Elections chief confident tallies will be accurate

This is the ninth in an occasional series of stories exploring Hawai'i's poor voter turnout and solutions for change.

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer

State elections officials insist that Hawai'i has among the most secure ballot handling and counting systems in the country, and most of those on the outside seem to agree, although some want fine-tuning.

State Sen. Colleen Hanabusa (D-Nanakuli, Wai'anae, Makaha) wants an automatic recount after close elections, but she has been unable to push the legislation through the Legislature.

"I introduce it every year," she said. "An elections commission that studied it recommended that, but it is killed in the Legislature."

Hanabusa said that state elections officials and independent organizations such as the League of Women Voters concede that in mechanical counting systems, just as in manual counts, there is a margin of error — not every vote is properly counted.

"You've got to accept a certain amount of error, and that means every vote doesn't necessarily count. The only way to minimize this is to set a percentage — perhaps (races where the margin is) 1 percent — where an automatic recount takes place," she said.

Hawai'i is heading into its third election using a vote counting system from Election Systems and Software — the nation's largest vote-counting firm.

Bob Graham, the former director of Data Systems for the City and County of Honolulu, said he has seen no evidence of fraud or negligence in vote counting in Hawai'i, although he feels the system could be made even a little more secure than it is.

His recommendation is an automatic recount of the entire election rather than Hanabusa's proposal of recounting only close races. He would use a ballot-counting machine provided by a company other than the one that does the first count. It shouldn't be too expensive, he said.

But state elections chief Dwayne Yoshina said his office — using independent observers and representatives of the different political parties to ensure fairness — conducts numerous different kinds of checks and audits to guarantee the results are valid.

"We don't have an automatic recount, but we probably do more recounting than most states," Yoshina said.

Furthermore, said Yoshina's administrative assistant Rex Quidilla, "the integrity of the software is tested. The software and firmware is certified by an independent third party."

The biggest potential vote counting issue in recent elections came in 1998, when several precincts recorded unusually high numbers of overvotes. It turned out to be a simple problem — obscured lenses on the M100 vote counting machines made the machine see more black marks on the ballots than there actually were.

But when every single ballot in the state was recounted twice — once using visible light and once using infrared — the numbers changed slightly, but not enough to change the outcome of any race.

A special oversight committee made of state and federal officials found that the vote counting methods used in Hawai'i amounted to "an accurate and efficient system."

But the recounts that year would not have changed the election even if they'd found errors in deciding who won and who lost, since the counting took place long after the election results had been certified.

Since then, new programming has been built into the ballot readers so that they'll give an alert if they detect unusual patterns of overvotes, said Charlie Laramy, director of professional services for ES&S.

It is one of the several safeguards built into the counting system, which has been in place since Hawai'i moved away from punch-card ballots after the 1996 election.

The primary election ballot will be a sheet of heavy paper, 8 1/2 inches by 14, and voters will use black ink to fill in ovals next to the candidates' names. At the polling place, a voter will slide the completed ballot into a ballot-counting machine at the polling place.

The computerized card reader — an M100 from Election Systems and Software — will check the ballot. If the ballot is not marked or if there are overvotes in a race or candidates from more than one political party are marked, the machine will give the voter the opportunity to take the ballot back. Actual votes are recorded on a memory card locked into the M100.

At the end of election day, with observers from competing political parties watching, the memory card is removed from the machine and placed in a box with the ballots and the precinct pollbook. The box is padlocked, and with observers escorting, taken to the island's main counting center.

During the counting process, audit teams occasionally stop the process and run tests on the machines — running pre-counted ballots through the readers and checking the results to be sure the machines are tallying properly.

"I'm very confident in the results that we put out on election night," Yoshina said.

Yoshina said he is frustrated that the parties are not aggressively recruiting party representatives to work in the polling places and watch the balloting.

"If the political parties were really concerned about how we run the elections, they would be working hard to staff the precincts," he said. "They're not, and we're having trouble finding precinct workers."