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School districts will need to borrow county election machines

Posted 2/20/16

By CRAIG FREILICH CANTON -- Old lever-type voting machines have been officially deemed obsolete, so school districts and other entities that hold elections and referendums are asking the St. Lawrence …

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School districts will need to borrow county election machines

Posted

By CRAIG FREILICH

CANTON -- Old lever-type voting machines have been officially deemed obsolete, so school districts and other entities that hold elections and referendums are asking the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections for help.

Meanwhile the board is preparing to conduct four different elections this year, including primaries, requiring hundreds of hours of work by paid inspectors.

“The lever machines have been outlawed,” said Tom Nichols, the Republican St. Lawrence County Elections Commissioner. “With school elections in May, we have requests for use of the machines we have. If people approach us, it’s part of our charge to help with elections in St. Lawrence County.

“We’ve sent a letter to all schools telling them we will assist where we can,” Nichols said.

Aside from polling on Election Day each November, the county elections board is responsible for conducting political primaries involving county, state and federal candidates, and special elections.

While they usually don’t get involved in village elections or school or library votes, they will provide technical help if asked. That could mean supplying things like voter lists “and lists of those who qualify as permanent absentees, so they can send out absentee ballots. If any of them ask for help, such as technical information, we’ll support it,” Nichols said.

Places like Potsdam Central School had their own lever voting machines, and they were good enough for school board and budget votes, but as time went on and the machines were no longer being manufactured, the supply of spare parts and qualified mechanics began to dry up. With the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, the punch-card ballot counters that caused so much controversy during the 2000 election for president, along with the old lever machines, were to be phased out and new electronic machines brought in to replace them.

The Board of Elections has been lending out its machines for a couple of years now, when asked. They recorded the votes of people in the Potsdam village government dissolution referendum in 2011 and the Potsdam and Canton school district merger referendum in 2014.

Now that the old machines are outlawed, the board is getting requests from school districts for their elections in May. “Several school districts have expressed interest,” he said.

“We’ve been involved with schools, providing things like the absentee lists and that sort of thing, but you don’t have to be registered for vote in school elections, so we didn’t provide voter lists,” Nichols said. Any other assistance they could provide, they have, and they will now.

Nichols and his co-commissioner, Democrat Jenny Bacon, will look at each request and jointly decide on the request, likely granting them. But now the users will have to reimburse the board for transport – “to recover costs only. The law is very clear on that,” Nichols said -- and the users will have to get their own ballots printed up at their own expense. They don’t supply elections inspectors for those polls.

These requests are decided on by the commissioners on a case-by-case basis

The board so far has had no requests from fire or water districts to use their machines, “but we might in the future,” he said. “I can’t speak for my counterpart (Commissioner Bacon), but we will decide as a team how we go forward.”

In addition to the presidential election in November, this year the county board will play its part in the statewide presidential primary April 19, the federal primaries for the members of the House of Representatives and Senate on June 28, if there are any that apply to the county this year, and state and local primaries Sept. 13, according to the state Board of Elections calendar as it is set now. The calendar could change. “You never know with the state Legislature,” Nichols said.

Each time they preside over an election in the county, for each polling place the board sends out teams of elections inspectors, workers from the Democratic and Republican parties who are trained and paid to supervise polling stations, keeping track of those who come to vote, making sure they’re registered, and making sure the machines are working properly and that voters understand the ballot. At the end of the voting day, they compile and report the results.

“We’re always looking for inspectors,” Nichols said. With all the elections, “we do need more inspectors this year,” he said.

“In a presidential year we can always use more inspectors,” said Deputy Democratic Elections Commissioner Seth Belt, explaining that turnout is always higher in a presidential election year. He said a 400 inspectors would not be out of line. “There is an effort to reach out to more people to work for us on election day,” he said.

“We train a number of them every year. From there, we assign responsibility for polling places. We always want to have a surplus, in case someone calls in at 5 a.m. on Election Day saying they don’t feel well, and we will call someone else to fill in for us,” Belt said. “We hope to provide a quick and painless experience at the polling place, so we will increase staff to handle the turnout.”

On Election Day in November, every polling place in the county will be staffed. For the primaries, with much lower turnout expected, only one polling place per town will be open.

“We’re trying to be judicious with tax dollars and not inconvenience voters any more than we have to,” said Nichols.

To train an inspector costs $35. On a primary election day, each inspector is paid $120 for the day. On the Nov. 8, they will be paid $200 each. If 400 inspectors work on Election Day, the bill is $80,000.

But Nichols says he has an idea on how to save the county some money in their operations: eliminate the “local registration days” mandated by the state in presidential election years.

In the second week of October this year, Nichols and Bacon will have to send one or two bipartisan inspector teams to each of the 32 towns in the county and the City of Ogdensburg for the special registration day.

“We have to pay every one of those inspectors $200 for the whole day.

“It’s overkill, I think, because clerks in every town already have registration forms every single day, the point being that no one wants to deny anyone a chance to vote, but why have the taxpayer bear the brunt” of the expense of the day, Nichols said.

“And every day is registration day for us” at the Board of Elections Office on Court Street in Canton, he said.