Editorial: Not broke; don’t fix it

Friday, Dec. 5, 2003 | 5:50 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

Dec. 6 - 7, 2003

Secretary of State Dean Heller has said he will decide this week on whether to force Clark County to replace its voting machines. He wants all the machines in Nevada to be provided by the same vendor. His reasoning is that uniformity would lower prices through bulk purchasing power, and that maintenance, training and operation would be simplified.

Diebold Inc., an international firm whose voting machines are used in many states, has offered to replace all of Clark County's Sequoia machines at no cost to the county. The company would take an initial loss, receiving only $12 million in federal election funds. But it sees profits in Nevada's growth.

The deal may make sense to Diebold, but it doesn't work for Clark County. Since installation of Sequoia machines in 1993 the county has developed a good reputation for its smooth elections. Voters find the machines easy to use. The county's voting-machine maintenance workers would have to be retrained. All-new training procedures would have to be adopted for poll workers. Voters themselves would have to be re-educated. New requirements under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 could be hard to meet on new, unfamiliar machines. Additionally, criticisms have been leveled, most recently in the New York Times, about the security of Diebold machines. In our view, any change of voting machines in Clark County at this late date jeopardizes the smooth running of next year's primary and general elections.