http://www.hometownlife.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060818/LIFE/608180313/1099New voting machines not entirely up to snuff
As she predicted before the Aug. 8 primary, the overseer of elections in Oakland County said new voting machines were not completely up to snuff when voters hit the polls.
County Clerk Ruth Johnson predicted there could be problems because of technical shortcomings of the new Help Americans Vote Act machines.
The HAVA was passed in the wake of the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election.
More than a week after the election, workers at the county building are still compiling data about how the new HAVA machines performed. In short -- it doesn't look good.
"There were more than 100 problems," Johnson said. "About 20 machines needed to be swapped out. For state-of-the-art machines, that number is too high."
As Johnson said before the election, HAVA put the cart before the horse by mandating new machines before coming up with standards for their performance. Because many communities had machines only a year old at the time -- namely Southfield -- HAVA should have targeted antiquated machinery first rather than every voting machine in the nation.
"They should have allowed communities with new machines to wait and given the companies a chance to catch up," she said. "There has to be a plan of action; we have to have machines that are reliable."
Tabulating machines had to be turned on and off a few times to run correctly, memory cards and high-speed counters failed and the handicapped-accessible Automark machines folded ballots into accordion shapes. Some machines had to be swapped out mid-election.
Birmingham City Clerk Nancy Weiss had to swap out two new HAVA machines during primary voting.
"They wouldn't take ballots. It didn't delay the voting too much," she said. "Voters were able to put ballots into an auxiliary machine."
There was also a slight problem with understanding the machines' error messages. Clerk's office workers were not familiar with the messages and that slowed things down until vendor Electronic Systems and Software was able to decipher them.
Bloomfield Township Clerk Janet Roncelli said 11 of the Automark voting machines failed there at one time or another for one reason or another.
"We spent a tremendous amount of time on this equipment," she said. "We're disappointed it didn't work as expected."
She said one of those machines was replaced and the rest were cajoled into working for the rest of the night. She said upgrades were expected to come before the November general election and she was "optimistic."
Roncelli wasn't the only clerk thinking things should be better in November.
"We'll be able to address the problems by November," Weiss said. "We're learning. We're starting to recognize the problems and how to resolve them."
All that aside, Johnson said the vote counts were good because of the people working to resolve the various problems.
"Every vote was counted," Johnson said. "That's because of the local clerks. The election worked despite HAVA."
Originally published August 18, 2006
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