Important voting changes for Hays County

OP-ED

Hays County is implementing two big changes to the way we vote. It has started the process to join the state’s Countywide Polling Place program (“Voter Centers”), and it is preparing to purchase new voting machines. If these plans are successful, our November 2019 election will use voting machines that have a paper trail, and on Election Day we will be able to vote in any polling place in the county.

If you take advantage of early voting, you don’t have to worry about which polling place to use. You can go to any early voting site in the county. The situation on Election Day is different. You have to go to the one polling place assigned to your precinct. Every Election Day, a substantial number of voters show up at the wrong location, causing delays and frustration. Voter centers will eliminate this problem. Election Day will be like early voting, but with many more county-wide polling places. You will be able to vote at whichever location is most convenient for you.

The new voting machine will be a “ballot-marking device.” This is also called a hybrid system, because you vote on a touch screen but it prints out a paper record of the voter’s choices. You feed that paper record into a scanner, which records your vote. Although the vote is still counted by a machine (the scanner), the paper records are available for post-election audits.

There are two important things to note about that paper record. First, it is not a full image of the ballot you saw on the screen. It only contains the candidates you selected. Second, it does not provide you a takehome record of your vote, as that would be illegal.

Some people will be disappointed that we are not adopting hand-marked paper ballots. However, the law that created voter centers does not allow this type of voting. The County’s planned course is the only way to get a paper trail together with voter centers. This is the best solution available under current law.

The new voting system will also eliminate a vexing source of error. With our old system, one poll worker printed out a paper tape that contained your “ballot style,” and another poll worker typed that identifier into the voting machine controller. Typing errors were not rare, and occasionally a voter would get the wrong ballot. With the new system, that ballot style identifier is captured with a hand-held scanner, eliminating human error.

In summary, these two changes will fix three problems that have plagued past elections:

1. We will have a paper record of every vote cast;

2. No voter registered in Hays County will be told that they are in the wrong polling place on Election Day; and

3. It should be exceedingly rare for a voter to get the wrong ballot style.

These are very encouraging developments. If you agree, contact your precinct’s County Commissioner and say that you support the voter center program and the new voting machines with a paper trail.

Robert Smith was formerly on the committee charged by the Hays County Commissioners Court with assessing the changes necessary for voting locally. The committee has since finished its work and therefore has been disbanded.