Election Systems counts for 2,200 jurisdictions

Virtual dead heats in several key statehouse and congressional races across the country and the memory of recent election troubles put unparalleled pressure on an Omaha company whose machines are counting about half the ballots cast today in the United States.

"The level of scrutiny is unprecedented," said Michael Limas, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Election Systems & Software, the largest U.S. provider of voting equipment. "Any little misstep or problem that an election administrator would have had last year, or 10 years ago, now is headline news."

Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, a Houston-based organization of state and local election administrators, put it this way:

"Every election administrator in America is under a microscope right now. Those in Florida are under an electron microscope."

Lewis said election reform should be less about technology and more about policies, procedures and people.

"Not who to vote for," Lewis said, "but how to actually complete the process of voting so the ballot is counted."

In Florida two years ago, he said, voters were unwilling to ask questions. Election officials presumed wrongly that people who showed up at polling places knew what to do.

The key, he said, is to find a way to quickly teach people how to use voting equipment.

"My guess is that if we had voter schools, they wouldn't be very well attended," he said. "So we're going to have to figure out a way to educate a voter in two minutes or less while they're inside the polling place."

Florida's first test of its new voting system performed well nearly everywhere during the primary but in Broward and Miami-Dade. Many ES&S machines there remained dark. Poll workers stayed home. Janitors forgot to unlock doors.

When the polls finally opened, confused workers handed out the wrong ballots and had trouble operating the new machines despite county-run training classes.

In contrast, other counties with voting machines made by ES&S and other vendors had smooth primaries because they invested heavily in training.

This is an insider's view from the standpoint of the leading supplier of voting equipment in the country, including Broward and Miami-Dade counties in Florida. Read the entire article for all the details, but the bottom line is that voting problems in these two counties is not due to the equipment but due to lack of training and voter error.

The electorate in general, contains, and will for some years to come, a significant percentage of people to whom the non-paper/non-mechanical or electronic apparatus is an uncomfortable challange. We see them everyday. Not computer literate, they don't like ATMs and counter-top credit card machines with PIN numbers and the like.

This rush to electronic voting machines was ill considered for that reason. No matter what is done, there will be a percentage of users that have trouble, feel threatened or embarrased, and just in general will have trouble or complain.

Whose hands does that play into? Those that want to hold results and certifications back for backroom deals and decisions by judges, that's who.

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