No easy touch for 134 voters in Broward [Florida voters can't find touch screen]

Three years after helping render punch-card voting systems obsolete, Broward County voters have proven that no election system is foolproof.

In Tuesday's special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate.

How so many happened to cast nonvotes remains a riddle. Unlike with punch cards or paper ballots, there's no paper record with electronic voting that might offer a clue to the voter's intent.

Changes to touch-screen machines proposed

The undervotes remained something of a puzzle Thursday. ES&S, which sold Broward County the $17.2 million touch-screen system, believes that some voters failed to push the ''vote'' button to record their choices. In that case, poll workers might have canceled the ballots by mistake. They are supposed to cast the ballots, creating a special electronic record.
Others, including several candidates, have theorized that Democrats who reached the polls decided not to cast a vote when they realized that only Republicans were on the ballot.
Undervotes are also possible when poll workers reset the machine after a voter error, or after initially choosing the wrong language for the voter.
Whatever the reason, the electronic machines do not provide a paper record that might offer a clue to the voter's intent.

The undervotes may remain a mystery, but they did lead to a major change in future Broward County elections. Voters will have a ''none of the above'' option that allows them to vote, without selecting a candidate.
It may not forestall recounts in close races, but it will help explain undervotes in the future, election officials said.

Human Error?

Out of the 10,845 votes in the election, 137 ballots with no candidate selected were cast on Tuesday using the touch-screen voting machinery -- all but three by Broward voters.
Another two people requested absentee ballots, signed them, had someone witness their signatures, placed stamps on the envelopes and dropped them in the mailbox and yet did not choose any candidate. Three more filled out the oval next to every candidate on their absentee ballot.
The blank ballots were not concentrated in any precinct, something that Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said would have been an indicator of a problem.

There are four kinds of touch screen in common use, Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW), Resistive, Capacitive, and Infrared. They all have their pluses and minuses, but in the early days of touch screens poor choices were made due to lack of understanding and budget constraints. For most major touch screen rollouts now they use technology that is pretty darn reliable.

With respect, altho there are now highly reliable touch-screens on the market, I will bet that a county confronted with buying a thousand or so terminals that are going to be used (on average) one day a year are gonna go for the absolute bottom of the line cheapest.

Thank God. This means there are actually objective standards the vote counters and courts will have a very hard time circumventing, and they'll be less likely to engage in the witchcraft of gtrying to determine unidentified persons' "intent.".

Until someone hacks the software and steals votes imperceptively, or a power outage or surge wipes out the days voting in a crucial district, etc etc. It would be nice to have a "plan b" or backup system in place. I do not trust these touchscreen systems.

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