As a December compliance deadline nears, Albany County elections officials have come up their own version of what the HAVA Help America Vote Act acronym stands for, but they aren’t sharing what it is.
Lately, and especially after each election, officials from the county down to municipal officers are using the phrases `joke, poorly thought out and waste of money,` when they speak of the 2002 federal legislation, which was meant to streamline the election process and prevent the confusion that surrounded the ballots in some states during the 2000 presidential election.
Other than federal and state mandates, the only thing county election officials have seen as a result of the legislation is one new machine and thousands in extra costs each election.
Federal courts are expected on Thursday, Dec. 20, to either extend the state its third waiver on compliance deadlines or crack the whip, said Albany County Board of Elections Democratic Commissioner Mathew Clyne.
If the latter happens, the county will have to move quickly to supply additional handicap-accessible voting machines, come up with the money and space to store replacement electronic voting machines and work out all the kinks since taking over elections in all county municipalities last year.
`Albany is kind of like in a Twilight Zone. As far as Upstate counties, we are one of the largest. These timelines (to come into compliance by 2008) are completely unreal,` said Clyne.
For towns, it has only over-complicated a process that, for the most part, has run smoothly in New York. It also has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars looming in municipal budgets in county charge backs soon to take affect. However, the county has eased the burden on its municipalities with a plan to move away from per capita and assessed value charge-back formulas to a simpler cost-of-doing-elections formula, which could result in huge savings for some towns. Colonie will see a $140,000 reduction in expenses paid to the county as Albany looks to recoup the costs for running the 2006 elections.
`We are finalizing the numbers that will be sent to the municipalities in the next few days. The numbers we are finalizing are based on actual costs. This is a bill for the 2006 elections,` said John Rodat, commissioner of management and budget for Albany County.
November’s general election has exposed some cracks in the current infrastructure. Colonie’s official election results are tied up in the courts pending a challenge by GOP candidates due to wrongly formatted lever machines. The machines only allowed voters to vote along party lines, closing out any possibility of voting outside party affiliation on a combination of the three Republican and Democrat contenders for town board.
Numbers were also skewed between Colonie and unofficial county numbers. In the uncontested Colonie Town Justice race, Colonie’s numbers showed Peter G. Crummey received 12,889; the county transposed the votes at 21,188.
Commissioners fixed the problem Thursday, Nov. 30.
As the county waits for the state to approve the voting machines that will be used throughout New York, the election commissioners and Colonie Town Clerk Elizabeth Del Torto are asking why the old machines should even be replaced.
The biggest problem with voting has always been human error, said John Graziano, county Republican commissioner. And no electronic machine mandated by HAVA will remove that.
`It ran fine all those years,` Del Torto said.
This year’s blunder in Colonie was an oversight, and by the time it had been noticed the morning of Election Day, polls had already been open four hours, she said. It was human error.
`I think the old machines work just fine. This election was not the fault of the machine. It did what it was told to do,` said Del Torto.
She admitted that the prospects of a digitized machine that could cut in half the typical 15-hour work day that is Election Day sounded nice. But at what cost?
The old machines don’t need specialists, both technical and electrical, not to mention climate control storage. If the old machines break, they are fixed instantly, she said. That won’t be the case with the new electronic machine, working on a Windows platform that will need technical support with every glitch.
So why the change? Accessibility for handicapped voters, an area that needed to be addressed, said the commissioners, but that is an area that has been addressed through years with a simpler and cheaper solution: absentee ballots.
The initial intent of HAVA was to get every state on the same page when it comes to the logistics of voting. Recently the focus has switched to handicap accessibility, said Graziano. That brought up more questions of whether or not to buy a specialized machine for polling stations or buy voting machines with the capacity to serve the general public at large, including the handicapped.
For the 2006 primaries, Albany County paid $5,000 for a handicap-accessible machine that uses a ballot marking device to cast votes. The one machine was set up for September primaries and November’s general elections at the county Board of Election’s North Russell Road offices. Ballots and expenses to operate the machine ran about $21,000, said Graziano. No one used the machine in September; one or two voted on it in November, he said.
`There is no consideration for money here. Common sense has not seemed to prevail in this process,` Graziano said.
Even if the original intent was to solely provide better access for disabled voters, current steps have not served that intent. For one, traditionally, disabled voters prefer to vote from home, Graziano said. Also, the new accessible machines aren’t the end-all cure the machine manufacturers and lobbyists would have people believe, he said.
`The bigger problem for me is the charge back the county is placing on the town. I have budgeted $80,000 a year for 10 years, and have never spent that,` said Del Torto.“