By Paul Nyberg

Town Crier Publisher

Electronic voting is on its way to Santa Clara County, possibly meaning fewer absentee ballots and quicker vote counts, according to Kathryn Ferguson, Santa Clara County Register of Voters.

Ferguson, speaking at a League of Women Voters-sponsored April 24 appearance in the Los Altos main library, said she has had extensive experience with electronic voting machines before coming here. She implemented a countywide electronic voting system from punch cards in 1996 in Las Vegas. She also developed early voting programs in San Antonio, Texas, and Las Vegas.

Ferguson told an audience of about 35 that electronic voting would be tried this fall with polling booths in shopping malls for early voting. According to Ferguson, this could eventually draw both absentee and Election Day voters into voting early at their convenience. Holding the number of absentee ballots down could result in earlier election results, she said, since they delay the counts significantly in larger counties.

In Texas, where Ferguson implemented the first mobile and retail voting program in the nation in 1992, nearly 220,000 voted early in the general election in San Antonio.

The old punch card system is difficult for the voter to use, Ferguson said, but it is inexpensive and can be effective with proper voter education and procedures. She added that Secretary of State Bill Jones has been pioneering the use of electronic voting machines in California and that Riverside County is now 100 percent electronic.

Electronic touch screen machines would prevent “overvoting,” or voting for more than the allowed number of candidates in a race, thereby losing that vote. The computer would not allow the voter to cast a vote for more than the allotted number of candidates in each race, Ferguson said.

Likewise, the registrar said it could minimize unintentional “undervoting” - voters completely skipping certain races or propositions on the ballot - by presenting a summary of the race selections and the races not voted at the end of the ballot. Voters would then have the opportunity to go back and make a selection in any race they had skipped.

However, Ferguson pointed out many “undervotes” are intentional. She said that in Liz Kniss’s 5th district supervisorial race this past November, there were 30,000 undervotes alone, meaning no vote for any candidate. She said that the voting tends to fall off as voters progress farther down the ballot.

Ferguson got her start working for NASA. She recalled with amusement that it was so long ago, her official job title was “computress.”