Nassau officials blame workers for voting machine woes

Nassau election officials vowed Wednesday to retrain poll workers on new voting machines after their mistakes caused major headaches for confused primary voters and resulted in delayed counting of the ballots.

While voting problems in Tuesday's primary election were not as widespread on Long Island as in New York City, Nassau poll workers overloaded a troubleshooting call center with concerns they should have been able to handle themselves, said William Biamonte, the Nassau Democratic Party election commissioner.

"It created a real backlog," Biamonte said. "We're going to identify the inspectors we had real problems with and give them remedial training."

Biamonte said unprepared workers were the biggest problem as Nassau and the rest of the state switched from voting machines with levers to paper ballots fed into a scanner.

The machines themselves also shared blame, as six had to be replaced and there were persistent paper jams, Biamonte said. Uneducated voters didn't help, as they often pressed the wrong button or fed the ballot into the machine incorrectly.

But Biamonte and independent election experts blamed poll workers for problems such as not knowing how to print out election results and not distributing ballot privacy sleeves.

"The vast majority of the problems were with training of poll workers and administration," said Bo Lipari, founder of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, a nonprofit that advocates for better voting systems.

In Suffolk, election officials reported few problems, though it wasn't immediately clear why. Suffolk workers received the same 21/2 hours of training as Nassau workers. In New York City, where there were widespread complaints, workers got six hours of training.

Neal Rosenstein, an election specialist with the New York Public Interest Research Group, said Suffolk may have had an easier time because its machines were produced by Dominion, a Canadian company. Rosenstein said most problems were reported in New York City and Nassau, which used machines produced by Omaha-based Election Systems and Software.

But John Groh, an Election Systems and Software executive, blamed workers. "There was the frustration and jitters of working with a new system," he said.