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New Electronic Voting Machines Help Disabled: Other Voters Report Problems at Polls

Posted on: Wednesday, 17 May 2006, 06:07 CDT

By Karen Owen, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.

May 17--Voting was easier for Mary Varley this year. The 55-year-old disabled woman was able to cast her vote in Tuesday's primary with a new electronic voting machine designed for handicapped accessibility.

"I thought it was neat," said Varley, who lives at the Wendell Foster Campus for Developmental Disabilities. "Us people with disabilities have the same rights as everybody else."

Other voters, though, had a harder time this year. Officials in the Daviess County Clerk's office said they received some complaints from people who said they had trouble at the polls or were denied the chance to vote in the Owensboro City Commission race or some other contest.

Daviess County Clerk Mike Libs and Richard House, deputy clerk for elections, said the problem had to be either voter error or operator error.

"We're as aggravated as anybody about this," Libs said. "It's not the machine."

There were two machines at each precinct -- one of the new handicap-accessible eSlate machines and one of the older electronic voting machines the county has been using for six or seven years.

"This one is still good, but that's history," said Hugh Whittaker, a precinct judge at Precinct 7, where Varley was voting. "This is the future," he said, gesturing to the eSlate machine.

If one machine malfunctioned, the other one could be used, Libs said. Precinct workers were ordered to set up the older, traditional machines first. They were all ready by 6 a.m., he said.

Some voters may have been confused about which races they could vote in because they were confused about whether their residence was in the city or county or a fringe area where the city boundaries and city school districts don't match, officials said. Some poll workers may have been confused as well, they said.

Some voters shied away from the new machines Tuesday, area county clerks and precinct workers said.

"When they make me vote on the new one," one woman told precinct sheriff Betty Miller at Wendell Foster, "I will."

By early afternoon, about 30 of 44 people to vote so far in that precinct had used eSlate. About 10 of them were actually disabled, precinct workers estimated.

"This is fantastic," said Alan Vetter, a voter who gave the new machine a chance. "It'll confuse some of them, but they'll get used to it."

Precinct 7 has 523 registered voters, the poll workers said. During slow times Tuesday, Whittaker, who is a retired minister of music, entertained his co-workers by playing the baritone and trumpet.

In McLean County, Clerk Linda Ray Johnson said about half the voters in all of her county's precincts were willing to give the eSlate a try. Most liked it, she said.

In Muhlenberg County, "Very few people wanted to use them," said County Clerk Gaylan Spurlin. "There's an age barrier there."

Federal law required all states to provide machines that were accessible to the disabled by January 2006, Johnson said.

All but 10 counties in Kentucky went with eSlate, which is manufactured by Hart InterCivic, Libs said. "Texas has been using them for a number of years, because that's where they're manufactured."

The new machine looks like a hard-bodied suitcase propped open, with a tent attached to the opening. The machine allows the disabled to vote with little or no assistance from anyone, Precinct 7 workers said.

The voter sits in a chair or rolls up in a wheelchair to look through the tent opening at a computer screen. The voter turns a dial to enter a code number precinct workers gave him or her, then a ballot pops up on screen. The voter uses the dial to move a computer cursor to mark the ballot. The disabled could also press large buttons to move the cursor and lock in a vote.

For the visually impaired, buttons are marked in Braille, and headphones deliver feedback from the machine on how the ballot has been marked.

House said the eSlate shows the voter a summary of the marked ballot and issues a prompt if the voter failed to vote in a particular race.

But it's up to the voter to tell a precinct worker before leaving the voting booth if he or she has had a problem, Libs said.

"We're not sure people went to the second page of the ballot on eSlate," he said.

The 350 precinct workers and substitutes in Daviess County went through an election school that lasted more than three hours, he said. They were given "cheat sheets" on setting up the voting machines. They were taught how to punch in the codes that indicate whether a voter is a registered Democrat, Republican or Independent and whether he or she lives in the city, county or fringe area.

The codes were used in the last presidential election, House said. "In 2004 we didn't have as many problems." This year's problems may have been from a new machine, he said. "Maybe it's because we took a year off." No elections were held here in 2005.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.

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Source: Messenger-Inquirer

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