Experts fear new voting process may cause confusion

ALBANY - In a sea change that some experts fear will cause confusion at the polls, New York voters will use a completely new process to cast their ballots starting with the Sept. 14 primary election.

Gone are the familiar lever voting machines. Under the new system, paper ballots must be filled in using an ink pen and votes are counted by a computerized scanning machine.

The lever voting machines - in use on Long Island for nearly 100 years - had to be replaced because of new federal requirements following the 2000 presidential recount controversy in Florida. New York is the last state to adopt the new system.

A test of the machines upstate last year didn't reveal widespread problems, although turnout was low. To teach people how to use the new equipment, boards of election in Nassau and Suffolk counties are rolling out videos, brochures and tutorials.

Preparing for primaries

Suffolk has hired 1,000 more poll workers. Nassau officials said they didn't make extra hires because the new machines can record more votes than the old ones, so fewer operators are needed. Some retrained instead to be troubleshooters at the polls.

Still, some election officials and good-government groups deplore scrapping the sturdy lever machines, first demonstrated in 1892 in upstate Lockport. They worry about lines at polling places as voters struggle to adapt to the new procedures or that computer hackers can corrupt the scanners' software.

"I'm afraid people will be intimidated by the technology and there are bound to be some problems with the machines," said William Biamonte, Democratic elections commissioner in Nassau. "But we're trying to educate the public and have done a lot of training of poll inspectors."

Nassau has again gone to court in a last-ditch attempt to keep the lever voting machines. Whether a judge issues a favorable decision before Primary Day is uncertain.

Suffolk hasn't joined the lawsuit, deciding instead to make the best of the new system. Democratic elections commissioner Anita Katz is cautiously optimistic that voters will embrace the paper ballot-scanner combination once they've tried it in an election.

"Voting this way actually isn't hard to do . . . you are filling in ovals on a piece of paper, just like with lottery tickets or the SAT ," Katz said. "Once you have completed the ballot, you feed it into the scanner in the same way you would send a fax."

The voting equipment differs between Nassau and Suffolk but the process is nearly identical.

Voters go to their polling place, sign the registry and receive a ballot and a folder - called a privacy sleeve - which hides their candidate selections. The ballot is laid out like those in the lever machines.

Voters mark ballots behind high tables equipped with small partitions. The completed ballot is then inserted into a nearby scanner. Ballots drop into a locked box and the scanner's monitor indicates the votes have been tabulated.

Fear of lost votes

This final step, however, could lead to lost votes.

Aimee Allaud, an elections specialist for the League of Women Voters, explained that paper ballots, unlike lever machines, don't stop someone from accidentally picking too many candidates for a particular office. And while the new scanners won't record these votes, the warning message flashed to voters is so confusing some may forfeit the right to fix mistakes, she said.

Allaud and others said the scanners should automatically spit out ballots with too many votes, not wait to be prompted. Instead, voters are given a vague message and asked to respond by pressing a red or green button. The race with too many selections isn't identified.

The red button returns the ballot to the voter while the green button tabulates the votes except for the races with mistakes.

"Some voters are going to panic, hit the wrong button and lose that vote," said Bo Lipari, founder of the advocacy group New Yorkers for Verified Voting. He supports a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, Working Families Party and others to force scanner modifications.

Lost votes, long lines at the polls and other problems didn't occur a year ago when 47 upstate counties used the new system for local elections. Cities were largely excluded from the experiment.

Scanners accurate

Still, the primary day experience in the Buffalo suburbs offers a glimpse of what could happen on Long Island. New voting equipment (the same Nassau will use) was deployed at 248 polling places (about 100 less than Suffolk has). Turnout was low - between 10,000 and 12,000 ballots cast - and a recount showed the scanners were 100 percent accurate.

The biggest complaint from Buffalo-area voters was about privacy when marking ballots. Some felt people were too close to their voting booth, said Dennis E. Ward, Erie County Democratic elections commissioner.

The Nassau and Suffolk boards of election have scheduled demonstrations of new voting machines in advance of the Sept. 14 primary elections. Here’s where to learn how to use the machines:

Nassau

Aug. 29, 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., United Methodist Church, 40 Washington St., Hempstead

Aug. 31, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Glen Cove Senior Center, 130 Glen St., Glen Cove.

Sept. 4 through Sept. 13, 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday, demonstration site near Macy’s department store at Roosevelt Field Mall, Garden City

Suffolk

Sept. 1, 1 p.m., Oakdale Senior Center (Ockers Community Room), 963 Montauk Hwy., Oakdale

Sept. 7, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Mastic-Moriches-Shirley Community Library, 407 William Floyd Pkwy., Shirley

Sept. 7, 7 p.m., Belmont Village Senior Apartments, 408 Wyandanch Ave., West Babylon

Sept. 9, 7:30 p.m., Lake Ronkonkoma Civic Association meeting at the American Legion Hall, Church Street, Lake Ronkonkoma

Sept. 11, 9 a.m., NAACP meeting at the Huntington Hilton hotel, Route 110, Melville Online Instructional videos are available on the home pages of nassauvotes.com and suffolkvotes.com.

SOURCES: NASSAU AND SUFFOLK COUNTY BOARDS OF ELECTIONS

Nassau and Suffolk have spent millions of dollars, some of it from the federal government, rolling out new voting machines for the Sept. 14 primary. The new machines are required by federal law. Here’s how the counties’ stack up:

Voting system being used: DS200 from Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb. (Nassau); ImageCast from Dominion Voting Systems of Denver (Suffolk)*

No. of ballot scanning machines: 1,070 (Nassau); 1,200 (Suffolk)

No. of privacy voting booths: 4,000 Nassau; 5,500 (Suffolk)

Ballot size: 8 1/2 inches X 22 inches (both counties)

Cost of ballot: 55 cents a piece (both counties)

Time for scanning machine to record votes: 5 to 10 seconds per ballot (both counties)

No. of additional poll workers hired: 0 (Nassau); 1,000 (Suffolk)

Total poll workers: 5,550 (Nassau); 8,000 (Suffolk)

No. of polling places: 397 (Nassau); 347 (Suffolk)

Percentage of electorate expected to vote in primary: more than 20 percent (Nassau); 15 percent (Suffolk)

Web site for voter information: www.nassauvotes.com, www.suffolkvotes.com Telephone helpline: 516-571-2411 (Nassau); 631-852-4554 (Suffolk)

NOTE: *Both counties also will deploy ballot-marking machines at each polling place for use by the disabled. These machines have been used for the past several years.

- Compiled by James T. Madore

SOURCES: Nassau County Board of Elections, Suffolk County Board of Elections