New county vote scanners point to smoother election

BY MIKE FITZGERALD

Goodbye punch cards and hanging chads. Hello black felt tip pens and blank ovals.

This morning, St. Clair County voters will encounter for the first time the county's new optical scanning system. Instead of punching a ballot, voters will use a felt tip pen to fill in a circle next to the candidates or proposals ed. It's a process strikingly similar to what high school students do when they sit for their ACT and SAT tests.

The ballot is fed into a computer and the results are immediately recorded. This type of system is supposed to make tallying votes faster and more accurate, said Bob Delaney, the St. Clair County clerk.

"We're expecting the worst and hoping for the best," Delaney said. "I think we have done everything we could do, and my staff has done an excellent job. We know we'll have some problems, maybe in the morning, but the voters won't have a problem at all."

The East St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners rolled out a similar optical scanning system in 1997. But instead of improving the accuracy of voting, the new system led to a voter error rate that spiked elevenfold, from 1.17 percent in 1992 to a high of 13 percent in the March 2002 primary election the worst rate in Illinois, according to a University of Illinois research paper.

The difference between East St. Louis' optical scanning system and St. Clair County's?

The voting machines in St. Clair County are equipped with an error notification system. If a voter makes a mistake and votes for two candidates in the same race, the computerized tabulator "will kick the ballot back out and will not take it," Delaney said.

An election judge can then draw the voter aside, give him or her a new ballot and toss out the spoiled one, Delaney said.

In contrast, East St. Louis has no error notification system the reason why voters there suffer the highest error rate statewide, according to the University of Illinois researchers.

But that situation could change in the months ahead. East St. Louis election commissioners have agreed to apply for federal money to exchange the optical scanning gear for more state-of-the-art touch-screen computer machines when money for such an upgrade becomes available through the state.

The East St. Louis election board's agreement to apply for the money arose from its recent settlement of a federal voting rights lawsuit filed against it, as well as six other voting districts across the state, by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

Still, these plans could all become moot before the year ends. City leaders are pushing ahead with plans to scrap the state's second-oldest election board and turn its duties over to the St. Clair County clerk's office. They hope to place the measure on the November ballot.

Faced with a ballooning budget deficit, City Manager Robert Storman sees no choice but to pull the plug on the board, which costs the city $434,000 a year to operate.

Several other Illinois towns operate their own election boards, but East St. Louis' is the only one in the metro-east.

"It's one of our top priorities," Storman said of plans to scuttle the board.

Closing down the election board is not "going to change the election process here in East St. Louis," Storman said. "It's going to change the finances, that's all."

James Lewis, the election board's executive director, said the board should continue to operate as it has done since its founding in 1886.

The election board has proved its value through voter education programs, said Lewis, who took over as executive director in 1978, following a series of election scandals.

Voting problems revealed in the aftermath of the November 2000 presidential election led the ACLU of Illinois to file a pair of lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Chicago against East St. Louis and the city of Chicago, as well as Cook, Sangamon, Will and Whiteside counties.

The two lawsuits were settled late last year and approved by U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve, formerly of Belleville. The agreement calls for the defendants still using the old-fashioned punch-card ballots to replace them with better systems by the statewide primary election of March 2006. In addition, the State Board of Elections must seek money to buy the new systems.

The federal dollars will ultimately come from the federal government under legislation passed in 2002. Already the law has made a huge impact for St. Clair voters. The measure provided more than two-thirds of the $837,000 the county spent to buy optical scanning machines with error notification devices.