The paper chase: On the trail of new voting machines
Dolores Shelton brought the house down.
“The younger generation came out of the womb knowing how to do this,” the longtime Chester activist and poll worker said, jabbing the air as if she were navigating a cellphone. “Some of us have been out (of the womb) a long time so you need to keep things simple. It’s hard enough to get people to come out and vote.”
And what she said next brought applause, cheers and nearly a standing ovation at Tuesday afternoon’s public forum on voting machines.
“We need more help.
We used to work for nothing. Now when you ask someone to work the polls, the first thing they say is ‘How much does it pay?’” (Hint: not enough.)
It was amazing that County Council and the election board managed to get more than 200 people – standing room only in the County Council meeting room – to come out at 4 o’clock on a weekday afternoon for a discussion of voting machines.
Who knew anybody cared that much about what kind of machine the county chooses to replace our current touch screen system, especially since the ones being offered are so similar?
As the speakers soon revealed, the audience wasn’t really a cross-section of voters or the public.
Some were members of good government groups, like the League of Women Voters and Citizens for Better Elections, some were local Democratic or Republican leaders.
But many in the crowd were poll workers – the judges of elections, machine operators and clerks who check you in when you go to vote.
Perhaps the election bureau beat the bushes to get them to turn out for the event.
If so, that’s fine. Poll workers may have a higher stake in the choice of new machines than the voters, and they know a lot more about the nuts and bolts of how to run an election.
These are the people – and in the last few years I have occasionally been one of them – who sit there at precinct tables upwards of 15-16 hours on election day, opening and closing the machines, keeping the lines moving, manning the poll books and resolving registration issues.
They do that, sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs, for
$95 for the day, or as Bethel’s Bob Casey put it, “pennies on the minute.” It is very hard to recruit enough people to do that on a workday.
I went to the hearing Tuesday fearful we would be told that we will not be getting new machines before the next presidential election after all and that we all might as well go home.
That’s because Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf had just vetoed a $90 million spending bill to help the counties fund the purchase of new machines after Republican legislators tacked on a provision banning straight ticket voting – pushing a button or marking an X in a box to vote for an entire party slate at once.
I get the Republicans’ reasoning. In the 2018 midterm election, Democrats voting straight ticket for congressional candidates in the new court-ordered congressional districts pulled several down-ballot state senate and representative candidates along with them.
Another election like that could give Democrats control of the state Legislature.
Regardless, our predominantly Republican Delaware County Council and predominantly Democratic county election board both seem firmly committed to buying new machines.
The county’s appropriation of
$7 million is not nearly enough, so many of us in the audience were relieved to hear that Democratic Gov. Wolf intends to pursue a $90 million bond issue by executive order to fund the new machines. (The Republican-controlled Legislature will fight that tooth and nail, of course.)
After the Russians tried to hack election systems in 21 states in 2016, federal and state agencies both required Pennsylvania counties to have machines that leave a paper trail and are unhackable.
All five of the certified systems on offer do those two things. Delaware County’s current touch-screen system does not. Its “paper trail” is merely a tape that records each vote cast on the machine, but there are no ballots to recount to determine if the tape is accurate, if votes were not recorded or if the machine was rigged beforehand.
The new systems all use paper ballots, whether you hand mark them or whether you use a “ballot marking device,” which is a touch-screen like our current machines but which then spits out a printed ballot.
Many of the poll workers who spoke Tuesday said they want only BMDs because they are the most similar to our current system. They’re thinking about the logistics, and they know a major change in the voting process could cause chaos.
But going with only BMDs, as Philadelphia has done, will be a great deal more expensive because those machines are more costly than privacy tables and scanners (and more costly to replace down the road).
The speakers raised several valid issues: privacy; paper jams; the number of ballots that must be printed for each precinct; potential long lines; storage space; additional furniture in already impossibly cramped polling places.
Whichever machines the county chooses, the hard-working folks at the election bureau will have to figure out solutions to all those issues.
Some speakers raised issues that are not very valid – people make terrible messes marking paper ballots; people won’t understand the new system; disabled people who need to use the BMDs will feel stigmatized.
I trust that people can figure out how to mark an X in a box and feed a sheet of paper into a scanner, that people with most kinds of disabilities can still manage a pen and paper, and that people will come out to vote if they believe their vote will count.
Dolores Shelton is right, keep it simple. You can’t hack a piece of paper.