Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren is looking for some tech-savvy help for the Aug. 8 primary election just in case the county’s new touch-screens blink to error screens and its paper trails become paper jams.

The county will roll out its new touch-screen voting booths and electronic ballot scanners for the first time in August. The new technology and the potential for glitches have Noren concerned that her pool of generally elderly election judges might not have the skills to troubleshoot if problems arise.

"Democracy is not going to survive if all we do is leave this up to senior citizens to run," said Noren, who once calculated that the average poll worker was 73. "Everybody needs to participate in this process. We need people with some technical skills."

Election supervisor Karl Miller said he is computer literate, but he knows some election judges are nervous about the change to new technology.

"While I’d probably qualify as a geezer, being 71 years old, there are those who have been dealing with the old system all their lives and are apprehensive," he said.

Poll worker Liz Schmidt, 75, said she uses a computer for e-mail, but said she’s not an effective troubleshooter. "If it doesn’t work, there’s nothing I can do to fix it," she said. "Then I call my kids."

Both Miller and Schmidt said they are eager to see the new computerized machines and hope they will increase speed and accuracy at the polls.

"If it will cut down on the mistakes, it will also make it easier on election officials and save time," Miller said.

Voters will be able to cast their ballot as in the past. But instead of just placing their marked ballot in a ballot box, each voter will run their ballot through an optical scanner.

Each polling place also will feature a touch-screen voting booth, an entirely new way to vote in Boone County. They are intended to make voting easier for disabled people, but anyone can use them.

To keep things running smoothly, Noren said she’d like to have 15 to 20 tech-savvy troubleshooters traveling between polling locations on Election Day as well as 10 more volunteers back in the office taking calls from workers in the field. She could also use computer-literate people who might not be able to stay at the polls all day but could at least help set up the machines in the morning and shut them down at night when voting ends.

"At 5 o’clock in the morning, when election judges are trying to set this stuff up and they get an error message, well, that’s the kind of thing that can keep the poll from opening," she said.

Noren said she doesn’t have any particular technical talents in mind. She just needs people who aren’t intimidated by computers and who know how to use a manual to fix errors.

"What we need are people who have an ability to learn stuff quickly in a technical area," Noren said. "Clearly, if you have been through three generations of PCs or if you have been able to move from Macs to Windows, you have a brain that acquires these kind of things easily."

The need for new volunteers who can easily tackle technical learning curves is heightened this year, as Noren will have less time than she expected to train her legion of poll workers. She hoped to have the nearly 200 machines by now, but so far she’s only received one optical scan machine and one touch-screen booth. Every week that goes by reduces her ability to get her workers comfortable with the machines, Noren said.

"We are in a huge bind. The reason I needed stuff the first of May is to develop training materials and get it in a format and fit it into our procedures," she said. "We’re in a design phase eight weeks before an election. It’s just insane."

Noren said the county’s vendor, Election Systems and Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., is simply swamped with orders, and election jurisdictions around the country have faced similar delays.

Noren said she’s doing everything she can to get the new devices as soon as possible. "I’m kind of a raving banshee whenever I talk with these people," she said.