Political Desk

By DAVID BATES
Of the News-Register

For the first time in years, no Yamhill County political jurisdiction - not a city, a school board, or even a fire district - has submitted any issues for the March ballot.

But there’s going to be an election anyway. County Clerk Jan Coleman plans to use the March 11 date to conduct a mock election to test new ballot-counting equipment.

The office conducted an initial mock election in December, but it was strictly an in-house affair.

This time around, election workers will get a chance to process ballots cast by real voters. In exchange, those voters will get a sneak preview of what the new ballots look like so they’re not caught off guard in May.

“We’re hoping it will be a little easier for people,” Coleman told the Yamhill County Board of Commissioners on Monday. “But it is a change.”

For years, the county’s ballot has required voters to draw, with a pencil, a line completing an arrow on the right side of the candidate they choose. The new ballots require them to shade in a box to the left of the candidate’s name with a blue or black pen.

The Hart InterCivic Ballot Now mail-ballot counting software replaces a 20-year-old system relying on a trio of optical scanners.

Ballots will be fed into a machine capable of scanning them digitally rather than optically. That way, officials will have an image of each ballot stored on a disc.

As an additional safeguard, the paper ballots will be retained.

Coleman and other officials brainstormed some ideas for the election, so that at least some useful information might be gleaned from the public.

It’s likely voters will be asked, yes or no, whether Yamhill County should be a home-rule county. That’s actually something voters have rejected before, the last time about 10 years ago.

Another likely question will be whether voters would prefer the nation’s presidential primaries to be held on the same day. Currently, West Coast states are near the end of the line, with the primary having effectively been settled weeks before, rendering the vote for a presidential nominee largely meaningless.

The ballot will clearly indicate it’s a mock election, for educational purposes only. Thus, the “results” will not be binding.

Coleman estimates it’ll cost about $10,000 to run the election, although about a third of that money comes from the Help America Vote Act of 2002, stemming from the controversy surrounding the presidential election of 2000.

She said she understands that some might grumble about the cost, but she thinks it’s a small price to pay to ensure any bugs are worked out before the county conducts an election that counts.

“There’s a tremendous amount to learn on our side of it,” she said. “It is different.”