New York counties to decide on new voting machines

Optical scanners win out over touch screens

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — Six years after officials in Washington voted to upgrade voting machines across the nation, officials in New York State have finally taken action.

The judge overseeing the lawsuit between the Department of Justice and the state on January 24 accepted a plan put forward by the New York State Board of Elections (BOE) to come into compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Under the plan, BOE officials have approved three voting machines that counties can choose from to meet the goal of having at least one handicapped accessible machine installed in each polling place by September of this year. The second part of the plan calls for lever voting machines in all districts to be replaced by September 2009.

Rodney Gaebel, the Republican election commissioner in Sullivan County, said he had seen the three machines approved for the first part of the plan, and they are all optical scanning machines. He said, however, that none of the machines had yet been certified by the state, but that might be coming soon. A decision on which machines the county will buy should be coming in the next week or two.

Gaebel said the BOE’s action had effectively taken touch-screen machines out of the picture. Some voting rights groups consider this a victory because they have argued that touch screen machines are vulnerable to hacking and other problems. Counties in some states, including Florida and California, have scrapped touch-screen machines that they purchased a couple of years ago because of reliability issues.

Gaebel said there is discussion among the counties about using the same machine to serve both handicapped voters and everyone else, in which case there’s a chance that the two parts of the plan could be combined, and all lever machines could be replaced this year. He added that the timetable might not be feasible because vendors may not be able to provide enough machines quickly enough to cover all the counties in New York.

While some questions remain, the picture looks far brighter than on January 19, when Gaebel and Democratic election commissioner Tim Hill appeared in front of the Sullivan County Legislature and said the county might have been forced to spend an extra $500,000 on handicapped-accessible voting machines because of foot-dragging in Albany. That possibility seems unlikely now. Still, compliance with HAVA will mean significant changes for the county.

With the old system, most lever machines were operated by election workers employed by the town, and stored at town locations. Under the new system, the electronic machines will have to be stored in a climate-controlled central location, which will be overseen by the county. For each election, the new machines will have to be deployed to each of the county’s 48 polling places. Gaebel said, “We’re going to have a truck or trucks to deploy these machines… and they’re sensitive to move, it’s not like moving a couch.”

When the election is over, the machines will be picked up and returned to the central location.

Hill said, “And when you get them back, you’ve got to be able to go over the machines again, because you’ve got to be able to certify the results and work on the machines. So you need a space to store, a space to work on them and space for public viewing.”

Also, the election workers will ultimately be moved from town payrolls to the county payroll. Gaebel said training them might also be an issue. “Our poll inspectors and custodians, a lot of them have been doing this for many, many years. When everything becomes electronic, we’re afraid we’re going to have a huge turnover in personnel,” he said.

County officials are considering a county-owned facility on Rose Valley Road in the Town of Thompson as the location where the machines might be stored.

County manager David Fanslau said that about $1.5 million had been budgeted for 2008 to purchase the new voting machines, $900,000 of which will come from the federal government.