With the November election just weeks away, Chicago and Cook County
officials have yet to fix some of the problems that led to a virtual
meltdown of the new electronic voting system used in the spring primary.
Twice as many voters are likely to head for the polls on Nov. 7,
where they will face new voting procedures and test the training of
election workers who were often baffled by the machinery in March.
The most likely stumbling block for a smooth election remains a small
device that is supposed to consolidate totals from two voting systems
and transmit the results downtown via cellular technology. In the
spring, many judges couldn't get it to work.
And it will still be possible for workers to accidentally fry vote
totals if they forget to disconnect the power from ballot scanners
before data cartridges are removed at the end of the night.
"We don't want you to erase any of the memory," warned Gail
Weisberg, Cook County's equipment manager coordinator, during a
training class last week in Hoffman Estates.
Election officials have boosted training and demanded many fixes
to the machinery and software since March, when they were humiliated by
confusion and delayed results.
The possible snags are unlikely to throw an election--there are
paper backup systems at most every turn--but they could again slow
results from some of the nearly 5,000 precincts.
While they suggest major improvements have been made, officials
say politicians, voters and the media should never expect the new
system to operate as quickly as when paper ballots were used and 90
percent of precincts typically reported results within an hour of polls
closing.
"Will it be better than the primary? Absolutely," said Tom Leach, a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
The experience here this year with electronic voting was one of
the earliest, and also one of the most troubled. But problems were also
seen in Ohio, Maryland and elsewhere.
The snafu potential will be even greater in November, when the
battle for Congress and other close races hangs in the balance. It is
estimated that more than 80 percent of voters nationwide will use
electronic voting machines, with a third of all precincts using the
technology for the first time.
The changes were required by the federal government after problems
in the 2000 presidential election with punch-card ballots and
antiquated voting machines in Florida and elsewhere.
To satisfy a new requirement that the visually impaired and others
with disabilities be able to vote unassisted, Chicago and Cook County
purchased touch screens with audio prompts for each polling place.
Dual system in each precinct
But because those machines were expensive, officials also
purchased cheaper optical scan readers for paper ballots, creating a
dual system in each precinct.
This dual system, at a cost of more than $50 million, requires
hardware and software to blend the vote tallies from both platforms
into one result per precinct.
But the system, the first major hardware change here in more than
two decades, buckled under the pressure in its debut, when poorly
trained election judges failed to properly deal with ballot jams,
locked-up computer screens and other issues.
As roughly 25,000 Chicago and suburban Cook election judges are
trained, city and county officials are working through the
recommendations contained in a 26-page report that deconstructed the
primary's problems.
The report, prepared by a Florida-based consulting firm at a cost
of more than $90,000, found one of the biggest issues was a device that
is designed, among other things, to merge totals from the two voting
systems.
The Hybrid, Activator, Accumulator & Transmitter (HAAT)
machine was capable of erasing results from data cartridges if it
wasn't first turned off before the cartridges were loaded. Large
numbers of election judges were also unable to follow a complex series
of instructions to get the machine to transmit results.
