Second letter to the editor re write-ins

PhillyBurbs.com, letter to the editor of the Intelligencer, May 28, 2009:

Bucks machines get negative vote

To the Editor:

The assumption in your editorial, "Learning how to vote," that it is the responsibility of voters to know how to vote on a voting machine, is flawed. Tests of mental acuity, literacy or mechanical ability cannot be used to determine who can vote, and therefore, the voter cannot be required to know how to vote on a machine.
The Danaher voting machine we use here makes counting the votes easier for the election officials, but it places obstacles in the way of voters having their intended votes accurately counted.

The use of the write-in function is only one of the obstacles. The voters may not know that there are write-in instructions because they are on the left side of the machine, instead of next to the write-in mechanism itself, where voters might see them, if they are tall enough. If the voters do master the write-in function, after they finish pushing the buttons for all their candidates on the ballot, they also need to remember to push the "vote" button at the bottom of the machine to cast the ballot.

But the biggest problem with this voting machine is that there is no way to know if the voters' intended votes have been accurately counted, as there is no permanent paper record of these votes, external to and independent of the machine's software programming. Ironically, only the handwritten write-in votes can actually be seen and counted.

Bucks County commissioners need to discontinue the use of this Danaher voting machine and replace it with an easier and more accurate method of voting. Voters need to mark their votes themselves on a paper ballot so that a permanent record of all their votes exists for an accurate count, and recount if necessary.

Madeline Rawley
Doylestown

Letter to the editor re write-ins

PhillyBurbs.com, letter to the editor of the Intelligencer, May 24, 2009:

1 vote, 2 vote, 3 vote

To the Editor:

The problems with write-in votes in our recent primary were not, as the Bucks County Board of Elections and your recent editorial suggest, exclusively the fault of voters failing to follow instructions.

I attempted to write in a vote at my poll and followed the instructions to the letter. When the door lifted for me to enter my vote, a previous voter's mark was already there.

Attempting to rectify the situation, the judge of elections joined me inside the booth while speaking directly to the Board of Elections. He reset the machine as instructed, marked the paper indicating the reset, and we repeated the write-in process. This time when the door opened, the judge's signature was visible where my vote should have gone.

For my third attempt, I was led to a different machine, where I repeated the process again and was finally able to cast my vote. Meanwhile, the first machine was closed down as inoperable. It remained that way for at least an hour until the machine technicians arrived and replaced the paper-feed mechanism. When they tested the replacement, it also failed before any voter had been near the machine. They replaced it again with a third device before fixing the problem.

The electronic machines purchased by the county continue to have significant problems, especially with write-ins. And, of course, we still remain at the mercy of the software inside the machines - absolutely unable to verify whether the final vote totals accurately reflect the voters' actual selections.

What we still need is an optical-scan system employing paper ballots that are marked by the voters' own hands, counted electronically for efficiency and retained securely for recounts and random auditing of machine accuracy. Until then, we will continue to disenfranchise voters and frustrate their will in the birthplace of democracy. What an embarrassment.

And, for the record, I have no idea if I cast one or three votes for all the other races on the ballot last Tuesday, and no one else knows, either.

Neil Samuels

Doylestown Township

The writer is vice chairman of the Bucks County Democratic Committee.

Intelligencer re write-ins

PhillyBurbs.com: "Learning how to vote," Intelligencer editorial, May 22, 2009. ". . . The county's Danaher machines have come in for a lot of criticism because they don't provide a verifiable paper trail and are thought to be vulnerable to tampering. If brute force were required to open the write-in window, that would be another strike against the machines. But pushing a button to open the shutter doesn't sound too terribly difficult. . . ."

Note: This webmaster DOES have sympathy for those voters who were confounded by the Danaher machines when they tried to write in a candidate. This voter was likewise frustrated by the total absence of a user-friendly, intuitive interface. Commissioner Cawley likes to think of 25-year-old technology as tried and true. The fact is that 25-year-old technology is by definition obsolete. We've traveled light years since this machine was designed. The Danaher is a dinosaur.