Machines promise smoother elections

The Sentinel-Record/Richard Rasmussen NEW MACHINES: Sylvester Foley, of Little Rock, unloads a pallet of new voting equipment Tuesday at the Garland County Election Commission Building. The county's inclusion in a pilot program provided it with all-new voting machines for the March 1 elections.
The Sentinel-Record/Richard Rasmussen NEW MACHINES: Sylvester Foley, of Little Rock, unloads a pallet of new voting equipment Tuesday at the Garland County Election Commission Building. The county's inclusion in a pilot program provided it with all-new voting machines for the March 1 elections.

New voting machines for the March 1 primary and nonpartisan judicial elections were delivered Tuesday to the Garland County Election Commission Building, an arrival commissioners have eagerly anticipated.

The state's election services vendor has said the 110 touch-screen voting systems, 58 electronic poll books and 40 ballot scanners it has invoiced the county for are more functional and intuitive than the earlier generation of machines the county used, giving commissioners hope that next year's elections will go more smoothly than last year's.

"It's going to make a marked difference in lines, accuracy and ballot selection problems we had during the last election," Commissioner Dennis Bosch said.

Garland was one of four counties included in a state pilot program distributing the new voting machines ahead of the statewide rollout scheduled after the March 1 elections. Several counties had concerns about training poll workers on the new equipment and asked that the new machines not be distributed until after the primaries.

The secretary of state's office said earlier this year that the county was allocated $693,710 in equipment, a total based on the value of its previous stable of machines. The new ballot scanners and touch screens were respectively valued at $5,500 and $3,500 when Omaha-based Elections Systems & Software demoed them for the election commission in May.

Commissioners said the ES&S ExpressVote Tablet electronic poll books should reduce the likelihood of voters receiving incorrect ballots. Poll workers will scan a voter's bar-coded ID or type their name into the poll book to view registration information. Voters sign the poll book to verify their identity, and a printer produces a thermal-paper voter activation card bearing a bar code. Voters feed the card into the ExpressVote touch screen to cue up their ballot and make their selections.

The touch screen returns the voted ballot to the voter for them to feed into the DS200 scanner, which records and tabulates the votes. The touch screens have a tabulating capability, but the election commissioners said the county will only use the ballot marking function.

One DS200 can scan all the county's ballot styles, a capability owing to its independence from PC cards its predecessor, the M100, used to process and tabulate ballots. Multiple M100s had to be stationed at polling places assigned to voters from 10 or more precincts, and more were needed when ballot styles multiplied during primary voting.

The limitation prevented their use during the May 2014 primaries, shifting all voting traffic to the county's approximately 50 Ivotronic electronic voting machines. The commissioners said ES&S sent the county's Ivotronics to Benton County, clearing space at the election commission building for the new machines. They said they expect ES&S to take the M100s, too.

The electronic poll books update voter information in real time, allowing commissioners to implement the vote center system they discussed earlier this year. Similar to early voting, where voters cast ballots at any of three early voting locations, vote centers untether voters from assigned election day polling sites and allow them to vote at any vote center location.

A plan detailing equipment and locations filed with the secretary of state and a quorum court ordinance are needed to put the vote center model into effect, the commissioners said. Secure Internet connections are also mandatory, enabling real-time updates that can identity voters who have already cast ballots at another vote center.

The State Board of Election Commissioners will train the commissioners on the new equipment Thursday, and poll worker training is scheduled for the first week of January. ES&S representatives will be at the election commission building Nov. 30-Dec. 2 to help set up the machines.

The secretary of state in June selected the nearly $30 million proposal from ES&S to continue as the state's election services vendor. The Legislature appropriated the money earlier this year but didn't fund it. The secretary of state's budget paid for the $2.5 million pilot program that supplied equipment to Garland, Boone, Columbia and Sebastian counties.

Registered Garland County voters interested in becoming poll workers can find applications at the election commission website, http://www.garlandcountyvote.org.

Local on 11/18/2015

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