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The Journal News.

January 30, 2006

Rockland trying to sort through election reforms

By Sarah Netter

The Journal News

Less than eight months before the September primaries, the county doesn't know which voting machines it can use or who will pay to run the elections.

The Rockland Board of Elections doesn't yet have enough staff to train voters how to use the new machines and no one knows where the old ones will be stored.

"It's a messed-up system," Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef said. "Each day that goes by, the goal here looks more daunting."

The county must comply with new state and federal election rules that require, among other changes, that the county purchase new voting machines and take over all election responsibilities from the towns in time for the first federal election, which would be the September primary.

"It adds a tremendous responsibility at the county level," Republican Board of Elections Commissioner Joan Silvestri said.

And it's one Vanderhoef is trying to share with the county's five towns, at least for this year.

Even though the state election reform law requires counties to pay for and coordinate elections, Vanderhoef said he hoped the town supervisors would agree to contribute a combined $323,000 this year.

Orangetown Supervisor Thom Kleiner said the five town supervisors would meet Feb. 9, and the election changes would be on the agenda.

"We need to kick it around ourselves a little bit and then speak to the county executive and the county Legislature," he said.

"The county takeover is going to be helpful because we ... have a relatively small staff do deal with this," he said.

Including the town money the county hopes to secure, the 2006 county budget contains $777,000 to comply with the New York election reform legislation, enacted last year, and the 2002 federal Help Americans Vote Act, aimed at preventing the problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election.

Besides paying for the elections, to train volunteers and one-day leases at polling locations, the county will be responsible for coordinating where machines will be stored, how they will get to the polling sites, who will make sure the doors open precisely at 6 a.m. on Election Day, and when the building custodians will lock up.

Vanderhoef said that, for now, he hoped the towns would continue to store 400 or so existing machines.

The new state law allows counties to bill towns for all election expenses as long as the counties coordinate the actual elections, but Vanderhoef said he hoped for a compromise.

"All towns, I'm sure, would prefer that the county pick up the entire expense," Vanderhoef said.

Clarkstown Supervisor Alexander Gromack agreed that would be the ideal situation, but he said he was willing to negotiate.

Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence said that because the towns had bought all the machines and had paid for their maintenance and use, it was only fair the county eventually assume all financial responsibility for elections.

"Ramapo will want to work very closely with the county executive to come up with compromises that work best," he said.

But Haverstraw Supervisor Howard Phillips said he didn't want his town to have to pay anything extra.

"We were really counting on the county," he said, noting that the town had for years shouldered the heavy burden of coordinating not only state, federal, county and town elections, but also those of the villages, schools and libraries. "It makes the most sense having the county arrange it."

To deal with the added duties, Silvestri said, her office is looking at six new positions.

Two, Vanderhoef said, will be existing Board of Elections employees.

The money for the new employees, he continued, would come from the $777,000, but the county Legislature would have to approve the positions before they could be filled.

While the Board of Elections has always trained the 1,800 election volunteers at a rate of 600 per year, the county must now take over recruitment, retention and training for all 1,800 in one year, Silvestri said.

Though the county can't purchase or decide what voting machines to use until the state releases its list of approved machines, the county has been meeting with vendors and testing machines likely to be approved, including optical scanners and digital recording electronic machines.

"We don't want to start that process of review until after the certification," Silvestri said.

Once selected, Vanderhoef said, the machines will cost about $3 million, which the state will pay.

New City resident Al Rosenthal said he was confident he would be able to deal with the change the next time he stepped in a voting booth. He noted that he had been voting for about 50 years.

"I would assume that the instructions would have to be fairly easy," he said.

Silvestri said the state Board of Elections and the federal government were in talks to determine if full compliance by September was necessary or if the counties could be cut some slack.

"We don't want to get these machines three days before the election and just put it out there," Silvestri said.

Lee Daghlian, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections, confirmed that the discussions were taking place, but would say only that they included possible timelines for compliance with the Help Americans Vote Act.

"The Justice Department has asked us not to discuss it," he said.

Until that ruling is made, Silvestri said, the county will continue to work toward full compliance by September.

"This is one of those things," Vanderhoef said, "where you really have to watch to see how it plays out."

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