November 3, 2008

New Sangamon county voting machines

I heard the county had trouble finding election judges the last time we switched to new voting machines so I decided to sign up this year. The new system has paper ballots scanned on electronic vote tabulators. I don't think the SJ-R reported the specific model of the new machines, so for the curious you can google ES&S Model 100.

ES&S has a page about the machine and you can easily find old articles about various problems with them in past elections. Sangamon county is leasing previously used machines so let's hope those old problems were fixed. It would be nice if the County Clerk released public information about those issues to reassure the public, but as we learned in the Populex debacle, they would rather suppress public concerns than address them.


ESSm100.jpg
ES&S model 100 precinct vote counter

There are additional machines for voters with disabilities. I was impressed by how many different ways it allows people to vote despite any challenge you can think of. Two of them broke down with paper jams during the training, but I'm sure they'll be ready to go on election day.

During the judges' training I was struck by the way that each part of the voting process is monitored and double checked to provide complete transparency. Multiple people check to make sure the ballot box is empty at the beginning of the day. Each voter name is checked and judges from both parties are a check on each other throughout the entire process. Unfortunately, those safeguards are designed for a 19th century voting process that had nothing to do with electronic voting.

Who double checks to make sure there are no programming errors with the ballot counting machines or storage devices? Shouldn't independent computer programmers get to look at the system on election day? We don't have those kind of safeguards for modern elections.

With paper ballots we can verify that votes were counted accurately but only if there's a manual hand re-count of randomly chosen precincts. Running ballots through a machine a second time only proves that they were counted the same way twice. It doesn't guarantee that they were counted accurately either time. So, it's good that we have a voting system with a verifiable paper trail but there's no guarantee of a fair election without a recount by hand.