Voting machine options displayed

By Tom Grace   The Daily Star Cooperstown News Bureau   29 September 2005

COOPERSTOWN ? A hundred or more people came to Cooperstown on Wednesday afternoon to see a demonstration of voting machines organized by the county?s Board of Elections.

Machines from Sequoia Voting Systems, Elections Systems and Software, and LibertyVote were set up in the county office building and adjacent courthouse. Each company had its own room, and groups of people went from one to the next, listening to the vendors.

Sequoia and ESS each had two types of machines on display ? optical scanners that read the paper ballots voters mark, and computerized devices called direct recording electronic machines, or DREs. Liberty, a firm based in the Netherlands and represented in the state by Voting Machine Service Center Inc. of Gerry, had a DRE.
  
All the DREs cost between $8,000 and $9,000 apiece. ESS?s scanner sells for about $5,000 and Sequoia?s for about $6,500, but both must be outfitted with other equipment to comply with federal standards for handicapped accessibility. This device, popularly known as an AutoMark, costs about $5,000, according to vendors.

The county?s Board of Elections put on Wednesday?s display because the federal government has mandated that states replace equipment that doesn?t comply with federal standards. New York officials have given counties until November 2006 to have new equipment in place. The state will pass along federal grant money to pay for the initial purchase of equipment, which in Otsego County will probably cost between $500,000 and $600,000.

Differences among the models on display seemed apparent, but since vendors from competing firms were not in the same room as those describing their own equipment, it was difficult to compare models.

Dale Marshall, who sells LibertyVote machines, said that 17,000 of them are in use, many in Europe.

"Our machines have a good reputation around the world, and we just took care of the German election," he said.

A possible advantage of LibertyVote is that its computer source code, the technical data that makes the machine work, is not proprietary. If the county were to purchase LibertyVote machines, the county?s computer experts could ascertain that the machine is counting properly, Marshall said.

County Rep. Rudolph Laguna, D-Oneonta, said he liked this feature.

Larry Tonelli, a manager with Sequoia, said that while Sequoia?s computer code is proprietary, the code would be disclosed to state officials.

Tonelli said Sequoia recently sold many optical scanners to Chicago, but in New York it has seen far more interest in its DRE. He showed a group of about 30 people how it worked. Among those who said she was impressed was Ellen Tillapaugh, president of the League of Women Voters of the Cooperstown Area.

"I liked it better than I thought I would, but it?s still not set up the way it would need to be during an election," she said.

The machine was not configured to print a paper slip that could be used to recount votes, but Tonelli said it would not be difficult to add this feature later.

Dave Grodsky of Morris found this less than assuring.

"I?m tired of hearing what they can do later. I think at this stage we ought to see what the machine does now," he said.

Charlotte Koniuto, the county?s Republican elections commissioner, said she is leaning toward the New York state-built Sequoia DRE.

"I think it?s easy to use, and I like the way it?s set up," she said.

Judd Ryan of ESS said his firm?s machine is "more feature-rich" than its competitors, offering a high-contrast screen that allows voters to zoom in on words.

Casper Roos of Butternuts said he liked the look of ESS?s DRE. Dotty Hudson of Cooperstown said she preferred ESS?s optical scanner, "for its verifiability."

Bill Elsey, a candidate for county board from Springfield, said he worried about the high price of all the new equipment.

"If I had my way, we?d be voting with paper ballots," he said.

Another candidate for county board, Bill Waller of Cooperstown, asked the ESS vendors how long their DREs would last.

He was told they are guaranteed for five years and should last for 20.

Waller?s opponent in the town of Otsego race, Nancy Iversen of Pierstown, asked how long it would take a technician to arrive if a machine broke down during an election.

The vendor was unable to say, but noted that one technician would be stationed in the county during an election.