Voters losing their pull: Lever machines gone in 2006
By Hallie Arnold     Kingston Daily Freeman   08/07/2005
    

IN THE FINAL days of the state Legislature's 2005 session, the Senate and Assembly hammered out a deal to bring the state into compliance with the Help America Vote Act, making New York the last state in the nation to enact the 2002 federal legislation.

While the legislation, commonly known as HAVA, has many implications on the local level, what most voters will notice is the end of the lever-style voting machines that have been in place for generations - machines first introduced in 1892 that have changed little since in terms of the technology they use.

 BROUGHT about by the chaos that arose in the wake of the highly disputed and heavily litigated 2000 presidential election, the HAVA legislation aims, in part, to the nation's election technology by introducing either optical-scan or electronic, ATM-style voting machines in time for the 2006 election.

In New York state, that means roughly 20,000 new voting machines will have to be in place for the 2006 election, a deadline some have said the state may not meet. Should the state fail to get all the new machines in place by November 2006, it could forfeit some of the federal funds provided for the change.

But rather than calling for a single protocol for voting machines across the state, as many other states have done, New York lawmakers shifted that decision to the county level, leaving local boards of election will little more than a year to decide what types of machines to buy; set up processes to operate, maintain and store the new machines; and train board employees, election inspectors and the public at large in their use.

The state will provide local election boards with a list of voting machines that comply with the Help America Vote Act - machines that must include access to a full-face ballot in which all the races in a given election can be seen on a single page or computer screen, and that must produce some type of paper record for use in the event of a failure of the system or a manual recount.

Another standard machines will have to meet is accessibility for all people with disabilities, a critical part of the legislation.

IT ULTIMATELY will be up to county election boards to decide whether to go with the optical-scan or ATM-style machines, which some government watchdog groups say will create a patchwork of election systems across the state that could cause some confusion for voters, particularly if an election is challenged.

"When faced with the tough decision of making a decision, (the state Legislature) punted," said Blair Horner, a representative of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). "The original point of HAVA in 2002 was to raise the level of how elections are run in the country, and to some extent to create elections that are more or less the same. The problem in Florida is that you had different ways of counting ballots, and antiquated systems. Shockingly, New York seems to be turning back the clock in the sense that New York more or less has a standardized system for how elections are run. With a county-by-county system, within congressional districts you can have multiple types of voting machines, and that can create chaos, especially if there's a recount."

ANOTHER concern with shifting the decision to the county level is that county officials may become subjected to the type of high-pressure lobbying usually reserved for state officials and which local election officials may be inexperienced with.

Aimee Allaud, elections specialist for the League of Women Voters in New York, said manufacturers of voting machines already have spent more than $1 million lobbying state lawmakers in Albany to include their systems in the state legislation.

"As decision-making time is looming, they should be out there talking about their equipment. At the same time, we don't know and that's a concern we have, if there's money passing, not necessarily to individuals, but to political parties," she said.

LOCAL ELECTION officials have, for some time, been researching and learning about the Help America Vote Act and the new technologies they'll have to pick from, and those efforts surely will be stepped up in coming months.

Greene County Democratic Election Commissioner Thomas Burke said once the state hands down its list of approved voting machines, he'll try to arrange demonstrations of various machines, not only for election officials but for county legislators and the county administrator, as well, to aid in the decision-making process.

BUT WITH the decision placed in the hands of local-level Democratic and Republican election commissioners, who are party appointees, advocates say smaller political parties are likely to be left out of the machine-ion process much as they are out of the administration of elections as a whole, unless election officials strive to make the ion process as open as possible.

"This is just another example of how minor parties lose out in the way elections are organized in New York," said Horner, the NYPIRG rep.

WHILE THE most evident change the average voter will see with the implementation of HAVA will be the retirement of the mechanical dinosaurs we've been voting on all of our adult lives, there's much more to the change.

The responsibility for administering local elections - from maintaining and storing voting machines to hiring and training election inspectors - will be shifted from the town and city level to the county, as will the expense.

"It's a major, major, major undertaking," said Dutchess County Republican Election Commissioner Dave Gamache. "It's a major change as far as operations are concerned. There's no comparison to what our responsibilities will be compared to what they were. The impacts on the county and our offices will be tremendous, commencing almost as soon as we put this election to bed."

Gamache expects the responsibilities of local election boards to triple with the new laws in place.

THE HAVA law also means the county election boards will be responsible for ing polling places and ensuring access to them; for storing, maintaining and transporting the new voting machines, which require climate control, unlike the current machines, which often are kept in unheated storage areas, closets and basements; and for hiring and training election inspectors, who will need to be trained annually, rather than every four years, as is current practice.

And while the feds have given New York state - and, by extension, its local election boards - some $59.5 million to pay for the cost of purchasing the new voting machines, there is no money included for the additional staff, training costs and space needs, so county taxpayers will have to pay the difference through county budgets.