Can this man save democracy in America?

VISITORS to Bill Rouverol’s apartment may not immediately see, as he does, that the future of American democracy depends on the gadget sitting by the window.

The 86-year-old mechanical engineer has spent much of the past three years designing and building a green plastic box called the VoteSure. "The whole country is waiting for this machine," Mr Rouverol said. "I think it will save democracy."

It may save Mr Rouverol’s pride, too, because his Votomatic machine, along with its imitators, was blamed for bringing American democracy into disrepute in the infamous "hanging chads" controversy of 2000.

For a generation, the Votomatic booklets mounted in fold-up plastic booths were practically synonymous with election day. The Votomatic was a great and revered contribution to American public life. It saved some registrars thousands of dollars and let others mechanise the voting process for the first time. It replaced 1,000lb machines that could wipe out a registrar’s budget with one invoice, taking power out of the hands of local political bosses who often persuaded vote counters to toss out or overlook opponents’ ballots.

But in dozens of elections over four decades, the Votomatic and similar systems were plagued by printing problems, programming errors and counting malfunctions. Chaos and court battles often followed. And finally, in the 2000 elections, the acrimonious nationwide debate ruined the reputation of Mr Rouverol’s creation forever and gave America the term "hanging chad".

Yet Mr Rouverol refuses to allow that disaster to be his legacy; his work with voting machines goes back to 1963.

As a teacher of mechanical engineering at university for 12 years, he invented gear systems in his free time - until a professor of political science, Joseph Harris, sought his help in building a voting machine.

The lever systems that predated the Votomatic were generally accepted as accurate and difficult to defraud. But at $1,200 each and half a tonne in weight, the voting booths didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.

Mr Harris’s idea was a booklet mounted on a metal or plastic frame. Each page bore ballot questions or candidates’ names, and the turn of a page would uncover a new column of punchable squares in the paper card below. But bringing the ideas into reality required engineering know-how. Mr Rouverol worked out the angles and measurements of the styluses that voters would hold, the template holes that would guide the stylus, and the mechanisms for holding down the 1/8-inch paper rectangle - the infamous chad - after it was punched out of the card.

Minor punching and counting problems cropped up in test-runs, including the 1964 elections in Georgia, California and Oregon. But these didn’t dim the machine’s prospects. Accuracy was never the Votomatic’s top selling-point; registrars saw its 20lb weight and $200 price tag.

State and local elections officials certified the machines, and orders began pouring into Harris Votomatic, the company formed by Mr Harris, Mr Rouverol and others. They sold the company in 1965 to IBM.

But profits were outweighed by bad publicity over counting flaps in Montana, Oregon and particularly Los Angeles. Mr Rouverol, Mr Harris and a succession of corporate owners continued to tweak the machine, but new problems always seemed to crop up.

Yet few counties threw out their Votomatics. Many more kept ordering them, even as still others began in the 1980s to order touch-screen computers or systems that scanned ballots for pencil or ink marks. In 1988, the punch-card was the most common type of voting machine, used by about 37 per cent of registered voters. By 2000, its share had fallen to 28 per cent.

Mr Rouverol celebrated his 83rd birthday on an aircraft to West Palm Beach, Florida. Mr Harris had long since died, and Mr Rouverol had been called to Florida to tell state and federal election officials why tens of thousands of chads had stayed partially attached to paper ballots and thrown the Bush-Gore fight for the White House into chaos.

"I hadn’t really been connected to the Votomatic in a couple of decades," Mr Rouverol said. "But I decided to go patriotic and help straighten out the problem."

Mr Rouverol believes the hanging chad had two causes. The first was the punching mechanism itself. But only voters who did not see a bad punch lost their votes. So the second problem, Mr Rouverol thought, was inadequate lighting.

In a filing cabinet by the wall of his apartment, Mr Rouverol keeps photocopies of several articles from Florida newspapers. A chart prepared by the Miami Herald shows voting errors made on each brand of voting machine used in Palm Beach County. One type of error, the "undervote", was about as common on the Votomatic as on touch screens and bubble-in ballots. Undervoting occurs when a scanner does not register a vote for a particular contest because a chad remains attached to the ballot by one or more corners, because it is only pricked or dented, because the scanner makes an error, or because the voter simply chose not to vote. The rate of undervotes on other punch-card machines used in Palm Beach County was more than a percentage point higher than that of Votomatic machines.

