You won't have Palm Beach County, home of Florida's bungled elections to kick around anymore.
That famous capital of post-election confusion, home to the butterfly ballot and the pregnant chad, announced Tuesday that it's spending $14 million to purchase some of the most sophisticated voting machines in the country.
The new machines are ATM-style touch screen systems that prevent over-voting, the cause of so many problems in the 2000 presidential election. They'll replace the county's antiquated punch-card systems, now as forgotten as Al Gore.
The new machines are made by Sequoia Voting Systems, which last year deployed its systems in Riverside County, California. Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County's elections supervisor, said that she chose the machines after visiting Riverside, which she described as demographically similar to Palm Beach.
"And I thought, 'If it's good enough for Riverside, it's good enough for me,'" she said.
And since it's good enough for LePore -- who, after green-lighting the butterfly ballot, was herself embattled during last year's election imbroglio -- touch-screen systems will likely now get a lot of attention from other elections supervisors in Florida, which has become the new battleground for the future of voting.
One of the main reasons for going with the touch-screen system, LePore said, was its cost effectiveness. Although these machines are initially more expensive than the optical scanning machines that use paper ballots, they do not require new ballots printed for each election, which saves money in the long run, LePore said.
Also, the touch-screen systems are easier to manage in a big county like Palm Beach, where last year there were more than 100 ballot styles. (Ballots vary for voters depending on where in the county they reside.)
With the touch-screen machines, voters are automatically presented with an appropriate ballot when they log into the machine. Then, LePore said, it's all self-explanatory.
"There's a circle next to each candidate's name, and when you touch the screen, the other circles disappear and a check mark appears in the circle. You keep going page by page. When you get to the end, there's a review screen that'll show you how you voted. You also have a chance to go back and change it if you want."
There's also an audio-enabled version of the system for the visually impaired, she said.
When the polling place closes, an election worker collects a flash memory cartridge from each of the voting machines, and they're all transported to a central location in the county for counting.
So, there. Palm Beach's elections will now be more technically sophisticated than Silicon Valley's, and LePore sees that as a good result of last year's troubles. "With everything bad, something good happens," LePore laughed.
