Miami-Dade County officials are leading the charge to overhaul the state's voting process. A contract inked with Election Systems & Software (ES&S) provides for the purchase of 7,250 iVotronic touch-screen voting units, four Model 650 central count tabulation machines and related election software and support services.

The contract is worth US$23.7 million and is the company's largest agreement to date, ES&S vice president Steve Bolton told Wireless NewsFactor. ES&S claims it is the largest single purchase of election equipment in the history of the U.S.

Tabulations Sent Wirelessly

Bolton said that the iVotronic system uses CDMA (code division multiple access) and CDPD (cellular digital packet data) wireless technology to send the tabulations from ballots to an elections board or central election site.

"The iVotronic terminal holds the results from thousands of individual ballots, the data is collected from each precinct on a memory device and is then sent to the central election office," Bolton explained. The modem technology, provided by Sierra Wireless and Novatel, is still under development, he said.

Voters with Disabilities

The iVotronic device, weighing just 14 pounds with a 15-inch diagonal screen, is portable, wireless and multilingual. An Audio Ballot feature enables the casting of ballots by visually impaired voters, and its portability allows curbside and wheelchair-access voting, the company said.

To ensure the accuracy of voter intent and ballot correctness, ES&S said, the machines prevent over-voting and alert the voter of under-voted races.

The Model 650 central tabulator scans paper ballots up to 19 inches in length at a speed of over 300 ballots per minute, which is considerably quicker than the painstaking hand-counts conducted in the last presidential election, and will be used for paper absentee ballots, the company said.

Punching Out Punch Cards

The ES&S hardware and software replaces Miami-Dade County's infamous punch-card voting system, currently used by some 918,000 registered voters, and meets a mandate from the Florida legislature that all punch-card systems in the state be upgraded to either touch-screen or optical-scan units by September 2002.

"The iVotronic is the first touch-screen voting device officially certified in Florida, and the only such unit formally approved by the state for voters with disabilities.

Our technology enables all voters, especially those visually impaired, to easily and correctly cast their vote in complete privacy," said Aldo Tesi, ES&S president and CEO.

Of the 41 Florida counties with plans to modernize their voting systems, 25 have chosen ES&S for the upgrades, Tesi said.

Complete Election Coverage

Omaha, Nebraska-based ES&S has supported more than 40,000 elections worldwide over the last 36 years. In the 2000 election year alone, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots. The company's hardware and software are used in all phases of the election process, including voter registration, ballot production, voting, vote tabulation and results reporting.

The touch-screen voting system earned rave reviews from elections officials Cuyahoga County, Ohio, during last fall's citywide primary in Cleveland, ES&S reported.

"Voters overwhelmingly enjoyed using the iVotronic voting system and do not want to go back to punch cards," said Thomas L. Jelepis, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Since its introduction in November 1995, the Votronic touch-screen voting system has tallied more than 1 million votes across the U.S., the company said. During the 2000 elections the system was used in Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia.