Deadline to complete installation of paper-trail component looms

Election workers will be 'pressed and stressed,' the board vice chairman said.
By DAVID SKOLNICK
VINDICATOR POLITICS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Mahoning County Board of Elections officials are concerned the time line for the installation of a required paper audit trail addition to its voting machines will be challenging as it prepares for the May 2 primary.
Election Systems & amp; Software, the county's election machine vendor based in Omaha, Neb., is supposed to start adding the paper-trail component to the county's 1,001 electronic voting machines April 1. The adjustments are supposed to take about a week with ES & amp;S employees working 12-hour days to get the job done, said Joyce Kale-Pesta, the board's deputy director.
Also, the board is supposed to have the ballots programmed on the machines and start delivering them to polling places by the second week in April, Kale-Pesta said.
Poll workers will start receiving training on a voting machine, similar to the ones used during elections except for its screen size, during the last week of this month. The voting machine was given to the board by ES & amp;S for the training.
"There is no question we'll be challenged, so keep your seat belts fastened," said Mark Munroe, the board's vice chairman. "It could be a bumpy ride. We need time to receive and inspect the machines and train workers for the May election. A lot of work needs to get done in a fairly short period of time."
Munroe is confident the staff will get the work done and be ready for the May 2 primary. "But we'll be pressed and stressed," he added.
Training
As part of the training, Kale-Pesta said, poll workers will need to know how to change the paper ballots.
Mahoning elections officials say they have urged ES & amp;S to make the voting machine adjustments earlier than April 1. An ES & amp;S spokeswoman said the company's goal is to finish the work in early April.
Mahoning is the only county of 88 in Ohio that needs the paper trail add-on for ES & amp;S voting machines, Kale-Pesta said.
State law, passed in 2004, required all voting machines in Ohio to have a paper trail. The paper trail add-on costs $640,640 -- $640 a machine. Also, the elections board bought 142 machines that comply with provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act from ES & amp;S at a discounted rate.
After equipment problems with its optical scanner/paper ballot voting system, the county bought electronic touch-screen voting machines from ES & amp;S in 2001 for $2.95 million.
Reimbursed
Shortly after the purchase, the federal Help America Vote Act was signed into law that reimburses counties most or all of the cost of buying new voting systems. The act was in response to problems with punch-card voting systems during the November 2000 presidential election.
Mahoning County's election system cost $3.81 million. The county received $2.8 million in federal funds for the system.
Trumbull County's purchase of 766 touch-screen voting systems, costing $2.07 million, was completely reimbursed through HAVA, said Kelly Pallante, the county elections board director. The county recently spent $202,500 to buy an additional 75 systems in order to comply with a HAVA mandate that there be one voting machine for every 175 voters, she said.
Columbiana County is using an optical scanner/paper ballot voting system this year for the first time. The $1.2 million cost of the system was fully reimbursed through HAVA, said Lois Gall, Columbiana's elections board deputy director.