Oct 17, 2018 3 min read

Replacing Washington County’s voting machines is projected to cost between $2.2 million and $4.7 million, but the county commissioners learned Wednesday that they will be receiving just $235,526 from the federal Help America Vote Act security upgrade and state funds.

The rest of the tab for voting systems with a paper trail will be picked up from county funds, said commission Chairman Larry Maggi, who is also in charge of the county election board.

Commission Vice Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan called the purchase “another unfunded mandate. We never had a problem with hanging chads.”

Florida’s use of punch cards in the 2000 presidential election caused a weeks-long delay in deciding the contest between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, who was ultimately declared the victor by the U.S. Supreme Court.

After that fiasco, manufacturers would no longer support the punch card system that Washington County voters had used since 1981, when printed paper ballots went by the wayside.

Washington County’s 12-year-old direct-recording electronic voting machines, which Maggi said are nearing the end of their life expectancy, may be used Nov. 6 for the last time.

The devices purchased from Diebold Election Systems for $1.8 million lack a backup paper trail to secure and verify results. Eighty-four percent of the cost was borne by federal HAVA funds.

Elections Director Larry Spahr did not have to apply for a grant this time around to buy new voting machines because the money made available to the county is based on the percentage of voters in Washington County in relation to the total number of registered voters statewide.

“The state contributed a small amount to the federal allocation to get that total and determine the ratio,” Spahr said.

The cost of electronic devices has escalated in the intervening dozen years.

The costs of replacing voting equipment next year range from about $2.2 million for Clear Ballot Group Inc., about $3.8 million for Election Systems & Software, and $4.7 million for Dominion Voting Systems, according to Spahr.

The size of devices that incorporate both a touch-screen and optically-scanned ballot will increase the county’s warehouse storage and hauling costs.

Maggi said he’d like to see new equipment deployed during the May 2019 primary, while Spahr said the target may actually be the general election of that year.

In Pennsylvania in 2006, the year that Washington County purchased its touch-screen voting system, optical scanners were the only computerized voting system certified by the state that permitted the use of a voter-verified paper audit trail.

In an interview with the Observer-Reporter that year, then-Gov. Ed Rendell cited the high cost of devices with a paper trail as one reason the state wasn’t requiring them. He also said the technology was “not ready,” although it was being used outside of Pennsylvania.

Spahr emphasized that although election results are made available over the internet by the county’s information technology department, neither the voting machines currently in use nor those under consideration have internet access that could be subject to hacking.