Mock Vote Draws 6,000 Ballots
by By DAVID BATES, of the News-Register
published 03/11/2008
With the click of a mouse, ballots printed on green paper started sliding into a scanning machine Monday afternoon for Tuesday's mock election.
As each ballot disappeared into the device, an image of it flashed on a screen in front of Yamhill County Clerk Jan Coleman. Unfortunately, they appeared badly smudged, making them virtually unreadable.
"We wanted to see what different colors would work," Coleman said, noting that in a partisan primary race, Republicans and Democrats would receive different colored ballots. "Green apparently isn't going to work."
The color test was just one aspect of a training exercise county elections workers are engaged in this week. Officials are using new equipment for today's election, one in which no actual people or issues appear on the ballots.
The county decided to hold the mock vote to give voters a chance to test-drive the new ballots and workers a chance to test-drive the new digital scanners and computers that will count them. That way, no great harm would be done if things went awry.
Officials made up elections pitting, for example, Marilyn Monroe against Paul Newman for county entertainment director. And except for the poor choice of ballot color, things seem to be going well.
"It's real slick," said Marsha Gabriel, a retired deputy clerk who returns to lend a hand during elections.
As of Monday afternoon, more than 6,200 voters had returned test ballots. About half of those were deposited in drop-boxes around the county.
That makes turnout less than 14 percent, which would be abysmal and embarrassing if it were an actual election. But given the nature of the ballot choice in their mock election, officials were pleasantly surprised to get that many.
It was enough to give the system a meaningful test, but not enough to overwhelm workers adjusting to a radically different way of doing things.
Officials have a representative of the manufacturer, Hart InterCivic, on hand to guide them through the process. And it's considerably quieter than the old process, which featured optical scanners that clattered loudly as they went about their work.
The county has received some complaints about the $10,000 cost of staging the election. However, officials noted the federal government will pick up much of the tab, an outgrowth of its drive to make American elections fairer and more efficient.
A critic who had researched Hart InterCivic online wrote Coleman to raise numerous questions about the company's track record and the process that led to its selection.
Coleman responded by saying the mock election was being conducted precisely so any problems can be identified and dealt with in advance, before a May primary likely to feature a neck-and-neck race between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, thus draw heavy turnout. She also invited the critic to come down and observe the ballot-counting if he wished.
"Elections have always been open to public observers," she said. "Observers merely are required to follow some simple procedures we have laid out so that they do not impede the progress of our workers or the security of the election process."