HOW WE SEE IT

Benton County Ballot Design Comes In-House

The world is full of consultants because people are generally willing to pay for expertise. Why re-create the wheel, and all that. Whether the external contractors local government officials sometimes hire are worth the money is one of those eye-of-the-beholder situations. In Benton County, election commissioners have for years hired a company Election Systems and Software, a Nebraska company, to format the many variations almost every election requires of ballots.

Voters sometimes don’t realize it because each one sees only one ballot, but county election officials have to build difterent ballots, sometimes dozens of them, with the various candidates and ballot questions that apply to difterent areas of the county. A voter in Gentry can’t get the same ballot as one in Rogers, for example, because his candidates for state representatives, aldermen, justices of the peace and such are dift erent.

The Election Commission in 2012 spent about $62,000 for the private company to “code” those ballots, but members now opted to buy the company’s software, at a one-time cost of $60,000. It would simplify the process and let county staft design the ballots, they say. Supporters of the move say it will make the commission more nimble in making corrections and will ultimately pay for itself in savings.

“We are not writing code on this,” Election Commission Chairman John Brown Jr. said. “It is a software program where we fi ll in the blanks, most of which we are already doing.”

Kim Dennison, the staft election coordinator, said she’s all for the change. The amount of review time available to recheck ballots will grow by changing the practice, she said.

Honestly, local election officials designing ballots is a little nerve-racking. As we noted, it’s a sometimes confusing and tedious task to get it all right. Saving $60,000 a year is great, but those won’t feel like savings if the execution proves faulty. Sadly, when it comes to Benton County elections, there are several examples where election processes have not worked as planned.

We’re reminded of people who say they can sell their own house without employing the services of a licensed Realtor. Well, the answer is certainly yes, you can do that. But many fi nd the eftort required to market a house is more than they realized.

Robbyn Tumey, a member of the Election Commission, nonetheless says election staft is already doing most of the work involved.

“We’re paying them to do things we’re already doing,” she said.

On paper, this plan sounds just fi ne. No sense paying an out-of-state fi rm for the repetitive process of building ballots. But it all boils down to the attention to detail and execution. The Benton County Election Commission’s investment in this software will demand a high level of scrutiny. There will be no opportunity to set it and forget it. The last place a mistake needs to come to light is when a voter is trying to cast a ballot.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 11/04/2013

Upcoming Events