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Posted on 10/07/2003 10:24:40 AM PDT by NathanR
One Austin company is in close contact with some California election officials. Hart Intercivic has a contract with the second largest county in California to replace punch card ballots with electronic voting.
The company is supplying e-slate machines similar to what Travis County has to Orange County, California.
The plan's been to have them running by next year's March primaries. In someway the Austin company will help with the recall election, whenever it happens.
Hart Intercivic is sending 9,000 electronic voting machines to Orange County. In contrast, Travis County uses about 1,800 of these now.
The unplanned recall election did not change the timeline for a spring rollout in California.
"We felt, and so did Orange County that trying to install these voting systems and have the voters look at it of the first time during a recall election or something of that nature would be difficult," Michelle Shafer with Hart Intercivic said.
The California bound machines have five languages, English and Spanish also Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese.
Until their debut, Hart Intercivic is helping Orange County to replace their punch card ballots for the governor recall election.
"And that's actually a paper balloting system. It's an optical scan system," Shafer said.
Because of that Orange County was not part of the court challenge that was just ruled on, but with no definite word for now on a recall date, the Austin company is in touch with the California County that's in an evolving political drama.
"Decisions like this happen all the time, obviously not as interesting or in the media spotlight as this one is, but things like this happen all the time in the world of elections," Shafer said.
Several large counties were challenged in the lawsuit for their punchcard ballot system -- among them Los Angeles County, the biggest county in California and the nation with nine and a half million people.
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