A
desire to update equipment purchased in 1996 and to address potential security
and vote integrity concerns are two factors that motivated Montgomery County
officials to announce that they will be issuing an RFP in March of this year
for the purpose of replacing and upgrading the equipment used to record and
tabulate votes. There are 425 polling places across the County, utilizing
approximately 1150 voting machines each election (ten polling places are
located within Lower Providence). Polling places have 2-3 machines apiece.
Toward
that end, County commissioners Val Arkoosh and Ken Lawrence [both serve on the
Board of Elections, Lawrence as its chairman] hosted an open house on Saturday,
February 24, 2018 at Montgomery County Community College to give the public an
opportunity to view the vendors and products vying for the chance to provide
the latest technology, test them out and to provide feedback about those
products and potential selection criteria.
Ideally, the
new equipment could be in place as early as the November 2018 election cycle,
but a Voter Services employee told me today that it was far more likely that it
would be available for use by voters for the first time in 2019, given the need
to train a large number of poll workers and communicate all the changes in the
process to the voters who will use it.
The crowd
consisted primarily of elected committeepeople and poll workers, and a
smattering of the general public. Two categories of change
were shown:
1) New way to
check in -- touch screen and potentially less need to have check-in clerks at
the table inside the poll; and
2) Different approaches
to casting a ballot.
First, the check-in
process is now all electronic regardless of selected vendor, but seems to be
less of a process, mostly verifying the voter and signing, which people do now.
As for the 11 potential
vendors providing demos and marketing materials, the exhibitors present on
Saturday included:
- Clear Ballot of Boston, MA
- Election Systems and Software of Omaha, NE (ESS is the only vendor currently certified by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania)
- Dominion Voting of Denver, CO (acquired the former Sequoia Voting System, who manufactured the equipment the County uses now)
- Unisyn Voting Solutions of Vista, CA
- Tenex Software Solutions of Tampa, FL
The other
vendors are currently in the process of getting certified by the Commonwealth.
In the public
comment/Q&A segment of the open house, a
Maslow, who is
also involved with the group Citizens for Better Elections, leaned toward
vendor Clear Ballot, arguably the least-technological option, consisting of
voters hand-marking a paper ballot by filling in circles for their preferred
options, and that paper ballot then being fed into a machine for recording and
tabulation. She said she preferred Clear
Ballot because she felt that “anything can be hacked, we don’t really know who
owns these companies or who designs the software” and, with regard to Clear Ballot’s
paper ballot, that “it’s not a foreign concept, this is how SATs are done” so
it should be acceptable. “A voter would know their vote is as they intended", she said.
Maslow also noted
that many times one of the machines in a poll breaks down and then creates a
backlog of voters. In the more manual system, a voter would still be able to
vote. She would also like to see a system that can ‘last for a long time’,
since ‘we [the taxpayers] are not only voting on them but paying for them”.
Republican
committeewoman Brenda Hackett, whose polling place is located within the
Shannondell retirement community, offered her perspective – and arrived at the
same preference as her Democrat counterpart. “We have unique issues
here at Shannondell with so many people unable to learn new things and some
afraid of computers. I think a fully touch screen system would keep
voters away or create very long lines. This problem will dissipate in the
future as people unfamiliar with computers will have passed on. However,
there may be some people who never have to deal with computers…and introducing
a touch screen system will be unfamiliar to many of them”.
Hackett continued, “I
had a good feeling about the security and accuracy of the machine where a voter
marks a piece of paper or where they vote on the touch screen and a piece of
blank paper that they insert is returned to them filled in with their
vote. They then feed it in to the machine. So, I guess the one I like
best is Clear Ballot. When you are verified by the clerk, you are given a
ballot which you write on in a private setting and then insert it into the
machine. It is in the control of the voter, and it gives the paper
backup, and most people would easily learn how to do it."
And "I did not like the
system that produces the paper ballot behind a window that they can't touch.
It may be hard to read. Since the issue with our
machines is that there is no paper trail… [and since part of the new state
requirements are that there must be a paper trail that can be reconciled/audited]… I
liked the concept of a voter handling the paper themselves."
From
MY own perspective, I certainly agree with their comments, but I also liked
that vendor Dominion re-uses a lot of the technology the County has already
paid for in their Sequoia systems – which the County says they believe are
reliable and safe - so they may have an edge in that their product can
potentially been integrated more easily, quickly and for less money. In this
system, voters are issued a card at check-in which is then loaded and activated
with their voter information (party, district and relevant voting options) and
then taken by the voter to the voting machine and handed to the machine
operator for insertion, voting and recording. The card is then given back,
wiped clean and reused.
Arkoosh said
that money has been budgeted for this purpose over the past few years, but the
County wanted to make sure the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had finalized their voting machine requirements before going out to bid.
If you want to provide
general feedback on what features you’d like to see, reach out to the County at
www.montcopa.org/vmfeedback
and let them know your thoughts. They plan to post pictures and descriptions of
the potential replacement machines on their Voter Services website shortly.
