Day of reckoning in Guilford County

A New Voting System for Guilford County

Date of Forum: January 12, 2006
Time: 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Place: County Commissioners Meeting Room
2nd Floor
Old Courthouse building
301 W Market St
Greensboro, NC

This will be ES&S showing off their TS and OpScan systems. George Gilbert has made it clear that he will disregard the voter's wishes and buy the more expensive TS systems rather than the cheaper, more reliable Optical Scan systems.

This will be your chance to express you opinion to the Guilford Co. Board of Elections who can overrule Gilbert's folly. Mike Jim Pfaff, the board member who has viciously attacked voting machine activists as "spammers" and "Luddites" might be present, but is a lost cause being just as determined as Gilbert to embrace pricey and unreliable technology. The key to this vote are the other two board members James Turner and Thaddeus Warner.

We would like to use only OpScan in Guilford Co., but unfortunately, vendors (including ES&S) have crippled their OpScan systems so that they can only handle a limited number of ballots. This means that during early voting (which makes up about 30% of Guilford voters) it would be impossible to use OpScan since they cannot handle the over 400 ballots styles that are needed for early voting.

There are long-term solutions to this problem, but we are stuck with dealing with this NOW. The short-term solution is to use TS systems that produce a paper ballot in early voting, and OpScan on election day. I wish we could do it another way, but this is the only realistic scenario for Guilford County at this time.

This compromise limits the harm and expense of TS systems, while building a base for OpScan which will allow us to seek other solutions to the limitations of the OpScan system in the future, and phase out the TS systems.

Please take the time to come over and express your opinion on this matter and endorse this compromise solution.

While the big dog & pony show is Thursday, the actual vote will take place on Friday, January 13th, at 12:00 noon. If you can get away for this meeting, a show of support would certainly help. This meeting will be held at the BoE offices (same buidling as above), so it may, or may not, be open to the public. Regardless, we will be there, even if we have to stand in the corridors.