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Hillsborough Hauls Away Touch-Screen Machines

Tribune photo by JULIE BUSCH

Matt Brinkley, senior driver for Creative Recycling, and David McEachnie (left), manager at Creative Recycling, load up touch-screen voting machines from the Supervisor of Elections office Monday.

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By NEIL JOHNSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 10, 2008

TAMPA - Workers today started loading more than 3,000 touch-screen voting machines destined to be resold, disassembled or crunched into bits by a recycler as Hillsborough County begins changing how ballots are cast and counted.

The devices will be replaced by machines that scan and record paper ballots as part of a legislatively mandated change requiring a paper trail after elections.

The lack of a paper trail was a short-coming of the old machines that recorded votes on a computer card.

For Hillsborough, the change will cost roughly $3.2 million for the new machines after the Legislature voted in May that all counties using touch screens convert to the optical-scanning devices. The state will kick in an additional $2.5 million, Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson said.

The machines being hauled away by Creative Recycling of Tampa were 6 years old. The company has a state contract to dispose of 27,785 of the touch-screen machines in counties using them.

Of those, 3,730 will come from Hillsborough. The county will keep about 20 of the touch-screen machines. Some will be used March 25, when two precincts in the county take part in a special legislative primary election, and April 15 for the special legislative general election.

Johnson said he wanted to donate one to the county's history museum.

At the elections office on Falkenburg Road, the boxy touch-screen machines were loaded 24 to a pallet and trucked away.

The first step for the recycling company is to try selling the machines to states that still allow touch-screen voting.

Then, Creative Recycling workers will extract parts that can be resold, such as a thermal printer in each machine.

Any pieces that can't be sold will wind up shoved into a two-story-tall machine that will mash them into bits that will be separated and recycled.

The new optical-scan machines should be ready for voters in a Plant City election in April, Johnson said.

Voters countywide will use them in an Aug. 26 primary and the Nov. 4 general election.

The Legislature in May passed a bill requiring Florida counties using touch-screen systems to switch to optical scanners by July 1. The scanners read and record paper ballots with the voters' choices marked in penciled-in bubbles. The cards go in secure tubs after they're scanned and provide a written record of the voters' choices.

Along with the scanners will be new voting stations, where voters will fill out the paper ballots. They fold into containers that look like supersized pizza boxes.

The Legislature voted for the change after a hotly contested congressional election in 2006, when touch-screen machines in Sarasota County recorded far fewer votes in a race than the total number of voters. These were called "undervotes."

Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes in that race, but 1,800 ballots recorded "no vote."

The disputed results revived fears first stoked in the 2000 presidential election that votes were not being counted. After the Buchanan-Jennings flap, Gov. Charlie Crist backed calls for a ballot paper trail that would reassure voters.

The machines Hillsborough is disposing of were first used in the 2002 Plant City election and cost about $15 million. They were considered state of the art at the time.

About 38 counties opted to buy the optical scanners when computer punch-card voting was eliminated. Another 15 chose solely to use touch screens, and 14 decided on a combination.

Counties are allowed to keep some screen machines for visually impaired voters until 2012. After that, an audio system that works with the optical scanners must be in place.

Although the county will need fewer new machines because one is not needed for every voter casting a ballot at the time, the elections office will have to print the paper ballots and store them after the election. Election supervisors are required to keep ballots for 22 months after an election, Johnson said.

The change will also require the county to have a different method of counting absentee ballots.

Johnson has hired a public relations firm to teach voters how to use the new machines before the general election in November.

Johnson's office will pay about $40,000 to Tampa-based Schifino Lee Advertising & Branding to develop the education and public outreach campaign. Most of the money for the short-term contract will come from a federal grant under the Help America Vote Act.

Johnson said the new machines resolve the lingering problem of a paper method to verify votes.

"The issue is confidence. The issue is a paper trail. That wasn't going to go away," he said.

Still, without the legislative mandate for a paper trail, the county probably would not be getting new machines now.

"I don't think I would have initiated this expenditure at this time," he said.

Reporter Neil Johnson can be reached at (813) 259-7731 or njohnson@tampatrib.com.

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