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Voters will mark -- not punch -- ballots This close-up of a sample ballot for the Nov. 2 election shows the oval that Jackson County voters will fill in with pencil to indicate their choice. New system will scan page for choices By PETER WONG When Jackson County's 104,000 registered voters receive ballots for the Nov. 2 election in their mail starting Saturday, they will notice a difference. They will get paper ballots, instead of the punch cards they've gotten for more than three decades. But voters will be able once again to mark which candidate or what side of a measure they want -- and this time their choices will be counted electronically. "We are excited about this new technology," said Jackson County Clerk Kathy Beckett, who demonstrated it for reporters Tuesday. "It's like taking a machine-scored test. Basically, you are going to take a No. 2 pencil and fill in the oval next to your choice. "For the voters, we are trying to make voting easier than what they have had to put up with for the past three decades." Jackson County will be the 24th county in Oregon to convert to ballots scannable by an optical character reader. The cost of $167,385 was included in this year's budget -- about $1.61 for each registered voter -- and county commissioners approved a contract for the new system Aug. 11. Beckett said the change has been in the works for three or four years as more and more elections are conducted by mail. Oregon voters decided last year to require mail-in ballots for all elections, including primary and general elections that had been off-limits to mail-in ballots. Under the voting system that Jackson County has used since the May 1966 primary, voters punched their choices on cards tallied by a computer. The cards generally were not a problem in elections conducted at polling places, because voters could punch their choice next to the listing of their desired candidate or response. But some voters found them to be problematic in elections conducted by mail, because the cards required voters to match their desired candidate or response in the voter guide with the corresponding number on the card. With Jackson County's conversion from a punch-card to an electronically scannable paper ballot, only six counties in Oregon continue to use punch cards, four use hand-counted paper ballots and two use other machines. Josephine County made the conversion to the scannable ballot in 1991. It uses the same system from Elections Systems and Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., that Jackson County will use. "It's a voter-friendly system," said Georgette Brown, Josephine County clerk since 1983. "The fact that voters have to use pencils does not seem to have been that much of a problem. It has been working well for nine years." Brown said some voters mark their ballots in ink, but election boards assigned to inspect ballots before counting can spot those and process them. The optical character readers will tally paper ballots more slowly -- about 550 per minute -- than punch-card counters do at 1,000 per minute. But Beckett said handling the paper ballots will be easier, because election-board members will not have to look for shards of cardboard from incompletely punched cards. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA