News-Record.com

This USA Today story that ran Thursday on voting machine glitches got my attention because we have some of the same gear here in North Carolina, and specifically Guilford County. (A similar story was in NPR’s rotation Thursday as well.)

From the USA Today story:

Eight weeks before elections that will decide control of Congress, a rush by state and local governments to prepare new voting machines and train poll workers is raising the possibility of trouble reminiscent of the 2000 presidential election standoff.

Problems range from delayed delivery of new equipment to an insufficient supply of trained technicians to fix anticipated problems, voting experts say.

North Carolina, as you might have noticed, just went through a big voting machine replacement binge in the past couple years.

So, with less than 60 days to go before Nov. 7, should we be worried?

There are some problems that were mentioned in the above stories that seem less likely to crop up here. Counties have their equipment now and ran it during the primary, so they’re not going to be waiting on machines to ship in right before an election. And we’ve already been through one primary on the new machines, so it might be safe to think that most poll workers will know there way about the new gear.

There was one issue that kept cropping up in those and other stories that got me curious though. In counties such as Guilford, where they use DRE machines (small computers with touch screens) the machines are required to produce a voter verifiable paper back up. The thing looks like a grocery store receipt.

In the stories mentioned above, problems with those paper records included printer jams and some ballots not recording. The stories seemed to chalk this up to a combination of poll worker error and the occasional bad machine.

In the aftermath of the May primary, we got reports from most quarters that voting machines had worked well. But I wanted to double check. When we examined paper records here, did we find any glitches?

“The experience that we had was much better than I expected,” said Guilford County Elections Director George Gilbert. He said that audit counts of two precincts went as they should have and there were few reports during the primaries of printers getting gummed up.

Gilbert, it should be noted, is no fan of the paper back up system. He says the electronic machines are reliable and that if there is to be a backup, it ought to be an automated one. There are (a lot of folks who disagree with that view.)

At any rate, Gilbert seemed to think the printers on Guilford County’s machines were working with a minimum of fuss, but added the following caveat:

“Ask me the same question after the November 2008 election, and we’ll see,” he said. “A presidential election is a whole different animal.”

Translation: a higher turnout election equals more work for the machines equals more chances for something to go wrong.

So, no, we didn't see problems locally in May. But because more folks will be showing up to vote in November, it might be reasonable to assume there is a somewhate elevated (if not necessarily huge) chance of something going haywire that we didn't see earlier this year.

As furniture executives used to tell me back in my business reporting days, I'd say we can be cautiously optimistic.