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By: BRIAN CALLAWAY (Mon, Oct/06/2003)
DOYLESTOWN - She can tell you how many Bucks County voters are registered members of the Halloween Party - three.
Two people, meanwhile, are registered as Anarchists. That's exactly twice the number of county voters identifying themselves as part of the less popular than it sounds Populist Party.
What Deena Dean, director of the county's board of elections, can't say with any certainty is how effective the system she gets that information from will be come Election Day.
"They tell me that everything will be fine," she said, referring to the state officials overseeing the new database. "But I'm apprehensive."
Bucks is one of the state's first counties to "go live" on the new Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, which by next year will have centralized the old voter databases from all 67 counties into one new one.
But Dean said she and her peers are still having problems with the new program as voters prepare to go to the polls Nov. 4.
State officials stand behind SURE, saying it's only natural there should be some "bugs" in a new system, and stressing that when it was used in other counties during May's primary elections, there were no reports of voter disenfranchisement.
Officials from several counties are still unsure, though.
SURE frequently crashes, Dean said, and when it works, takes much more time to complete simple functions - for instance, it used to take only three steps to complete a change of address for voters. Now, she said, it can take more than eight.
She said it also can't perform all the functions Bucks' previous system could - things like tracking registration changes from one party to another.
And it's been difficult to retrieve some information the county had before, she said. For example, poll books - the sheets voters sign at polling places before heading into voting booths - used to note things like blind voters who had requested assistance in advance when voting.
Dean said SURE now shows only one person countywide has requested that.
She's not the only one complaining.
Joe Passarella, director of voter services in Montgomery County, said officials there were supposed to begin training with SURE weeks ago for use next year, but weren't even able to log on to the system.
Butler County, which went live before Bucks and was supposed to use SURE during May's primaries, instead relied on its old system - no longer operating - because the new registry crashed.
"My problem is, I had a system that was superior - it was a Cadillac," said Regis Young, Butler's director of voter services. "Now I've got a Chevy that still needs (to be) rebuilt."
The counties haven't had to pay for SURE, though. Funding came through Harrisburg, where a law was passed last year calling for a statewide voter registry, partially in an effort to curb voter duplication and fraud.
Before, voter registries were kept by individual counties - meaning if someone moved from one county to another, people could be registered in more than one.
Ted Koval, who's managing the SURE project for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said his office had received complaints from the counties, but stressed the issues wouldn't affect elections.
"I understand the apprehension," he said. "With any new system, there are going to be some bugs and we're working those out.
"The critical thing to look at is, are voters being disenfranchised? No," he said. "The critical functions of SURE are working."
He said the SURE system had been subject to regular crashes - he'd just been in a meeting on the topic when he spoke to The Intelligencer last week - but was always back up within "minutes."
He also said he was confident that problem would be fixed by Nov. 4.
Brian Callaway can be reached at bcallaway@phillyburbs.com.
Article's URL: http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/113-10062003-172698.html