Posted by David Kidwell at 4:25 p.m.
New vote-counting software in Chicago and Cook County is raising anxiety among elections officials who remember the lengthy delays that resulted when electronic voting debuted in 2006.
While election officials are worried about what happens when the polls close, voters will be facing a new procedure tomorrow when they turn in their paper ballots. That’s because a new state law requires election judges to give voters a second chance if they don’t cast a vote in statewide races for such posts as governor, attorney general, secretary of state, comptroller and treasurer.
Elections officials are on guard because of the number of close races that might hang in the balance in tomorrow’s primary election if results from some precincts are late.
The software upgrade — designed to end a late-night backlog in counting votes — has been fully tested in a mock election with no glitches, said Jim Allen, spokesman for Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
“Any time you roll out new software there is possibility of a wrinkle you didn’t or couldn’t test for,’’ Allen said.
The software was developed by Sequoia Voting Systems to enhance the electronic vote tabulating systems it rolled out in Cook County and Chicago in March 2006. That year, it took embarrassed elections officials into the weekend to count all the votes following a series of software glitches, hardware failures and human foibles.
That prompted elections officials to threaten to withhold millions in payments to Sequoia and hire independent experts to analyze equipment and software. Since then, elections have run much more smoothly.
The new state law, designed to curtail the number of accidental "under votes", means the scanning machines this year will automatically spit out any ballot that does not register a vote in a statewide race.
Elections judges will then inform the voter of the under vote, and give the voter the option to cast the ballot as is, or to change the ballot.
For those voters who opt to use electronic touch screens, there will be no change. The computer will flag voters to any races in which a vote was not cast.
In suburban Cook County more than 60 percent of people voted on touch screens in the last election. In Chicago only about 15 percent used touch screens, according to elections officials.
Allen said elections judges have been fully trained on the new under vote procedure and he does not expect any delays in the primary election, only questions from voters.