TX: Dozens of Counties Could be Forced to Temporarily Abandon e-Vote

[Wilms]

Holdup on ballot causing problems

Sat, Feb. 18, 2006

By ANNA M. TINSLEY
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

On the eve of early voting, dozens of Texas counties could be forced to temporarily abandon their electronic voting machines, create emergency ballots and count potentially thousands of paper ballots by hand.

The counties -- mostly small or rural -- learned in recent days that a contractor may not have the computer programming ready in time to set up the electronic voting systems before early voting begins Tuesday.

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"This is not anything we had control over and it's not anything the counties had control over," said Ellen Bogard, a spokeswoman with the Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software Inc., which programs many Texas voting systems and prints paper ballots.

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The delay raises questions about the statewide effort to move to electronic balloting, which got a push this year from the federal Help America Vote Act requiring each precinct to have at least one electronic voting machine to ensure that disabled voters have equal access.

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The secretary of state's office sent out a memo this week, telling election administrators that they might need to create emergency paper ballots that would have to be tallied by hand if the ES&S ballots don't arrive on time.

"At this point, we don't know how many counties are being impacted," said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office. "Our goal is to minimize that number by Tuesday.

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ES&S officials say they need between 30 and 45 days to code electronic machines and print the ballots. First priority will be given to those counties that had planned to use all-electronic voting. Disabled voters can use the old system -- which sometimes meant having special poll workers cast ballots for them -- or wait until the electronic machines are ready.

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"The problems are just the nature of the business, the nature of what's going to happen with elections," she said. "This is just one of the unknowns you have to deal with."

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http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/13905313.htm

[bluestateguy]

1. They better hurry it up if they want to steal it for Ricky Perry

Our 47% approval rating governor may not be able to do it on just his smooth talking, fake (brokeback?) cowboy act.

[TexasLawyer]

4. paper ballots are still susceptible to election fraud

Ohio had optical scan ballots in most counties but the election was nonetheless stolen and covered up by a highly partisan Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell.

We have our own highly partisan (GOP, of course) Secretary of State here in Texas, Roger Williams.

Fraudsters will need to use different skill-sets to steal a paper ballot election, though. So this is possibly encouraging news.

[Wilms]

5. We rarely consider paper ballot security issues.

If our elections were free of electronics, we would.

I find it kind of neat that ES&S is in this jam, and the resolution will be hand-counting. I wonder how many jurisdictions will spend LESS money as a result.

[aquart]

2. ES&S. Oh, yeah. You can trust them. That's the ticket.

[kster]

3. K&R....nt