


City Studies Plan for New Voting Machines


Story by: Mel Sacher


Date Published to Web: 10/17/2003


With national attention riveted on how chads in Florida have thrown the nation into an electoral morass, Alderwood officials are thinking about ditching punch-card machines and spending $1 million on the newest in paperless technology.  

The mayor and three of the five members of the City Council say the city needs to upgrade its voting machines, although they said any move might have to be made in small, more affordable steps.  

"You can't keep the same system after what we've been through," said Alderwood Council member Raul Martinez

Martinez briefed his colleagues about the city's creaky election machinery. He also reported on an experiment at nine locations with 38 high-tech voting gizmos called touch screens. 

They can count in seven languages, talk to blind people and spit out answers faster than a politician's spin machine. 

Many computer scientists strongly urge caution. 

They vehemently debate the vulnerability of electronic voting to tampering, but election officials say the machines have won voters' trust.  Conceivably, the city could slog along with its punch-card Votomatics, Martinez said. "But I don't think voters would stand for it. This is a national issue now," he said of election methods nationwide. 

If financing appears and no other major obstacles arise, Martinez thinks they could outfit the entire city with touch screens by 2004. 


