No hitches, no glitches, and the best part — no chads.
Clallam County’s new digital-scan ballot-counting system made a flawless debut Tuesday, tallying ballots in levy elections for Port Angeles and Quillayute Valley schools.
Election workers Monday and earlier Tuesday had fed 8,450 ballots into “a standard, off-the-shelf Kodak scanner” in the words of Sheri Charleston, an account manager with Hart Intercivic of Austin, Texas.
At 8 p.m., the system reported totals instantaneously.
Charleston was on hand to walk election workers through the new process.
Hart Intercivic sold its computer system to the county last month for $181,632, all of which will be reimbursed by federal funds under the Help America Vote Act.
The act’s purpose was to eliminate punchcard ballots, whose shortcomings became legendary in the 2000 presidential election in Florida but which had proven relatively trouble-free in Clallam County over the years.
Slower tallying
The new system, in fact, is slower than the one it replaced. It scans about 200 ballots in two minutes.
The old method could count 1,200 punchcards in the same time, said County Auditor Cathleen McKeown.
Nonetheless, the new scheme is thought to be more user-friendly.
Voters needed only to fill in blank boxes on letter-sized ballots next to their choices, using black or blue pens.
No more must they poke out tiny pieces of punchcards, being careful not to leave any so-called swinging, pregnant or hanging chads.
The system works by taking a digital picture of each ballot and storing the images in credit-card-size “mobile ballot boxes.”
When it’s time to tally votes, the cards are inserted into a computer, and the Hart Intercivic hardware delivers a total immediately.