to new election systems prompted the Federal Elections Commission to come out with a report for election officials to help them select new systems.
"Anything that Hawaii looked at or faced is probably not out of the ordinary for what other jurisdictions have faced," said Penelope Bonsall of the Federal Election Commission Clearinghouse.
The most common problem, Bonsall said, is that officials purchase and upgrade a system without sufficient time to implement it properly before an election.
Election officials also have to negotiate the amount of support the company will provide before, during and after an election.
"These are all real standard complaints when you convert systems. These are things you have to attend to, things you have to plan for," she said. "Certainly something gives when you do it rapidly."
The state's decision to replace the old punch-card system with optical scanners where voters use pencils or markers to mark their ballots is part of a trend in elections.
"More and more jurisdictions are doing so because their equipment is getting too old," said R. Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, a national organization for the improvement of voter registration and elections administration.
"Do you repair or replace all of the equipment that you've got? Why not go to the newer technology?"
No one keeps statistics on voting systems or the number of jurisdictions that are changing. But Election Systems & Software, the company that received a $1.67 million contract to provide the new election system to Hawaii, sold or leased new optical scanning systems to jurisdictions across the county, including Rhode Island, Detroit and Dallas. A competitor, Global Election Systems, had 30 large jurisdictions move to optical scanning systems this year.
Not all jurisdictions had problems with the switch. In Alaska, where some precincts still count ballots by hand, officials said they had a good experience with their system during the primary. Alaska purchased their system just four months before the Aug. 26 primary, but there were few problems reported and 90 percent of the returns were counted by 9 p.m., an hour after the polls closed.
The primary in Hawaii was the first major test of the ES&S Model 100 precinct counter. Tom Eschberger, an ES&S vice president, said no matter how much testing new equipment goes through, problems surface.
"I have yet to see one that was perfect out of the box," he said.
Dallas also purchased the ES&S Model 100 but did not use it in the primary election. Instead, officials there used the machine in several smaller elections before the general on Nov. 3.
"We chose what we thought was the best system, but we also knew going into it that the first generation doesn't always have all the bugs worked out," said Bruce Sherbet, Dallas County Elections administrator, before the general election.
After Nov. 3, Sherbet was quoted in the Dallas Morning News as saying, "In 17 years of doing this, there's been nothing more troublesome to me, more humiliating."
Bonsall said, "There are a whole bunch of things that go wrong and a whole bunch of things that can go right in any election no matter what the system."
In Detroit, officials spent $100,000 on television advertising to educate voters on how to fill out the new ballots. Most voters apparently understood how to mark their ballots, officials said, but they also admitted they did not do enough to train the election workers, and that's where problems occured.
One of the major reasons Detroit switched to a new system was to cut down on the number of people whose ballots were disqualified because they voted for candidates in more than one party during a primary or for too many candidates in an election.
In previous elections, about 36,000 ballots were spoiled because of cross-party voting or over-voting. The new precinct scanners were able to detect mistakes in 46,000 ballots and give those voters a chance to cast a new ballot.
"I'm sure we did prevent some candidates from losing that would have lost otherwise," said Gloria Williams, the county's director of elections.
In contrast, the primary election in Hawaii saw an increase in the number of spoiled ballots - from 1,676 in 1996 to 8,021 this year - because of its new system.
Detroit also had problems with misplaced absentee ballots and a poorly designed paper ballot that allowed ink to soak through and affect races on the other side of the ballot.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel for jurisdictions that switch to new election systems, said Lewis. "There are so many variations or combinations of things that can go wrong on any voting system that you just have to learn what the potential problems are," he said. "The first one or two times is when you really learn your lessons and after that it all seems to go smoothly."
