Voters in Salisbury and Granite Quarry might feel as if they’re back in school
Tuesday, taking an SATtest.They’ll
be asked to use a No. 2 pencil or pen to fill in the ovals beside the names of the
municipal candidates they prefer.
It’s part of the Rowan County
Board of Elections’ testing of new precinct ballot counters.
The machines of two companies are
getting the test runs. Each of Salisbury’s 10 precincts will have an Accu-Vote ballot
counter.
The Granite Quarry precinct will
have the Optech III-P Eagle model.
“I think it’s pretty
easy,” Rowan Board of Elections Director Nancy Evans says of both brands.
After receiving their ballots and
filling in the ovals of their choices, Salisbury and Granite Quarry voters will take the
ballots to the counter, place it in the machine and watch it be sucked away into ballot
boxes underneath the counters.
It doesn’t matter if the
ballots are placed in the counting machines face up or face down.
The beauty of the counters from
the precinct workers’ point of view is that the ballots are counted as they are fed
into the machine by voters. Under the old system, at the end of the voting day, the
precinct officials had to open up the ballot box and look at, handle and feed each ballot
into a counting machine to arrive at a final tally for the candidates.
The counters being used in
Salisbury and Granite Quarry should be able to give precinct officials a final readout of
the voting results within minutes, possibly seconds, of the last vote’s being cast.
The machines being tested also
automatically separate or “deflect” the ballots with write-in candidates. The
old system, which dates back to 1976 and will still be in use Tuesday in the other Rowan
municipalities, forces precinct officials “to eyeball” every ballot for a
possible write-in vote, Evans says.
A reminder to Rowan County
taxpayers: This is only a test. The precinct ballot counters are on loan from the
companies, which hope to land a contract to supply all of Rowan’s 42 precincts.
To do that would cost the county
$300,000 to $350,000, Evans estimates.
The ballot counters, while
seemingly easy and straightforward, have a major drawback: paper.
State law requires the elections
board to have enough ballots on hand to cover 100 percent of the county’s voter
registration. Of course, the county never comes close to a 100 percent turnout, but it has
to have that many ballots, nonetheless.
Storage of the paper ballots also
becomes a problem. When a ballot includes any federal office, all of the ballots must be
kept by the elections board for a minimum of 22 months. Tuesday’s municipal ballots,
used and unused, must be kept at least two months.
Evans remains keenly interested in
the touch-screen voting machines that eliminate the need for paper, while serving the dual
purpose as voting machine and ballot counter. The elections office successfully tested one
brand of these machines in Spencer during the 1998 general election.
Their major drawback: cost. For
this election, Evans set up two different brands of the touch-screen machines in the
elections office for one-stop voting in Salisbury and Granite Quarry. One-stop voting
ended Friday. |
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