County Wise To Spend This Money

Sat., Dec. 9, 2000

By Doug Floyd dougf@spokesman.com

With last-minute prodding, Spokane County commissioners agreed this week to spend $350,000 upgrading the county’s elections system.

None too soon. Spokane County is one of a shrinking number of jurisdictions still using the outdated punch-card system whose vulnerability to error and uncertainty has been on display in Florida.

But it’s not maverick chad that makes astute elections officials such as County Auditor Vicky Dalton eager for modernization. It’s the inconvenience to voters, the labor demands on election workers and the cumbersome logistics of preparing and distributing punch-card ballots within an unforgivingly narrow window on the election calendar.

The process is stretched so thin in Spokane County that, as Dalton would admit, she can’t swear to its integrity.

Matching absentee ballots with voter guides and envelopes now takes every available worker crammed into every square foot of the auditor’s antiquated space. And that’s with only a third of the county’s registered voters listed as permanent absentee voters. In some Washington counties it’s more than half.

No wonder Dalton went to the commissioners this week to lobby for the $350,000 they almost excluded. That money will allow the county to update and integrate the systems it uses to register voters, prepare ballots for 387 precincts and tabulate election returns. The optical scanning devices Dalton wants to buy will allow for readable ballots that voters can mark directly.

The improved technology will free Dalton and her staff to attend to other official responsibilities now being neglected because of elections demands. Conversion to optical scanning is only step one, however.

Step two - at an additional $1 million - should be equipment that scans and tabulates ballots right at the polls. Using such a system, Pierce County has been known to complete its election-night count 30 minutes after the polls close.

More important, poll-site scanners can alert a voter whose ballot would be tossed out because an accidental pencil mark looks like an overvote. That could eliminate hundreds of disqualified ballots.

Thanks to commissioners’ past frugality, Spokane County enjoys a budget reserve that allows consideration of sound investments. What could be a sounder investment than smoother elections, increased voter participation and the better democracy they produce?

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