Outgoing elections board member criticizes vote-machine letter By Jim Phillips

letter By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer

An outgoing member of the Athens County Board of Elections used his last meeting Thursday to blast the Athens County Commissioners, for a letter they sent the board about the county's pending purchase of electronic, touch-screen voting machines.

Board member Bruce Mitchell, publisher of The Athens NEWS, accused the commissioners of trying to muddy the waters of the voting-machine debate with unfounded allegations that he said have repeatedly been exposed as false. Purchase of electronic machines has been mandated by the federal government.

"This group, despite our best efforts, is misinformed, and now appears to be obstructionist," Mitchell charged. "They're trying to argue points that we proved long ago." Mitchell had announced earlier that he would not serve another term on the board.

At his urging, the board agreed to send a letter to the commissioners, addressing a single point raised in their letter the possibility that the county may have to buy up to 40 more voting machines than it already has agreed to purchase.

The estimated added cost would be $120,000, though Mitchell has said he does not believe added machines will be needed, and that in any case the federal government will pick up the tab.

Board Chair Susan Gwinn, who with Mitchell made up the Democratic portion of the four-member board, said, as she has before, that it is not certain the county won't need more machines.

"We don't know that we're not (going to)," Gwinn said, adding that the board has sent a letter to the Ohio Secretary of State asking about precisely this issue.

Gwinn has suggested that the number of new voting machines the state has mandated for Athens County may be too low to handle the actual voter turnout in some elections, because it was based on the turnout in a non-presidential election year.

Mitchell accused Gwinn of encouraging the commissioners to keep harping on the issue, by her comments suggesting that the county may have to buy more machines.

"You keep saying that," he told Gwinn. He then challenged the other board members: "You can go with me and pass this thing, or you can listen to (the commissioners) yap about $120,000."

After some debate on the wording of the letter, the board agreed simply to inform the commissioners that the elections board has not taken any official position on whether it plans to buy more machines. Republican member Dick Mottl argued that the board should not state categorically that it will never have to buy any extra machines.

"What you have to do is leave a little bit of the door open, because we're looking to the future," he suggested.

Mottl and fellow Republican Howard Stevens agreed more readily with Mitchell's denunciation of other points in the commissioners' letter.

Though the commissioners claim, for example, that the new machines create no "paper trail" recording how each person voted in any election, Mottl insisted that "there is a paper trail for a recount in every machine that was certified by the state of Ohio."

To the commissioners' claim that the current punch-card voting system works well, Mitchell responded, "they obviously didn't see Florida," referring to the 2000 presidential vote scandal in that state.

The commissioners also state that many county precincts are not equipped to accommodate the new machines, though Stevens maintained that "all you need is a 120-volt wall outlet."

Another complaint of the commissioners is that they were not involved in the bidding or ion process for the machines. Stevens pointed out, however, that "there was not a county commission in the state of Ohio that was involved in the bidding process," which was handled by the Secretary of State.

Gwinn questioned the wisdom of replying to the letter at all, given that the commissioners apparently cannot hold up the purchase of the machines. "My question is, why are we even bothering to respond to this?" she asked.

Mitchell replied: "I guess we can just accept it and say they're ignorant, or we can try to correct it."

Stevens, though he voted with the rest of the board to send a letter to the commission, suggested he can also appreciate Gwinn's point. "I hate to get involved in going back and forth with this," he said. "When you're doing this in the media... there never is a winner."

MITCHELL ALSO FLOATED, unsuccessfully, a proposal to give employees of the elections board a 3 percent raise. He argued that county officials misled the public into believing the county was facing a budget crisis for 2004, after early budget projections showed a in revenues from last year.

Later budget figures showed that this "so-called" crisis was illusory, Mitchell said, and he feels that giving the elections board workers a raise retroactive to the beginning of the year would be fair.

In discussions with Mitchell before the meeting, however, Stevens and Mottl made clear they had no intention of giving raises to one county office when no others have gotten pay hikes this year, especially as Mitchell will be leaving the board and won't have to take any heat over the decision from the public and other county employees.

"I don't want to be the guinea pig and have to live with these people," Stevens declared. "I'm all for giving people raises, but this is an entirely different situation."

Mottl suggested that at the very least, the board should query the county commissioners as to whether they would go along with such a raise. Mitchell responded, ""Well, they'll say no." During discussion of his resolution during the meeting, he added, "Quite frankly, I don't care what the commissioners do with their employees."

The proposal died for want of a second