Electronic ballots bring back comic alphabetical memories

The Baltimore Sun ^ | March 4, 2004 | Mike Himowitz

[Cincinatus' Wife]

AS A "COMPUTER guy," I've always doubted the wisdom of purely electronic voting systems, and now that I've tried one, I'm still worried - and not just for the reasons I expected.

Yes, I know that handing the future of American democracy over to the Microsoft Windows operating system is lunacy. And any scheme that counts votes with proprietary software that's not open to public inspection is an invitation to misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance and every other feasance.

But my experience with the Diebold AccuVote-TS touch-screen voting machine showed that I hadn't thought of everything.

In fact, from a purely mechanical standpoint, everything went well. The machine was easy to use, and the large print and touch boxes next to the candidates' names were easy to see.

However, when it came time to choose delegates to the presidential nominating convention, I noticed something strange. Of the 20 names on the screen, listed in alphabetical order, a dozen were committed to candidates who had already dropped out of the race, but only two each were listed for the remaining leaders, John Kerry and John Edwards. Weird, I thought, but I selected my allotted four candidates and hit the "Next" button.

That's when I found myself looking at a screen with 10 more delegate candidates, including two each for Kerry and Edwards.

Having neglected my specimen ballot, I didn't realize that 30 people were running in my district and that the screen didn't have room for them all. So I spent the next few minutes with the R-through-Z's, hitting the Previous and Next buttons, erasing previous votes and picking new ones. Not exactly a user-friendly ballot.

I also began to wonder how delegates banished to the Siberia of that second screen would fare if voters were confused by this alphabetical straitjacket. And that brought back fond memories of the first and wackiest campaign I ever covered.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Voting machines did fine; as for those humans ...***Local election directors such as Howard County's Robert J. Antonetti Sr. said the state Board of Elections needs to simplify the method of transferring the voter data from the local precincts to the state's electronic server.

"It's too complicated," Antonetti said. "There's so many things they're concerned about -- security for one -- but if you can't get that data transferred and something goes sour, you've got a massive problem on your hands. And it's an hour before we know anything's gone wrong."

For example, by 1 p.m. yesterday -- 13 hours after the polls closed -- election officials in Prince George's County were still tallying ballots after election judges in 15 of the 209 precincts failed to properly transmit their results using a modem. They instead drove their memory cards to regional collection sites. ***

The county's assistant elections administrator, Alisha L. Alexander, said human error was to blame. Although they had two-hour training sessions, she said, some elections judges were unsure how to transmit the tallies -- stored on memory cards about the size of a credit card -- to the local elections office. Some simply chose to fill out required paperwork first before reporting the ballots.

Others did not tally the results from all of their machines. Still other judges who decided to drive the results to a regional office arrived after the 11:30 p.m. closing time. The tallies then had to be driven to the county elections board in Upper Marlboro for transmission to the state elections office.