New Voting Machines Demonstrated in Huntington

Suffolk County voters will find themselves using new machinery and ballots at the polls for Tuesday's primary election.

Two representatives of the county's Board of Elections demonstrated the new system to about two dozen voters Thursday night at the South Huntington Public Library, walking people through the new steps each voter will take.

After an overview of the system from Peter DeNigris, a trainer, and Hope Archer, polling place coordinator, members of the audience asked questions and practiced casting their votes, sometimes deliberately making errors to test the technology's responses.
 
Gone are the mechanical levers and curtained areas, replaced by paper ballots, scanners and privacy booths, all part of a federally mandated changeover brought about by Florida's fiasco in the 2000 presidential election. New York State becomes the last state to fall in line with the Help America Vote Act, which, among other things, requires a paper trail of each vote cast.

After checking in at a polling place, voters will proceed to the new booths, mark their ballots and then take them to a scanner designed to read and record their choices in about 12 seconds. Polling places with multiple electoral districts will have machines designated for each district, which will not be able to accept ballots from other districts.

Voters will mark their choices by filling in ovals on paper ballots, which could be two sided, with candidate contests on one side, referendum or questions on the other.

DeNigris said the machines had the ability to address or head off several problems, such as "over voting" (making too many choices in any given category), ambiguous markings, such as using a checkmark or X instead of filling out the oval, or ballots that are blank.

People who overvote will hear from the machine, literally, which beeps to warn voters of the error and asks them in an on-screen message if they still want to cast that ballot or revote. If the voter proceeds with the overvote ballot, every selection on the ballot is counted except that in the overvoted category. The machine will return ballots with ambiguous markings so voters can fix them.

Huntington voters Mitsuko Yude and Hiroshi Murata studied the sample ballots carefully, with Murata deciding that he liked the way each category indicated how many choices could be made. Both saod they wanted to understand the ballot lineup to make sure their votes would be counted.

Some members of the audience seemed a little tentative about the changes in the system but after practicing and hearing from Archer and DeNigris, appeared comfortable by the end of the demonstration. Others had questions about the privacy booths or possibly longer lines as people adapt to the new system.

Marked ballots can be enclosed in a paper sleeve to ensure privacy as voters carry them to the scanners, and newly arriving voters are discouraged from walking behind those already in the process of marking their ballots.

Lauren Graham of Melville said she liked the new technology. "I think the electronic system is cool," Graham said. "I like that it tells you when you did something wrong."

Justin Littell, chief of staff for Suffolk County legislator Lou D'Amaro, D-Huntington Station, dropped by to hand out voter registration forms for the general election in November, and to compliment the board for its educational efforts.

The demonstration scanner wasn't perfect Thursday night. It had trouble determining whether a ballot was marked poorly or was blank, though eventually got it right. And it had no trouble segregating a ballot with a write-in vote from others so that it could be hand counted later.

Archer said the goal of the new system was to ensure "quality elections that are fair, honest and private."