Washington County officials hear second pitch for new voting machines
Barbara Miller/Observer-Reporter
In this file photo, Joseph Passarella shows Washington County elections officials the chute component of an electronic voting machine that serves as a locked ballot box for paper ballot cards that are automatically scanned.
Barbara Miller/Observer-Reporter
In this August 2018 photo, Joseph Passarella, regional sales manager for Election Systems & Software, explains the use of a touch-screen voting machine that complies with requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. An electronic voice reads the voter’s choices through headphones privately for the blind to review.
It’s been an issue since 2006, when computer touchscreens replaced punch-card voting in Washington County: How does the average person know the device is recording his or her vote accurately?
Before primary and general elections, the county conducts relatively quick logic and accuracy tests of each voting machine to be deployed, but some have questioned if the much higher volume of votes cast during the 13 hours the polls are open affects the reliability of the 12-year-old devices.
With ballot security and the specter of election tampering in mind, the federal Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 includes $380 million in grants for states to enhance technology and make improvements in election security.
Pennsylvania’s share of federal funding is $13.4 million. The state appropriated an additional $673,808, and last month, Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Robert Torres submitted to the federal Election Assistance Commission a description of Pennsylvania’s program and budget for distributing the grant money to counties.
In use for the past dozen years in Washington and Greene counties are what are known as direct-recording electronic devices. Washington County Assistant Elections Director Melanie Ostrander said the trend is to move away from this type of machine, which the state is expected to no longer certify because it has no paper backup that can verify vote totals.
Locally this week, Washington County officials heard the second of two pitches from vendors selling new voting machines.
Joseph Passarella was elections director in Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County when the federal Help America Vote Act was signed into law in the wake of 2000’s “hanging chad” cliffhanger of an election between eventual Republican winner George W. Bush and Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore.
Passarella, who is now regional sales manager for Election Systems and Software, based in Omaha, Neb., demonstrated his precinct-level optical scanner and tabulator that reads “fill-in-the-bubble” paper ballots. Voters, themselves, feed the ballots into a locked, self-contained compartment with a capacity of 2,500.
It has a battery backup in case of a power failure, and its thermal imaging needs no ink.
“The voter scans his own ballot,” said Passarella of the system that would give everyone at the polls a paper ballot nearly identical to ones absentee voters have been using in Washington County for years.
The machine holds the ballot in suspension, and if it detects an overvote, it can spit out the ballot, which the voter can relegate as spoiled and try again.
Passarella suggested a voter fill in all the bubbles on the spoiled ballot before discarding it so no one can discern his or her choices.
Should the voter choose to cast a ballot with more votes in a race exceeding a stated limit, the scanner would not count that race. An example of this would be the county commissioners’ race, where at least four candidates are listed but a voter is to choose no more than two, with the top three vote-getters being elected. A person casting more than two votes negates the choice altogether.
The information from the scanner-tabulator would be stored on a flash drive instead of a memory card to be processed at the elections office after polls close, and the paper ballots would be available as a backup in case of a recount.
ExpressVote, another device he demonstrated, resembles the touchscreens currently in use. The screens can be placed at wheelchair height. A blind voter who needs assistance at the polls can plug in headphones for privacy and hear a digitally-generated voice read the votes cast as an assurance that the ballot reflects his or her choices. The ExpressVote also has a port for a sip-and-puff device and an audio-tactile keypad.
A common misconception among voters who haven’t used electronic systems with a paper backup is that the voter keeps a copy of his or her ballot. That is not the case, Passarella said. The paper ballot or card printed on thermal paper through digital imagery remains locked inside the machine until the device is returned to the elections office.
Because counties now make election results known on the internet, there’s also a misconception that the voting machines are linked to the internet. That’s not the case. The county’s information technology department works with the elections office on election night to post results on the county’s website once tabulations become available.
Commission Chairman Larry Maggi, who is also the chairman of the Washington County Elections Board, asked Passarella about the cost of the new voting machines.
Passarella said he’d provide an estimate based on the number of machines the county wanted, but the actual figures won’t be revealed until a public bid opening.
Washington County purchased electronic poll books – a database of registered voters, their addresses, party affiliations and a record of how often they vote – under a contract with ES&S in 2013.
County officials also heard a sales presentation in July from Dominion Voting Systems.