May 29, 2002 By Paul Sunyak 3 min read

Big voting precincts in Fayette County were most affected by a bookkeeping change instituted by the Fayette County Election Bureau for the May 21 primary, said bureau director Laurie Nicholson. The change eliminated the need for election bureau employees to file individual proof of voting cards in metal boxes traditionally sent to each voting precinct. Those cards were signed by the voter and by an election worker, who also assigned a voter number to the card.

While that system was time-honored, Nicholson said that preparing the cards in the metal boxes took five to seven days. She also said that individual cards were easily torn and were sometimes misplaced.

For the most recent election, precinct workers used a pre-bound book that allowed the names of nine registered voters to be displayed on a single page. Voters and election workers signed in appropriately marked spaces on the page, and the voter number was also affixed.

“It’s the same thing, just a different format,” said Nicholson. “It’s a lot simpler for us, and cheaper.”

Under the old system, it cost $1,400 to purchase the cards and another $4,150 for preprinting of pertinent information such as the voter’s name, address and party registration. The new system cost only $2,500, not counting $892 for a one-time purchase of reusable book-style binders to hold the pages in place.

“It’ll only be $2,500 per election (in the future),” said Nicholson, noting that the cost savings will exceed 50 percent. The old system cost $5,590 per election, mostly due to use of the more expensive individual cards, she said.

Both systems provide the election bureau only with a means of tracking who voted. Bar codes in each system allow the voter’s name to be scanned into a computer after the election, but neither system allows anyone to know for whom a person voted.

Nicholson said the new system allows for significant time savings for her staff. The books took only one-and-a-half days to prepare for the May 21 election, in contrast to the old system, where filling the metal boxes with cards took nearly a week.

While the new system worked well in smaller precincts, the lack of tabs in the alphabetized books led to delays at larger ones, where election workers had to thumb through more pages to find the voter’s last name.

But Nicholson said that tabs are on the way to eliminate that problem in the future. She said that election workers will then find it easier to locate, for example, voters whose last name begins with “D” or “S.”

“I ran out of time (before this election). I couldn’t do it,” said Nicholson. “It will get better.”