Voters will put new system to test June 6

By Sarah Lunsford

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Posted: Monday, May 29, 2006 7:49 PM CDT

This election will be one of transition for Calaveras County’s 26,900 registered voters.

The Help America Vote Act passed by the federal government in 2002 required new voting systems to be put into place as well as providing provisional voting rights, among other changes.

The most visible of the changes is the new voting system that will allow county residents to make sure there are no inaccuracies on their ballots before turning them in to be counted. Voters will be able to review and make changes to their ballots up to three times.

The new optical scanning voting system, from Election Systems & Software, automatically counts and tabulates votes as individuals insert their ballots into the precinct ballot counter at their polling sites.

The county elections department has been making a concerted effort to introduce voters to these new machines. The optical scan system the machines use is similar to the fill in the bubble scantrons used by many schools and universities for testing purposes.

“They (the public) were very positive about the machines,” said Calaveras County Clerk Recorder Karen Varni about the time her department recently spent at the fair registering voters and introducing them to the new voting machines.

All polling places must have at least one voting machine that is tailored to the needs of those with disabilities so they can freely participate in the democratic process.

The county has purchased AutoMARK terminals designed for disabled voters. These terminals feature a touch screen along with audio instructions for voters.

The new system comes with a hefty price tag, $282,831. This was paid through HAVA and does not come out of the county’s budget.

The Act requires provisional ballots to be available at polling places for those whose names are not on the voting roles. A provisional ballot is the same as a regular ballot its status is considered pending until the election official can determine the voter’s eligibility to vote. When a voter’s eligibility is determined, then the ballot is cast.

Today is the last day that the elections department will accept applications for absentee ballots. Those who want an absentee ballot can hand deliver their application to the elections department by 5 p.m.

New voter information pamphlets, also known as sample ballot pamphlets, were mailed out to all registered voters in the county because some of them may have contained incorrect information.

For example, the sample ballots in some of the mailings will be for supervisorial districts that the recipient is not eligible to vote in, and some contain incorrect polling places.

The correct polling location for Mokelumne Hill is the Hotel Leger and the correct polling location for Murphys is the Masonic Hall.

The voter information guide and the regular ballots are outsourced to two different printers for printing and mailing to voters.

Varni said the November 2005 voter database file was incorrectly pulled by the printer when it generated the voter information guide which caused the wrong information to be included on some voter’s pamphlets.

The absentee ballots have not been affected by this, said Varni. All of the absentee ballots are correct.

Voter lists are updated constantly. When the Elections Department receives any new information about a voter, whether they have moved into or out of the area, or changed their party affiliation, those changes are entered into the system and the system is updated within 24 hours.

The printer will pay for the reprint and resending of the pamphlets.

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