Voting machines ready

Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson stopped in Warren County Clerk Dot Owens’ office Thursday to display and demonstrate the optical-scanning voting machines that will be used here this fall.

Grayson’s aide wheeled in a waist-high black plastic case. Most of that is a bin into which paper ballots drop after they’re read. The actual scanner is a laptop-sized device on top. They brought sample ballots, with small rectangular boxes next to names for party straight-ticket and the presidential race.

Deputy clerks and two members of the Warren County Board of Elections - secretary Mary Stahl and new Democratic board member Harold Miller - looked on as Grayson described the machine.

Voters will be asked to completely fill the box next to the candidate of their choice. Pencils or pens can be used.

Miller asked what will happen if a box is only partially filled.

“It looks to me like that would be a problem for some people,” he said.

The machine successfully reads those “99 percent of the time,” Grayson said. If it can’t, clerks can still count the paper ballot by hand, he said.

Owens said the machine will take unmarked ballots or those that it can’t read, marking them as “undervotes.”

“The only way it’ll reject it is if it looks like you’re voting for two or three people in the same race,” she said.

If a ballot is rejected and returned to the voter, that person can get a replacement from poll workers, Owens said.

The machine not only tallies the vote and keeps the paper copy, it scans a double-sided image as a backup, Grayson said. Owens said that since the actual scanning goes so quickly, people can fill out their ballots anywhere in the voting room and feed them all through one machine.

Counties are phasing out old voting systems, but Warren County will still have the handicap-accessible eSlate electronic screen machines available in each precinct, Grayson said. Those and the new scanners, called eScans, are made by the same company. That should simplify and speed clerks’ vote-counting, he said.

“The machines work very well together,” Grayson said.

At a secretary of states’ conference last week, Grayson said, he was told that by 2012 Congress will probably require all elections to leave a paper trail.

Jefferson County has used paper scanners for 20 years, and probably half of all voters in the country will use such machines this fall, he said. Seven Kentucky counties used paper-ballot scanners in this year’s primary, and about 30 are expected to this fall, Grayson said.

“The voters really liked it, the poll workers liked it,” he said. “It really went better than we hoped.”

Owens said the machines have already been used for local absentee ballots, with no problems.

The machines’ cost will be reimbursed by the state, through federal funds from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, Grayson said. The $4,500 price for one machine is available for each precinct, he said. Almost every county has signed a contract to get money for this over the next two years, Grayson said.