Area Officials: Voting Upgrade Is Unnecessary
By: Amy Mulvihill 01/06/2005  Litchfield County Times

 Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz announced plans this week to include Connecticut municipalities in the ion process for a new contractor to provide electronic voting machines to the state in time for the 2005 municipal elections.

One problem exists, however-many municipal leaders, at least in Litchfield County, don't want any part of the new machines, which they say are unproven and unnecessary, as the old lever voting machines still work consistently well.
"In the words of the old Yankee adage, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it," said Woodbury First Selectman Dick Crane when asked for his stance on the state's embrace of electronic voting. And that sentiment was echoed by municipal leaders from Colebrook, Cornwall and Canaan to Harwinton, New Hartford, Norfolk, Roxbury, Salisbury and Washington.
Calls to other municipalities went unreturned as of press time this week.
"We don't have any "hanging chads" or push out election forms that can be misread or misinterpreted," commented Salisbury First Selectman Val Bernardoni. "Our machines have been working for all these years ... so to change any number of machines because they're old or because other areas have had problems just doesn't make sense to us."
According to Ms. Bysiewicz, however, the time has come and there's no turning back.
"[The change to electronic machines] is a matter of federal civil rights law," she said Tuesday, referring to the Help America Vote Act [HAVA], authored by Connecticut U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.
The new law mandates that all states voting systems by Jan. 1, 2006. It requires that all voting machines must produce a paper audit trail, and that all polling places provide a machine where persons with disabilities can vote privately and independently, standards Ms. Bysiewicz says the state's current lever machines do not meet.
Although she acknowledges that the lever voting machines can be retro-fitted with what's called a print-o-matic, a device that enables the machine to produce a readout of a day's activity, she said that the results would still not be as effective as a paper audit trail, which is a real time printout of voting activity.
"And anyway, even if we did that, it wouldn't meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act," she said.
The much more pressing issue, she maintained, is that all municipalities offer disabled residents a machine on which they can vote privately and independently.
"A blind person, for example, cannot vote without having someone assist them in a lever voting machine," she said, adding that she will not budge on this issue, as she views it as a simple matter of civil rights.
"There is no more precious civil right than a person's right to vote," she stated, "and it is my job as the chief election officer of the state to ensure that we meet all the requirements of federal civil rights law."
In order to do this, Ms. Bysiewicz is pushing all municipalities to have at least one electronic machine in each of its polling places by November's municipal elections.
Connecticut has used lever voting machines for the past 50 years. In the last election, Connecticut used 3,300 voting machines at 769 polling places.
Recently, the state received $33 million in federal funds to purchase the new machines, an amount that Ms. Bysiewicz said will more than cover the cost of the new technology.
"It's one of the few fully funded mandates that I am aware of," she commented.
While all the municipal officials queried said they supported the idea of providing disabled citizens with a private way to vote, most remained skeptical that the federal funds would actually cover all the costs associated with the changeover. Many insisted there will be hidden costs associated with the new technology that the towns will have to absorb.
"It's going to be a huge expense," remarked Mr. Crane in Woodbury. "The manpower levels that are going to be required to operate these machines are much greater because even though it is electronic, it is much slower to go through the system with these machines than it is with the lever machines."
Cornwall First Selectman Gordon Ridgway agreed.
"I'm pretty unenthusiastic about the whole procedure," he said. "We don't have huge staffs in these towns to run these operations. We can't be whisking off to three-day seminars about this technology because, then, that means we won't be here doing the things we have to do here."
Roxbury First Selectwoman Barbara Henry sees the funding as a nice but misguided contribution.
"If the state is going to spend that kind of money, they can give it to us for our schools or our roads," she remarked, adding, "I just don't want to see it fall into the laps of the towns to purchase machines when it's not on [the town's] top ten list."
Despite, or maybe because of, this reticence, Ms. Bysiewicz is encouraging towns to get involved in testing the prospective machines and to commit to changing all voting machines from lever to electronic in 2006-something they are not required by law to do.
"[Towns] do not have to move to all electronic voting machines unless they want to," Ms. Bysiewicz allowed, "but, having said that, there are civil rights groups around the state and the country poised to bring lawsuits against towns or states if they feel they have not complied with the law."
"I also foresee litigation with Equal Opportunity Groups, if they feel that everybody is not being treated equally in the polling place," the Secretary of the State continued.
Still, many remained unmoved.
"As it stands now, we will get one electronic voting machine [this year]," Norfolk First Selectman Sue Dyer stated. "We will not seek to get another."
Other officials accept the realities of a technology-based world, but are hesitant to take the plunge just yet.
"We're heading down the electronic highway ultimately," noted New Hartford First Selectman Bill Baxter, "but to rush into it in a state that doesn't really have the voter fraud and inaccuracy issues that other states have is maybe a little ambitious and premature."