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Voting by pull-tab?
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November 16, 2000: 11:31 a.m. ET
Minnesota inventor says he has a solution to ballot woes like Florida's
By Staff Writer Steve Bills
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - We might not have to hear so much about Florida "chad" if more people paid attention to ideas like those of Eugene Luoma, an entrepreneur and inventor in Duluth, Minn.
Luoma has designed what he calls an easy-to-use and reliable election ballot using pull tabs -- the same kind of technology used for giveaway promotions on drink cups at fast-food restaurants.
As Luoma describes the idea, each candidate's name would appear on a separate pull-tab on a standard ballot. In the voting booth, you would simply pull off the tab of the chosen candidate, revealing on the underlayer the candidate's name on a contrasting background, along with a pre-punched hole and a barcode.
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Since this fiasco in Florida, I thought there has to be a simple way to use modern technology.
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Eugene Luoma, inventor |
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If you pulled back the wrong tab, you could push it back into place, as long as you hadn't pulled the tab completely loose. You would need no pencil or hole-punching device, and you could keep the tab as a receipt -- if you wanted to show people who you voted for.
For election officials, votes would be easy to count, whether by hand, by grocery-store type scanner to read the barcode or by a punch-card reader to detect the exposed hole.
And because the holes would be pre-punched into the ballot, there would be no ambiguity about a partially-punched hole, the "hanging chad" that has caused such controversy in the contested Florida vote for president.
"There would be no reason for that to be misread," Luoma asserted. "This is not rocket science."
He admitted he has not yet taken the idea to election officials, even in his home town of Duluth -- "that's the next step" -- but he said he has disclosure documents filed with his patent attorney so he can talk about the idea.
Campaign trail of a serial inventor
Yes, Gene Luoma has a regular patent lawyer. In fact, a search of the database at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site shows seven patents in his name, among them:
- A device to put orange traffic cones down along the road and to pick them up again, so the highway worker doesn't have to get out of the truck to do it.
- A mechanism to draw back the string on a crossbow, so that a handicapped person can enjoy bow hunting, even if lacking the strength to cock it.
- A gadget to perforate the crust of a pizza, to give you consistent slices (this patent was assigned to the commercial pizza maker Jeno's Inc.).
 In his regular life, Luoma makes concrete forms. His Duluth company, Design Pro Inc., has been in business more than 30 years, making forms to produce highway median barriers, picnic tables and parking curbs, among other things.
Then he invents. "He's a very inventive guy," said his nephew, Dan Stocke, sales manager for Leoma's newest venture, the "Zip-It," a disposable strip of barbed plastic that pulls clogs up out of congested drains. Stocke called the gizmo "a head smacker," the sort of thing that, once you see it, you wonder why somebody didn't invent it before. "It's so intrinsically easy to use," Stocke added, "people just immediately understand it."
Luoma said he keeps an 8-1/2x11-inch pad on his bedside table to capture ideas that come to him as he sleeps: "Most of my ideas come in the middle of the night."
Technology to combat a 'fiasco'
The disputed presidential vote got him to thinking. "Since this fiasco in Florida, I thought there has to be a simple way to use modern technology," he said, noting that a 5 percent rejection rate on machine-processed ballots would mean 50,000 rejects among a million voters. "I've had this idea before. Now it's surfaced again."
He never pursued the idea in the past, because friends discouraged it. "The government is the one that has to approve the ballot, and they doubted the government will ever make the change," he said.
But with unprecedented attention now being focused on ballot procedures, he decided to press ahead. The pull-tab ballot is one of those ideas that seems obvious after you see it. "I think anybody would understand the procedure," he said.
And what does he plan to do with the idea now? "I would like to find somebody who could take it to the next level," Luoma said, "either sell it outright or license it." 
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