Nearly every day, Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said she gets e-mail alerts containing articles and reports that counties and states across the nation are having trouble with touch-screen electronic voting machines.

As the Nov. 4 presidential election draws nearer, many jurisdictions are scrapping their machines, and in a work session this month, the Boone County Commission asked Noren about the reliability of this county’s voting system.

Noren said states having the most problems - Florida, Ohio and California - purchased equipment in 2001 and 2002, before paper trails were a part of the technology. By 2004, there was a tremendous push for paper trails.

Boone County purchased its equipment in 2006 from Election Systems and Software, or ES&S. "Jurisdictions that purchased in 2006, their equipment had paper audit trails as ours does," Noren said.

Boone County uses a combination of optical scanners and touch-screen voting machines at each polling place. Optical scanners read and tally paper ballots.

Noren said she has been active at the national level, even testifying before Congress, to delay the mandate for electronic voting machines until federal testing requirements were in place. "Nothing has yet been certified through a testing program that" the Help American Vote Act, or HAVA, "envisioned," she told the commission.

Noren said she keeps up with new information and conducts extensive tests on the machines throughout the year.

Laura Egerdal, communications director for the office of the Missouri secretary of state, said any machine approved for use in Missouri must meet state standards for security, accuracy and disability access.

Noren said many jurisdictions in other states are switching from using only electronic voting machines with no voter-verified paper trails to configurations similar to what Boone County has. In federal elections, HAVA mandates at least one touch-screen machine at each polling place.

Egerdal said even though electronic voting machines have been used in Missouri since 2006, the November election will draw out first-time voters and people who only vote every four years. She believes more Missourians will be using touch screens than ever before.

To shore up voter confidence, Egerdal said Secretary of State Robin Carnahan recently increased the post-election, hand-counted audit from 1 percent of randomly selected precincts to 5 percent.

Recently, Noren and her staff worked through a recount using ballots in the Democratic primary for attorney general, where hand-marked ballots tallied with the optical scanner and voter-verified paper trails from touch-screen machines were counted by hand.

"The touch screen matched exactly," Noren said of the hand-counted paper trail votes. A few of the optical-scan ballots had scratch outs or other abnormalities that Noren said were counted for a candidate after they were inspected by hand. "Out of the 14,000-plus ballots we counted, there were only four ballots that in hand inspection they decided would count for a candidate," she said.

Noren has said from the beginning that there needs to be better standards for design and testing of electronic voting machines, but she told the commission the county machines are tallying accurately.

"Am I thrilled with the equipment? No. Is it counting votes better? Yes," Noren said at the work session. "They are more accurate, no question. … The chance of a voter making a mistake on" a touch screen "is much less. No votes changed on touch screens with the recount. We’re counting votes much better than eight years ago."

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