11/07/05
By Tom Grace
Cooperstown News Bureau
UNADILLA FORKS — When you vote Tuesday, say goodbye to the voting machine.
It may be the last time you use a lever-type voting tabulator in a municipal election.
These durable, mechanical devices, which came to New York state more than a century ago, are being replaced, although what’s coming next has not been determined.
"This should be the last time around with those machines," Lee Daghlian, a spokesman with the state Board of Elections, said Friday.
The BOE has just completed regulations allowing implementation of new equipment and soon will announce a 45-day period for people to comment on which models are best.
Many manufacturers tout their touch-screen models, called DREs, but groups of citizens have said these machines are not as reliable as their chief competition, optical scanners.
With scanners, voters mark a ballot, which is then scanned and counted automatically. In cases of recounts, the actual ballots may be hand-counted.
With DREs equipped with paper backup, as will be required in New York, a slip something like a cash register receipt recording a voter’s choice is stored in a hopper and may be recounted later.
Daghlian said that after the first of the year, manufacturers who want to sell voting machines in the state will submit models to be certified by state inspectors. This will happen in the first quarter of 2006.
After that, counties may select only those models approved by the state.
"The plan is to have the new machines in place by July, which will allow a couple of months for training before they’re needed," he said.
The counties’ elections commissioners will decide which machines their counties will buy. If the commissioners disagree, the choice will be made by the state BOE.
In Otsego County, Republican Commissioner Charlotte Koniuto said she has been impressed by a DRE manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems.
Democratic Commissioner Hank Nicols has said he wants to see which machines are certified before making up his mind.
Some residents, such as William Elsey, a candidate for the Otsego County Board of Representatives from Springfield, have said they wish the county could keep its lever machines and avoid the $600,000 conversion cost, even though it will be paid for with federal tax dollars..
Others fans of the venerable lever machines include the county’s voting-machines custodians, who spent much of last week setting up the machines for their last municipal elections.
"I think whoever made these machines was a mechanical genius," said Bill Ross of Fly Creek while inspecting a 1930s Sequoia model Wednesday morning in the town of Plainfield.
"Properly maintained, these machines would last forever," said George Schoradt of New Lisbon.
Those two men, along with Dick Bull of Schenevus and John Cunero of Milford, travel to the county’s polling stations each election, adjusting the machine to the ballot in use at that time.
Lucinda Jarvis, the county’s Democratic deputy elections commissioner, accompanied the custodians on their rounds Wednesday, and in Plainfield the group was met by Mindy Wadsworth, an elections inspector.
Jarvis said the machine in Plainfield is about 70 years old. Wadsworth said it hadn’t been used in town nearly that long, and that when it first arrived, some town residents recalled voting with paper ballots.
The successor machine is unlikely to be nearly as long-lived. Manufacturers who attended a recent display of voting machines in Cooperstown said models typically are guaranteed for five years.
When the new ones are installed, the old ones will go.
Greg Relic, chairman of Otsego County’s Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, said Wednesday that no decision has been made on what to do with the old machines after the last curtain closes Tuesday night.