State, county consider voting system changes
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Amid heightened public awareness of potential
ballot-counting difficulties, Blaine County Clerk Marsha Reimann is
investigating possible changes to the county’s voting system, which uses
the same kind of punch-card machine made infamous in Florida.
For the two years she’s been in office, Reimann said,
she and her crew of election volunteers have had no problems counting
ballots with the eight-year-old punch-card machine.
Nevertheless, said Rep. Wendy Jaquet, D-Ketchum, the
problems in Florida have raised general concerns about vote-counting
accuracy. So, she asked Reimann to begin looking into possible
improvements that could be made to all aspects of running an election.
The work taking place in Blaine County is part of a
statewide effort initiated by the Idaho secretary of state and Association
of County Clerks. On Jan. 11, an "election systems review task
force," made up of members from those two entities, is scheduled to
meet in Boise to review Idaho’s voting system and to discuss ways to use
any money the federal government might provide for improvements.
Sen. Hal Bunderson, R-Meridian, who helped initiate the
task force, said legislators expect to soon see a flurry of activity
across the nation aimed at improving elections.
Recommendations from the task force may guide Idaho
legislators in changing the state’s election laws.
Fourteen counties in Idaho use the decades-old Votamatic
punch-card system, 14 use a newer optical scan system that reads
pencil-lead marks made by voters and 16 of the state’s most sparsely
populated rural counties still hand count plain paper ballots.
Several people involved in the Idaho effort said
consolidation of those three types of systems into a single, newer type
seems improbable, because it would be expensive and politically difficult.
More likely, state and local governments will look at improving procedural
and management practices during elections. That could mean finding ways to
better educate voters and election volunteers about the existing machines
so fewer mistakes occur on election day.
Reimann said the punch-card system works better here than
in other, more populated places because during each election Blaine County’s
single counting machine has to count only about 8,000 ballots. That allows
her volunteers to "fluff and chad" each ballot to make sure the
machine can read it properly.
"I’m very confident with our system," she
said. "I think Florida’s problem is they were not able to go
through every ballot by hand."
She estimated that switching to the newer optical scan
system in Blaine County would cost $20,000--difficult to fund with the
county’s $36,000 annual elections budget.
Reimann is not scheduled to attend the Jan. 11 task force
meeting, but she said she plans to talk with two members of the group
before the meeting so they can pass along her suggestions. Generally, she
wants state and local governments to provide better voter education, but
she declined to offer anything more specific than that until she has a
chance to review written feedback from the November election’s
volunteers.
Jaquet said she wants to see better directions given at
the polls, especially for young voters who might be voting for the first
time. She said also that a "check your chads" sign may be
something that appears at future polling places.
Some changes the state could look at making include adding
specifics to Idaho’s "voter intent" law, Bunderson said. Right
now, he said, that law could cause confusion by leaving too much room for
interpretation of ballots.
Also, he said, state law could be changed to allow
counties to begin using new touch-screen computer technology at polls.