After the Votomatic’s patent expired in 1985, other companies moved in with cheaper imitators. Several economised by leaving off a lamp that Mr Rouverol and Mr Harris had designed into the Votomatic. Mr Rouverol believes many voters using these machines may have missed their errors more often than Votomatic users. "I was disappointed that the cheap knock-offs were giving the Votomatic a bad rap," he says.

Thinking that Votomatic error rates could be reduced, too, he designed backlighting for it, called it the Verimatic, and applied for two patents.

Following California’s lead, more and more states have banned punch-card machines. The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, promised federal money to counties that replaced them. But Mr Rouverol pressed ahead with plans for what became the VoteSure.

Like the plastic template he designed 41 years ago for the original Votomatic, the new 8in by 4in "wafer" is filled with a grid of 300 small holes. The prototype has two layers, encasing the ballot like a sandwich. And its holes are only a hair’s breadth wider than the stylus that plunges through them.

Mr Rouverol is designing the VoteSure, like the Verimatic, to screw on to the stands that held the Votomatic up to waist level. Its key difference with the old machines - a new shearing mechanism similar in principle to that of a hole punch used in classrooms - should eliminate hanging chads and therefore the problem that attracted bans on the old machines.

Mr Rouverol has repeatedly tested the punching stroke of his new machine. Punch after punch, the paper circles fell into the plastic box. With a depth of 2.5in, the box can collect chads for a longer time, he reckons.He hopes to send at least a description of the VoteSure to the country’s 3,285 county registrars before the November elections.

Every day, he reworks calculations and dreams of sending off prototypes of the machine next year. And Mr Rouverol believes that, this time, his machine is a winner.

In Britain, you vote like this - you get a piece of paper with the candidates' names on it. You mark an "X" next to the name and stick it into a ballot box. It works fine: while it's not perfect, we've never had a hanging chad issue.

Just a suggestion.

Regards, Ivan

No way. Some of the local ordinances we vote on are short essays.

In the last election I was voting for president, voting on some local sewer ordinances and county bond issues.

Ya couldn't get that on a slip of paper.

Oddly enough, in my voting district, a small town in east Texas, we still use PAPER BALLOTS.

The ballots are counted in front of representatives of both major parties.

The chance for fraud is small as either side would rat the other one out in a second.

Hell, even the French can handle voting with PAPER BALLOTS in nationwide elections.

Paper ballots are the way to go. Count 'em in public, invite the news services.

Poor Mr Rouverol got a bad rap. I was bemused to hear the Dems make the accusation that such machines were only used in "poor districts with large minority populations" in FLA -- as if there was some conspiracy to ignore these votes. Much of the public was taken in by this.

I live in an affluent and rural section of California where these machines were in use for years. Old people who are easily confused can have trouble with simple act of making an X in the right spot. It's your responsibility to get it right, and I've never had a problem with Mr. Rouverol's machine.

<< I am for going back to paper ballots, myself. >>

Absolutely!

Counted and scrutineered at the voting station by volunteers from every party -- the results posted to a central location -- and ONLY THEN signed and sealed and securely escorted to any place else.

The vast criminal enterprises we call the "Democrats," which control the machinery of voting -- and of counting votes -- in every local, state and feral precinct have been electing themselves -- including several times, Kennedy and KKKli'ton the most recent, to the presidency -- to gummint in America for almost eighty years -- and it's time we put them to pasture.

And/or in prison, where they belong.

Blessings -- B A

I've used punchcard ballots all my life and never had a problem with them. To paraphrase the old military saying - there's no such thing as bad punchcards, only bad punchers.

Exactly. I'm beyond sick and tired of people not putting the blame for the 2000 fiasco where it belongs. It was the fault of the SoFLA morons who couldn't follow an arrow to within 1/8 of a inch of the candidates' names, and the 'Rats and their lawyers who brazenly tried to break the law in order to win when they couldn't do it honestly. It wasn't Katherine Harris' fault, it wasn't the fault of the butterfly ballot. It was the fault of stupidity and criminal intent. That we have bent over backward to spend millions (billions?) on high-tech touch screen machines that are still prone to tampering just shows how stupid and cowardly We The Sheeple have become. Instead of fighting for what's right, we're playing right into the hands of the stupid and the criminals.

Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!

Americans are hooked on electronic gadgets. There's nothing one does that Americans don't think can be done better with an electronic gadget.

Cell phones that transmit pictures, e-mail, Palm Pilots, - etc. Remote controls for everything -
If it isn't electronic, we don't want to use it.

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