Mark Von Nida knew what he wanted to do, but building a consensus was something else. Who, after all, gives a hoot about boring election machinery?
Until 30 years ago, the voters of Madison County did fine with pens, scratching an "X" beside each of their favorite candidates' names. Voting machines nearly the size of refrigerators sped up the counting in 1970. But after just eight years, officials got tired of the hauling costs and hernia risks and switched to punch cards. Those were easily portable and reasonably fast to count.
That was the system Von Nida inherited when he became county clerk in 1997. The former administrator for the state's attorney, he maintained the clerk's office's reputation for superb public service while bringing his own keen eye for the details of making government work.
About a year ago, he was spending up to three nights a week on the circuit of Rotary and Kiwanis and church club meetings across his county of 260,000, trying to sell members on the considerable cost of switching voting systems yet again.
The established error rate of punch cards is about 4 percent. Von Nida wanted to convert to optical scanners, which are able to cut errors to one-half of 1 percent. They also report spoiled ballots instantly, so a voter can fill out another before leaving the poll. And their internal computers can even call in the results by telephone.
"The first thing people wanted to know was, 'Why change?'" Von Nida recalls. "The skeptics said we were doing just fine as it was." Maybe. But Von Nida saw savings in operating costs and something else. He figured that someday, somewhere, 96 percent would not be accurate enough.
So he got the momentum for the county to buy 188 optical units from Election Systems and Software in Omaha for about $800,000, then traded in the old punch card booths for a $150,000 credit. The money came from the Capital Outlay Fund, a county savings account used to cushion the taxpayer impact of large purchases.
The new system, tested on 15 union elections in the heavily blue-collar area, was simple: A voter takes a printed ballot to a privacy stand where a marking pen awaits to fill in ovals beside candidates' names. The voter carries the marked ballot in a paper privacy sheath to feed into a scanner, which looks like a fax machine.
When the 228 polls closed November 7 (with 180 machines and eight spares in use, some polls shared hardware) judges turned keys that shut off further balloting and revealed the candidates' totals. The ballots remained safely locked in the machines' bellies.
The immediate advantage seen on election night was that Von Nida finished processing 112,000 ballots by midnight; in 1996, it took until 5:30 a.m. to handle 92,000 votes on punch cards.
The more lasting advantage was seen later, after tough questions arose about the closeness of Florida's vote for president and the accuracy of its tallies.
In Madison County and Peoria and McHenry County and East St. Louis and other scattered jurisdictions in Illinois, voters knew with virtual certainty that their voices had been heard accurately.
Von Nida, a Democrat, figures Al Gore would have been president if everybody in Florida used these machines. But he doubts they're practical everywhere.
With punch-card systems, ballots need only be printed for every voting stand in the precincts. With optical scanners, every voter needs a ballot.
It is hard enough for Madison County to print nearly 200,000 ballots at the last minute, as was required last year by legal uncertainties of whether to include Ralph Nader. Von Nida figures it might be logistically prohibitive for larger jurisdictions to print millions that way.
The 2000 Florida election debacle may have deprived Von Nida of his personal choice for president, but it sure affirmed his foresight. "Now I think it's obvious to people why we needed to change," he says.
It's obvious enough, in fact, that some of those civic groups are inviting him back to talk more about boring voting machinery. "I think it's funny," he says. "It's not often that a county clerk is in this kind of high demand."
Patrick E. Gauen writes an Illinois column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
