HARRISBURG, Pa. - Pennsylvania officials on Thursday barred three counties from continuing to use a touch-screen voting system that apparently contributed to a larger-than-usual undercount in the November election.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortes said officials do not believe votes that were cast but not counted on the UniLect Patriot direct recording electronic voting system would have changed the outcome of any of the races in Mercer, Beaver and Greene counties.
Still, he said, "there are enough problems with this system that in our estimation it's in the best interests of the voters" to stop using it immediately.
The decertification of the UniLect machine came barely a month before this year's May 17 municipal primary election.
It was not immediately clear how voters in the three western Pennsylvania counties, the only ones in the state using the Unilect system, would cast their ballots. Elections officials in Beaver and Greene counties declined to comment, and officials in Mercer County could not immediately be reached.
Pennsylvania's decertification comes after a growing number of federal and state legislators expressed doubts about the integrity of the ATM-like electronic voting machines. At least 40 million Americans used paperless voting terminals to cast ballots in November.
Computer scientists have criticized touch-screen machines as not much more reliable than home computers, which can malfunction and fall prey to hackers and viruses. At least 20 states introduced legislation last year requiring a paper record of every vote cast.
The UniLect Patriot system also was blamed for lost votes in two North Carolina counties last year.
Officials at UniLect Corp. headquarters in Dublin, Calif., did not immediately return a telephone message. Its Web site did not say how many states use the Patriot system.
Pennsylvania's 67 counties, which run the state's elections, use six different voting methods, including two other touch-screen systems made by other manufacturers, lever machines, optical scanners, punch cards and paper ballots.
Cortes said his decision to decertify the UniLect system stemmed from a Feb. 15 re-examination of the system that had been requested by some citizens from Beaver County. In those tests, the touch-screen devices failed to sense finger touches and also froze up at times.
A separate study by researchers at Grove City College indicated that the "undercount" - the difference between the number of voters who cast ballots and the total votes counted - in the presidential vote was substantially higher in those counties than the 1.5 percent average for a group of 24 rural counties. The undercount was 7.3 percent in Mercer County, 5.3 percent in Beaver County and 4.5 percent in Greene County, according to the study.
"When the numbers become that high, then the system becomes suspect," Cortes said in a telephone interview Thursday.
I wonder if this is the same system used in the Ohio and Florida counties which had results so at variance with the exit polls? Just a thought...
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