WATERLOO -- A new balloting system designed to improve voter confidence in elections could be in place by the September school elections.

The Black Hawk County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 Tuesday to approve an agreement with the Iowa Secretary of State and Premier Election Solutions, a vendor, to purchase 64 optical-scan voting machines and a similar number of ballot-marking devices for just under $679,000.

Funding for the machines, which were required by law, is being provided by the state.

"They're paying for us to get the machines for each precinct and a unit for absentee voting," said county Auditor Grant Veeder, who serves as commissioner of elections.

The county is expecting to purchase a few additional voting machines to serve as backups and for counting absentee ballots on election night. Those machines and additional equipment could cost the county taxpayers up to $200,000, Veeder said.

The machines won't be ready for use in the June 3 primary.

"The law says we have to get these machines, and they haven't been (approved) by the federal government yet," Veeder said, indicating the approval was expected.

Voter concern about touch-screen machines in recent years -- and the potential lack of a paper trail in some jurisdictions -- prompted state officials to develop the uniform statewide system.

To comply with provisions of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, Black Hawk County leased disabled-accessible touch-screen voting machines from Diebold Election Systems of Allen, Texas, in addition to the optical-scan voting machines with marked paper ballots the county had been leasing since 1995. Unlike some other counties, Black Hawk equipped those touch-screen machines with a paper trail.

The new optical-scan voting machines will be similar to the old system, reading marked paper ballots and retaining them in case a physical recount is necessary. The new "ballot-marking devices" will be similar to the touchscreen machines but will spit out a marked paper ballot, which can be reviewed by the voter before being fed into the optical-scan machine.

Contact Tim Jamison

at (319) 291-1577 or

tim.jamison@wcfcourier.com.