our history
THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY!
Dan English, former longterm Kootenai County Clerk, writes. . . . As a new county clerk in 1995, I accepted the decision of the previous clerk to migrate from a punch card to an optical scan voting system. My staff and I faced an all-too-familiar dilemma of the need to purchase new equipment. At that time, our county was experiencing a lot of growth that resulted in huge bottlenecks at some of our precincts, as there were simply not enough voting booths to go around. As you would expect, voters were quite unhappy about the unreasonable amount of time waiting in line.
I really liked the concept of tabletop voting, and thought a particularly nice benefit would be to allow voters, especially the elderly, to sit while they voted. As an added bonus, we recognized that all of our regular polling sites had a ready supply of tables and chairs that would accommodate our set up needs.
So I brainstormed with my election staff to come up with a solution that would be simple, inexpensive, lightweight and easy to use. I came up with a design utilizing two-sided 1/2" Melamine (common computer table material) for the platform and lightweight corrugated plastic sides for the privacy shields. And I created a tote bag for individually transporting and storing the voting booths. A bright and colorful logo of a ballot box was designed incorporating the Election Center motto "Gatekeepers of Democracy" on the front of the tote bag. I discovered additional benefits of our tabletop booths. They take up much less storage space compared to the votomatics or even other tabletop models we've seen. Our county has saved a great deal of money for delivery expenses per election cycle. In most cases, the poll workers can put them in their cars for delivery to and from the polling sites.
In the twenty years these booths have been in use I have had great feedback on them and many return customers and a growing list of new customers. Tote-a-Votes have now been sold to cities, counties, and school districts in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.