http://www.fltimes.com/Main.asp?SectionID=38&SubSectionID=121&ArticleID=10668
January 06, 2006
By JIM MILLER
Finger Lakes Times, jmiller@fltimes.com
LYONS — Changes in election procedures might discourage
people from working at the polls this year, Wayne County election officials
worry.
The Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 election,
is supposed to do just what its name implies. But implementing the changes it
made to election workers’ jobs has local officials concerned.
Those changes, which go into effect this year, include more
training time and the purchase of new voting machines, which election
inspectors will have to learn how to use.
Each town used to run its own elections, employing its own
inspectors, owning its own machines and arranging for their storage. Now the
counties are in charge of everything, including the machines.
The procedures various towns use will have to be merged into
one county system, and while some election workers could end up being paid more
money, others may receive less.
Although such changes may discourage some, county officials
aren’t panicking: In an emergency, they can appoint any registered voter as an
inspector, even if that person hasn’t been trained.
“I don’t think we’re going to have a problem, but I don’t
know this year,” said Election Commissioner Richard Clark.
The county needs custodians to care for the machines and
nearly 300 inspectors to run the polls on Election Day.
“Are you going to be able to get that many people?” Huron
Supervisor John Young asked Clark at a county committee meeting yesterday.
“Well, it’s a struggle every year, and it’s going to get
worse,” Clark replied.
He said some inspectors have told him they don’t want to
learn the new system and don’t plan to do the job this fall.
“There’s a whole lot of things that are going to be
different this year,” Clark said.
The biggest difference — at least to the average voter’s
eyes — will be the new voting machines that the law mandates.
That change will affect inspectors, too, because they have
to be able to help voters use the machines.
There won’t be much time to train them.
Although Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002,
New York state has been slow in implementing it.
“Essentially, every state has accomplished this except New
York,” Clark said.”
Despite the delays, at least some of the machines should arrive
in time for the November elections — and, hopefully, in time for the inspectors
to get some hands-on experience with them, Clark said.
Machine custodians will also need retraining because they
have to maintain and test the machines, he said.
The new machines will likely be more complicated than the
current machines. Election inspectors will have to learn how to use equipment
such as earphones and electronic touch-pads that can be raised and lowered to
make the machines handicap-accessible, Clark said.
Inspectors previously had to train once every three years.
Now they’ll have to train once a year. But Clark said they’ll be paid more for
attending the training sessions: $25 instead of $5.
Their Election Day wages, however, haven’t been set yet.
Some of Wayne County’s 15 towns paid inspectors by the hour.
Others paid by the day. An inspector in one town earned $128 dollars on
Election Day; an inspector in another town made $100. Establishing one policy
for the whole county could therefore be a challenge, Clark said.
Clark said the county should at a minimum pay the average of
all the town salaries, which would be $114. Ideally, he said, the county would
pay more than that, so that most — or even all — inspectors would get a raise.
He said he would bring a salary proposal to the Board of
Supervisors soon, but the board must make the final decision. Although the
county will be paying for the inspectors as is now required by law, county
officials plan to charge that cost back to the towns.
Despite all the changes, Clark said he hopes that election
inspectors enjoy their jobs enough to return this fall.
“I think many of the ones that do it do it because they get
to see a lot of the people they know,” he said. “I think many of them are there
for a social reason.”
But he and fellow commissioner Thomas Healy face other
challenges this year.
If all the machines haven’t arrived by November — or, if
there are primaries, by September — they’ll have to decide which towns get to
use them and which towns will use the old machines.
Although the county now owns the old voting machines, they
are still being stored in the towns. But once the new machines arrive, they’ll
be stored at the old nursing home, where they can be tested four times a year
as is now mandated by law. County workers will have to transport them to and
from the polls each Election Day, probably by truck.
“How we do this, we don’t exactly know yet,” Clark said.
Content © 2006 The Finger Lakes Times
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