New voting equipment to aid disabled

New voting equipment to aid disabled

BY JOHN ROSZKOWSKI
STAFF WRITER

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Krista Erickson of Mundelein is blind and has always needed help voting on Election Day.

"In the past, I'd have to bring somebody or ask an election judge to read the ballot and mark off who I wanted to vote for," she said.

Thanks to new accessible voting equipment, Erickson and other voters with disabilities will be able to cast ballots without help and maintain their voting privacy in the primary Tuesday. The new voting machines will available at all of Lake County's polling locations in the March 21 primary, as well as at early voting sites, and in Cook County's 2,400 precincts.

The federal Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in 2002, requires counties to have fully accessible equipment at every polling place by Jan. 1 of this year. In the suburbs, Lake, Cook and McHenry counties have purchased new equipment to comply with the law.

Lake County purchased 300 new ES&S AutoMark voting machines for each of the county's polling places at a cost of $2.2 million, most of which will be paid for by a federal grant.

Lake County Clerk Willard Helander said the new machines will allow voters with a range of disabilities to vote without assistance, including blind and visually impaired voters, and voters who have physical disabilities that make it difficult or impossible for them to a mark a ballot.

For blind voters, each AutoMark machine is equipped with headphones that reads the ballot questions and a Braille keypad for voting. Voters with limited vision, including elderly voters, can enlarge letters or change the type face on a touch screen and then vote directly on the screen, Helander said.

The machines also are equipped with gel pads which enable users to vote with their elbows or feet and sip-and-puff technology for quadriplegic voters who are not able to use the touch screen or touch pad.

"We're really pleased because we felt it was a really good system," said Helander.

Erickson served on a stakeholder committee, which included blind voters, voters with physical disabilities and election judges and workers, to test the new voting equipment and she believes it compares favorably to other voting systems that were considered.

"It allows voters with multiple types of disabilities to cast their ballots independently," Erickson said.

Cook County

Cook County will have new voting machines at all of its more than 2,400 precincts starting in the March primary. New optical scan and touch screen voting equipment will replace the punch card voting system the county has had since 1976.

Cook County Clerk David Orr said the county received about $24 million in federal grant money to replace the outdated punch card voting system with optical scan technology, as well as purchase touch screen equipment with the latest features for voters with disabilities. All of the new equipment was purchased from Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif.

Orr said the new voting machines will eliminate potential errors with the punch card voting process like those that occurred in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, and also offers greater privacy for disabled voters.

"We think both the touch screen and optical scan systems are very accurate," he said.

Optical scan technology, which is being tried for the first time in Cook County, has been used in Lake County since 2001. Unlike punch-card ballots, voters mark ovals next to the candidates they want on the optical scan ballot using a special marker. Ballots then are inserted into an optical scan machine, which can tell voters if they have inadvertently voted more than once for the same race.

Cook County's new touch screen equipment meets the latest requirements for voters with disabilities under the Help America Vote Act, including audio equipment for the blind and visually impaired, special keypads and other features for voters with physical disabilities or dexterity problems, said Scott Burnham, a spokesman for the Cook County Clerk's Office.