Cook County Clerk David Orr today demonstrated the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100, a voting machine that will immediately tell Chicago and suburban voters in next Tuesday’s primary elections if they failed to vote for a candidate or voted twice in the same race.
While the machine has been used in past elections to count ballots, next week’s primaries will be the first time the clerk’s office has used a feature that allows it to detect improperly executed ballots, Orr said during a news conference at his office in the Cook County Administration Building.
Cook County Circuit Judge Julia Nowicki gave the go-ahead to election officials two weeks ago after the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and the Illinois Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in January to overturn a state law that forbids the use of that feature on punch-card systems.
The suit was filed as a result of the Nov. 7, 2000, election, when almost 50,000 ballots out of a suburban county total of 954,769 failed to register a vote in the presidential race.
Orr said that if the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100 had these voting protection features turned on in November, about 80 percent of those votes would have been cast. He estimated a fifth of all the uncounted ballots were cast by people who didn’t want to vote for any presidential candidate.
“Alerting voters to problems and giving them a second-chance opportunity to mark their ballot correctly will dramatically reduce the number of intended, yet unregistered votes,” he said. “All of this stuff . . . would have been avoided.”
The basic system for voting remains the same. The change comes after the voter hands the ballot — wrapped in protective sleeve — to an election judge. Instead of dropping the ballot in the box, the judge will feed it through the machine, which will automatically scan the ballot. If it detects that the voter failed to vote for a candidate or voted twice in the same race, the machine will return the ballot to the judge.
If two candidates were chosen for the same race, the voter has the chance to destroy the ballot and revote using a new ballot. If no candidates were chosen for some races, a voter can take the ballot back to the booth and look for races in which he or she may have failed to vote. A voter can then cast a vote in that race or just return the card to the judge.
Orr said his office is holding extra training sessions before next Tuesday’s primary to teach election judges how to use the new feature. Extra staff from the clerk’s office also will be on hand during the primary to answer questions, Orr said.
The clerk’s office also has mailed to eligible voters instructional pamphlets detailing the new procedures. Orr said the ballot card has been redesigned to make it easier to read and to offer instructions in Spanish. He also is pushing for election judges to encourage voters to practice on a sample ballot before entering the voting booth.
Orr said he hoped Nowicki would allow the new voting protections to be used in the April elections. He also wants the General Assembly to pass legislation approving the permanent use of the protections, something it has failed to do in the last two years.
The machines will be used in primaries in Berywn, Cicero, Hoffman Estates and Thornton Township as well as the 17th and 37th Wards in Chicago.
