Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
Rouverol celebrated his 83rd birthday on an airplane to West Palm Beach, Fla. His partner Harris had long since passed away, and Rouverol had been called to Florida to tell state and federal elections officials why tens of thousands of chads had stayed partially attached to paper ballots.
"I hadn't really been connected to the Votomatic in a couple of decades," Rouverol said. "[But] I decided to go patriotic and help straighten out the elections problem."
Rouverol believes the hanging chad had two causes. The first was the punching mechanism itself. But only voters who don't see a bad punch lose their votes. So the second problem, Rouverol believes, is adequate light.
In a filing cabinet by the wall of his apartment, Rouverol keeps photocopies of several articles from Florida newspapers. A chart prepared by the Miami Herald shows voting errors made on each brand of voting machine used in Palm Beach County. One type of error, the "undervote," was about as common on the Votomatic as on touch screens and bubble-in ballots. Undervoting occurs when a scanner doesn't register a vote for a particular contest because a chad remains attached to the ballot by one or more corners, because it is only pricked or dented, because the scanner makes an error, or because the voter simply chose not to vote. Undervotes on other punch-card machines used there were more than a percentage point higher.
After the Votomatic's patent expired in 1985, other companies moved in with cheaper imitators. Several, including the leading imitator DataPunch, economized by leaving off a lamp that Rouverol and Harris had designed into the Votomatic. Rouverol believes many voters using these machines may have missed their errors more often than Votomatic users.
"I was disappointed that the cheap knock-offs were giving the Votomatic a bad rap," Rouverol said.
Thinking that Votomatic error rates could be improved, too, he designed backlighting for it, called it the Verimatic, and applied for two patents.
But following California's lead, more and more states have banned punch-card machines. The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, promised federal money to counties that replaced them. To Rouverol's chagrin, the legislation doesn't take into account the error rates of specific punch-card systems.
"There was always someone who would've favored one machine over another," said Hilary Shelton, who, as director of the Washington office of the NAACP, weighed in as the act was being formulated. "The last thing anyone wanted to do was get into a discussion of individual manufacturers."
As a result, registrars are taking advantage of the federal subsidies to upgrade technology for counting and other functions, even where mechanical systems have clean histories, such in as Ventura County, Calif.
This fall, fewer than 20 percent of U.S. voters will use punch-card machines, according to Election Data Services.
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After nearly three months of waiting, Rouverol received a package containing the new steel template that he had designed to hold a voter's ballot. He sent the specifications to a Bay Area machinist in November and then waited, calling the machinist periodically to check his progress with the 8-by-4-inch wafer.
Like the plastic template he designed 41 years ago for the original Votomatic, the new one is filled with a grid of 300 small holes. The prototype has two layers, encasing the ballot like a sandwich. And its holes are only a hair's breadth wider than the stylus that plunges through them.
Rouverol is designing the VoteSure -- like the Verimatic -- to screw on to the stands that held the Votomatic up to waist level.
But its key difference with the old machines -- a new shearing mechanism similar in principle to that of a three-hole punch used in classrooms -- should eliminate hanging chads and will allow it to avoid bans on the old machines. California and most other states still allow "shear-card" machines, which, like Rouverol's, have styluses that cut a hole through the ballot, rather than knocking out a pre-scored chad.
One leading shear-card system, DataVote, bears the names of all the candidates and ballot measures, often forcing voters to contend with multiple ballot cards. Only about 6 percent of California's voters used shear-card systems in the March primary. Nearly half of these live in Ventura County, which plans next year to replace its DataVote system with one that scans pencil or ink marks.
In Rouverol's new creation, the 8-by-4-inch steel template rests on two plastic runners so that it covers an 8-by-4-inch opening in the top of the box. The voter inserts the ballot at the top of the template and between its two thin steel plates. A voter will know when the ballot is in all the way because its bottom edge triggers two 13-watt fluorescent bulbs in the box.
Rouverol is redesigning the tip of the stylus, too, enlarging it and giving it an edge that runs around the circumference of the tip.
When the stylus punctures the paper ballot, the edge along the tip whisks past the metal of the template, shearing the paper in a perfect circle. Rouverol plans to apply for at least two patents for the shearing function. He's also trying out "helical" shapes, which would allow the stylus to start two or more cuts on opposite sides of the circle.
The awaited parcel arrived in late February, a couple of weeks before the California primary. Rouverol snapped it into the green box and tried out the punching stroke. Punch after punch, the paper circles fell into the plastic box below. With a depth of 2 and a half inches, the box can collect chads for a longer time, Rouverol reckons, than the term of even the most forgetful registrar in Florida. He hopes to send at least a description of the VoteSure to the country's 3,285 county registrars before the November elections. For a few minutes each day, when he can put aside his distaste for political intrigue and rigged elections, he reworks his calculations and dreams of sending off prototypes of the machine next year.
And he believes he has fertile ground.
Touch screens, which cost from $3,000 to $4,500 each and were used by 29 percent of the nation's voters in this year's primary elections, have several drawbacks and potential dangers, critics say. After a year of news reports, academic studies and conspiracy theories warning of the danger of large-scale voting fraud, several touch-screen systems in Southern California broke down in the March elections, preventing hundreds of people from voting. The next month, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley followed a state panel's recommendation to ban the Diebold TSx touch-screen electronic voting system used by nearly 2 million voters in San Diego and three other counties.
Shelley required that 10 other counties reapply for permission to use their touch-screen systems. Three have successfully done so, and others may do so soon, but more than 4 million of the state's 15 million registered voters could still be affected. Diebold said it's still in discussions with most of the counties where its machines were decertified.
More importantly, all touch-screen machines purchased after Jan. 1 must produce paper receipts that can be used for a recount. After Jan. 1, 2006, all touch-screen machines must produce such receipts.
Makers of touch-screen machines -- such as North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, and Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software -- have protested that adding printers to existing systems would be prohibitively expensive and not necessarily helpful. But some counties aren't waiting. Solano County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, abandoned its $4 million contract with Diebold last month and plans to begin using paper ballots that its 170,000 voters will mark with pencil or ink.
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