Journal News. "This
should be interesting....In Westchester County, voters complained of
systemic breakdowns, while 40 of the 800 scanners deployed on primary
day malfunctioned. Now, with 1,500 machines in use on Tuesday, county
election officials have a new problem: a shortage of technicians to fix
broken scanners on Election Day.... The change puts the county in
complete control, eliminating the hands-on assistance from municipal
clerks who ran local elections under county oversight in the
past.... Because local clerks would run their own balloting in the past,
there were routinely 160 to 170 workers on hand to set up and carry out
elections. This year, with the county running it all, there are fewer
than 100 -- 74 of them full-time, year-round board employees."
Election workers brace for
glitches with optical-scan voting machines
By Jorge Fitz-Gibbon October 31, 2010
WHITE PLAINS -- This should be interesting.
After a shaky trial run in the primaries, the state's new
optical-scan voting machines will get a full workout in Tuesday's general
elections.
Thousands of Lower Hudson Valley voters will be using the
new machines for the first time after a primary that saw 44 of 57 counties in
the state report major problems or technical malfunctions.
In Westchester County, voters complained of systemic
breakdowns, while 40 of the 800 scanners deployed on primary day malfunctioned.
Now, with 1,500 machines in use on Tuesday, county election officials have a
new problem: a shortage of technicians to fix broken scanners on Election Day.
"There will be enough people at the polling
sites," said Reginald Lafayette, the county's Democratic election commissioner.
"But I can't reassure that we're going to have enough people -- as the
problems occur with the machines -- to take care of that in a speedy
manner."
"Here we have 15 technicians who are based in Ardsley,
at the warehouse," Lafayette said. "So imagine getting from Ardsley
up to Yorktown. You understand?"
In addition to new voting machines, Westchester is
implementing a centralized election process for the first time. The change puts
the county in complete control, eliminating the hands-on assistance from
municipal clerks who ran local elections under county oversight in the past.
That change -- and the change to paper-ballot scanners -- are
to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which sought to streamline the
election process after the controversial 2000 presidential election exposed
inconsistencies in Florida.
The paper-ballot system allows voters to cast an
"emergency ballot" if a scanner is malfunctioning.
John Conklin, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections,
conceded that there is a learning curve. But he said it's nothing that can't be
overcome with practice -- for both voters and poll workers.\
" 'Smoothly' and 'election' are not necessarily always
harmonious terms," Conklin said. "But that's as old as elections have
been. That's not anything as a consequence of the new machines."
New York was one of the last states to overhaul the way it
runs elections, with Albany lawmakers approving models of optical-scan machines
for counties to choose. They replaced pull-lever machines used for more than 40
years.
"Obviously, there's a concern with folks that have been
used to voting a certain way for decades and decades, and now they have to
adapt to a new system," said Tom Murphy, Mamaroneck village Democratic
campaign chairman. "Part of my concern is that it'll engender longer lines
because of the necessary educational aspect that's going to have to be
done."
Westchester will go into the election short-handed, said
Lafayette, the election commissioner. Because local clerks would run their own
balloting in the past, there were routinely 160 to 170 workers on hand to set
up and carry out elections. This year, with the county running it all, there
are fewer than 100 -- 74 of them full-time, year-round board employees.
By comparison, Suffolk County, which has 1,047 election
districts to Westchester's 1,033, has 123 full-timers.
The Westchester number doesn't include more than 10,000
volunteer poll workers who were trained, about 6,500 of whom will be at more
than 400 polling sites on Tuesday.
There is also more manual labor required in the new system,
including the packing and transport of reams of paper ballots that have to be
delivered to polling places.
"Who can you point the finger at? You gotta play the
hand that's dealt you," Lafayette said. "The federal government
changed the whole system, so we're working with what is there."
"When it doesn't work, people want to jump and blame
the commissioners, but you don't blame the pilot every time the plane crashes."
The optical-scan voting machines have proved controversial,
prompting lawsuits and a host of complaints. New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg described the Big Apple's primary performance as "a royal
screwup." Last week, he fired George Gonzalez, executive director of the
city's Board of Elections.
The Brennan Center for Justice in Manhattan raised the alarm
on several issues, including a revelation that paper ballots in the city
incorrectly instruct voters to mark ovals above a candidate's name, when in
fact the oval is below it.
Rockland County, which uses the ES&S DS200 Ballot
Scanner model also used in New York City, made changes to its ballot to avoid a
similar blunder, officials said.
