Touch screens to aid disabled voters next year

11/04/2005

Start Tribune
Last update: November 3, 2005 at 11:45 PM

Next year’s elections will mark “a major leap forward” for Minnesotans’ voting rights, thanks to technology allowing almost all disabled people to cast ballots privately and independently for the first time, Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer announced Thursday.

Kiffmeyer’s office has contracted with a Nebraska firm to provide touch-screen voting terminals to counties at about $5,000 apiece. With $35 million in federal grants footing the cost, every polling place in the state will be able to meet a requirement of the U.S. Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for at least one such machine in 2006, Kiffmeyer said.

The AutoMARK Voter Assist Terminal from Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., lets the visually impaired hear ballot choices through headphones or see them in enlarged type on a video screen. Selections can be made by touching the screen, operating a keypad or, for the severely disabled, “sipping” or puffing on an air tube.

Kiffmeyer said the new technology will reduce ballot errors in half of Minnesota’s 4,108 precincts—mostly in rural areas that are home to 20 percent of the population—that have continued to use old-fashioned paper ballots counted by hand.

Polling places in the Twin Cities area will still have optical ballot scanners for most voters, but each will have at least one of the new machines for the disabled, she said.