In the upcoming board of educations elections throughout the county on May 18, residents will be introduced to the first large scale use of electronic voting machines across the county.
The machines, which will take place of lever machines that have been used across the state for decades, will give election officials three distinct ways to count and record votes, which they hope will allow for more accurate results.
It was very common that we would have lever machine breakdowns during the elections, said Democratic Commissioner of the Schenectady County Board of Elections Brian Quail. The commissioner said that in the past, with the lever machines, breakdowns during the day would be fixable, but slows down voting at the location of the breakdown. He also said that issues with the tumblers on lever machines cause votes to be lost in rare occasions. The two times that it has happened in Schenectady County, they have been non-outcome determinative, but the old system is antiquated and flawed in receiving votes.
`We’ve seen at least twice that this has happened and people’s votes have been lost and that’s unacceptable,` said Quail.
the new system will incorporate paper ballots, printed at the board of elections, that have bubbled in spaces for each listed candidate, with spaces below for write-in candidates as well. The page is then scanned into the machine, with the vote recognized for each candidate and proposition. The answers on the paper are recorded by the machine and on a small flash drive connected to the machine. The paper ballot itself then goes into a lock box at the bottom of the machine and are retrieved at the end of the night for verification of the votes with the machine. In the case of a power outage, the voting machine has a two hour battery life and paper ballots can still be fed into the machine and manually counted by election workers. A receipt at the end of the night is also collected from the machine which tallies the overall vote count at each voting center.
Republican Commissioner of the Schenectady County Board of Elections Art Brassard said the new voting machines and the procedures in place with the new machines, the board of elections is now somewhere between Fort Knox and Homeland Security.
`No one should be worried about their vote being lost in this new system,` said Brassard.
Quail said that the board of elections has looked at every possible problem that could be seen as an issue with the new voting machines and said the best thing a voter can do is to make sure to thoroughly darken the ovals next to their selections to obtain the best possible read of their ballot.
`You would have to have an error in the stick [flash drive], lose the paper ballots and lose the tape [recipt],` said Quail. `We should be able to get accurate votes in nuclear winter. We’ve taken everything into consideration so we are ready.`
While the board of elections does not run the school district votes, which are up to the individual school districts, but provide the service of their machines and workers to administer the voting process. For the coming elections, the board of elections will provide over 30 machines to the school districts while printing out 30-40,000 ballots for the election. The voting process is still simplistic, according to board of election, with voters signing in at the voting site, filling out their ballot at a privacy booth and then scanning it into the machine.
`It’s exciting and challenging to do this full roll out-it’s going to be a good test,` said Brassard. `I think people will be surprised about the ease of voting,.
For more information about the new voting machines and its technology, go online to www.schenectadycounty.com.
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