http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4790-2004Jan9.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A4790-2004Jan9¬Found=true
Fairfax Voting Machines A 'Failure'
GOP Says County Was
Unprepared, Urges State Control
By
David Cho
Washington
Post Staff Writer
Saturday,
January 10, 2004; Page B01
New
touch-screen voting machines used in Fairfax County's local elections in
November were a "failure," and county electoral officials were
unprepared to deal with the equipment's problems, according to a county GOP
committee report released yesterday.
In
their report, Republican officials urged the county to investigate the
"poor performance" of the machines, and they recommended state
regulations that would require localities with the new equipment to follow
stringent procedures.
"Neither
the Fairfax County Electoral Board, nor the new voting machines was ready for
Election Day," the report said. "The new touch screen machines were a
technological and procedural failure."
Several
Democratic and Republican state legislators are drafting bills aimed at
avoiding further problems with the machines, in Fairfax and elsewhere. One
measure would require the touch-screen devices to meet more rigorous security
standards in order to be certified by the state. Another would require
localities to attach printers to the machines and provide voters with paper
records of their ballots.
"Our
solutions not only need to work, but they need to work to give the citizenry
confidence in the voting system," said state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli
(R-Fairfax).
Margaret
K. Luca, secretary of the county Board of Elections, disputed the GOP
committee's report, calling it inaccurate.
"It
was about as good as an Election Day as we've ever had," Luca said. Her
staff "bent over backwards" to prepare for the election and held
numerous demonstrations and seminars for the public beforehand.
"I
feel so hurt that anyone would say we were not prepared; I mean, we were so
well prepared," Luca said. She said that every technical problem cited in
the report was fixed in the weeks after the election.
"We
anticipate having a perfect election in February," she said. The Virginia
Democratic presidential primary will be held Feb. 10.
Fairfax
purchased nearly 1,000 touch-screen voting machines last year from Advanced
Voting Solutions of Frisco, Tex., for $3.5 million. The devices, which resemble
laptop computers without keyboards, were used countywide for the first time in
November.
Fairfax
officials had promised that their machinery would perform well, citing a
battery of tests. They also predicted that the system would greatly speed up
the reporting of results. Instead, the new machines produced one of the slowest
vote counts in recent history as precinct workers struggled to transmit results
electronically. The problems mirrored many of those experienced by Montgomery
County when it switched to touch-screen machines in 2002.
The
Republican report cited dozens of e-mails and letters from precinct workers and
voters who described problems such as machines that repeatedly crashed, screens
that balked at registering votes and delays in tallying votes.
A
furor also erupted in Fairfax when Luca ordered that 10 machines that had
crashed at the polls be taken to the county government center for repairs -- a
move Republicans called illegal. At the time, the county had no policy for
dealing with machines that could not be repaired on site.
That
controversy prompted the GOP investigation and yesterday's report.
"The
laws have not kept pace with the technology, and nobody is at fault for that.
It just happens," said Christopher T. Craig, a lawyer for the county GOP
committee and a co-author of the study.
"There's enough questions about" the Fairfax elections,
said Del. J. Chapman Petersen (D-Fairfax). "It seems from my perspective
that there's definitely room for a more standardized procedure. In the
precincts in my district, machines broke down, lines were long . . . but a
primary issue for me is certainly security."
Petersen
said he would introduce a bill requiring the state Board of Elections to better
address security issues.
Maintaining
voter confidence in the machines should be the principal goal of any new
regulations, Cuccinelli said.
"Fairfax
County did not have sufficient procedures in place by any stretch of the
imagination to deal with this," he said.
©
2004 The Washington Post Company
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