Easy Fixes for Election System

This may be mostly an off-election year, but Orange County election officials are busy setting up for 2002 and beyond.

The ballot-counting controversy in Florida last fall prompted states and counties across the nation to analyze their vote-tallying systems to be sure they weren’t vulnerable to the same kind of fiasco.

California’s power crisis seems to have diverted the Legislature’s interest. Surplus funds have been going to buy electricity rather than new voting equipment. Still, the issue of improving the vote-counting system is still very much alive in Orange County.

Several extensive studies by county committees are evaluating new tallying systems on the market and in development, the county’s existing system and support system changes needed to improve election day performance.

And about two weeks ago, the Orange County Grand Jury released the findings of its own study. Perhaps to the surprise of some in this era of high-tech solutions, it cautioned against doing away with the present punch-card method of casting ballots.

Grand jurors in November visited precincts, interviewed poll workers, watched the tallying system count ballots and concluded that most of the problems in that election can be corrected without buying new tabulating technology. So, jurors reasoned, why junk a system that works well for a new one that could cost as much as $50 million?

Instead, the panel sensibly proposed using a touch-screen system on a small scale as a test. If it proves effective, the county could put it in selected precincts and buy it for the entire system over time.

The touch-screen drew considerable interest in November when it was used by neighboring Riverside County. It works like a bank ATM, allowing voters to cast their ballots by placing their finger on a video display. So it would be a familiar process for voters whose ATMs work that way. It also could save millions in ballot printing and personnel costs.

But it does have shortcomings that eventually could be overcome. For one thing, some public officials and poll watchers are leery of any system that doesn’t have a paper trail for recounting ballots. Also, the touch system would require a second system to handle the absentee ballots that are growing in number each election year.

Florida, which last month decided to outlaw punch card ballots and enact a single statewide system, has left open the option to use touch-screen voting, but is also considering optical scanners that tally the count as votes are cast and provide quick election results.

Speedy counts are always wanted, not only by the news media reporting results but by voters who want to know the impact of their choice sooner than sometime the next day. Speed, however, is one feature that none of Orange County’s tallying systems has ever produced.

But accuracy, not speed, must be the key component in any voting system. The glitches in November’s election were correctable ones having nothing to do with the actual vote count.

Thousands of absentee ballots were sent late. Some precincts didn’t open on time, and others ran out of ballots. In some precincts, workers were unable to assist non-English-speaking voters, and one candidate’s party designation was mislabeled on the ballot.

Those were errors caused by a short-handed office, operating with a staff that shrunk about 30% after the 1994 county bankruptcy, trying to cope with increasing numbers of registered voters and absentee-ballot requests. In that election Orange County’s voting registration department was serving nearly twice the number of voters as Santa Clara County did with the same number of employees. The grand jury noted that “the department has operated . . . on a ‘shoestring’ budget . . . with minimal staff” since the bankruptcy.

County supervisors have started making some of the needed changes that don’t really require high-tech solutions. The board has approved a new computer-based voter tracking system. It also should give the county registrar of voters the additional staff needed to prepare efficiently for a smooth election process, and be sure that there are bilingual precinct workers available to assist voters.

Those improvement can be made easily in time for next year’s primary. Decisions on the purchase, testing or phasing in of any improved technology to replace the present punch cards should be made in enough time to ensure that an accurate, fast, secure and economical vote-tallying system is in place by the 2004 presidential primary. Any voter anxiety on election day should be centered on who gets elected, not on whether the counting system will work.