Elections board aims to educate

By Linda Ober The Citizen

Friday, April 7, 2006 11:24 AM EDT

Regulations concerning the Help America Vote Act are set to shake things up for local municipalities, changing the way they have conducted elections for years.

In an effort to alleviate any confusion or misunderstanding, the Cayuga County Board of Elections is inviting all town supervisors and village mayors to attend a special HAVA meeting next month at the Cayuga County Office Building.

“We have inherited all this responsibility, not because we want to but because we're been forced to, so we have to be very careful as to how we go about it,” Legislator Paul Dudley, R-Cato, said at a Government Operations Committee meeting earlier this week.

Dudley suggested the idea to meet with other municipal officials. In the past, towns and villages

wned and stored the machines. They also were in charge of hiring election inspectors and custodians.

Because of federal and state regulations, however, all of those duties will now fall to the county board of elections, said Republican Election Commissioner Cherl Heary.

The county may subsequently bill the municipalities for machine transportation, inspector and custodian costs, with the exact charges to be determined by the Legislature, Heary said.

Municipalities now budget for inspectors and custodians, but any transportation costs would be a new expense, she added.

While the law puts the county in charge, Heary wants to ensure that local officials don't think the board of elections is trying to take away their power.

“I think the concern is that they still want to make sure they maintain the integrity of the elections in their towns,” Heary said, noting that the county welcomes recommendations from clerks as to whom their inspectors should be, “and I think that really isn't going to change.”

HAVA was passed in 2002 and requires states to update their voting machines and procedures.

New York has been criticized for falling behind other states in its HAVA compliance.

In March, the federal Justice Department sued the state for failing to meet the new voting guidelines, and a federal judge later ordered New York to come up with a plan by April 10 to comply with HAVA provisions requiring new voting machines the disabled can use this fall.

Heary said that though the county is ready to order its new machines - a touch-screen direct recording electronic device - the state and federal governments have yet to certify them.

Lever machines will likely be in place throughout the state this fall, Heary predicted.

“They're not going to be here,” Heary said of the new machines. “I can almost guarantee that.”

Cayuga County is set to receive about $850,000 for the purchase of 100 machines and another $40,000 for training.

In other board of election news, the Government Operations Committee has given the go-ahead for the purchase of computer software that will help with election results reporting.

NTS Data Services, a company based out of Niagara Falls, will provide the board with Total Election Reporting and Certification Software (TERACS).

The software will integrate with the TEAM-2000 voter registration system already in use to ensure that results can be posted online quickly.

The system, which is already in place in Broome, Schenectady and other New York counties, also helps to track machine and inspector numbers, generate reports necessary for the state certification of election results, verify candidate petitions and maintain campaign finance data.

“It really does a lot of our main functions kind of in one package,” said Republican Deputy Commissioner Tom Prystal Jr.

The software will cost Cayuga County $38,000, payable in five $7,600 annual installments.

This year, $5,000 of that cost will come from the board of elections budget, with the other $2,600 from the county's contingency fund.

In the future, the board of elections will budget for the full expense, Heary said.

Staff writer Linda Ober can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 237 or linda.ober@lee.net

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