Questions for Suffolk County

1. During the first year after purchasing new machines, ERMA mandates that vendor technicians be available to program and maintain the machines. Will Suffolk bypass the use of vendor technicians and require that all work be done by bipartisan BOE staff? Will the work of vendor technicians be performed only under bipartisan BOE staff oversight? How will our staff be knowledgeable enough to maintain oversight?

2. How will the BOE determine that our new voting systems are the same as the system of their type that was certified by the State Board, not just upon delivery but after vendor technicians have unsupervised access to the equipment?

3. Will the BOE assume that traditional logic and accuracy testing that was sufficient for mechanical lever machines will also be sufficient for computerized voting systems that have so many new and potentially undetectable ways of being tampered with?

4. Do you plan on having public hearings or meetings before the machines are chosen?

5. What is the present cost of elections, including the items of transportation, storage, setup, logic and accuracy testing, and printing of paper ballots for absentee, provisional and emergency ballots?

6. If Suffolk chooses DREs, and prints the absentee, provisional and emergency ballots via the DREs, will you print these ballots in advance of each election? Will you print more emergency ballots than you print now for the lever machines (due to the approximately 9% DRE failure rate allowed by federal standards, and experienced by many jurisdictions)?

7. Our new state regulations set the minimum print size for the VVPAT to 3 mm -- approximately 1/8 inch! The largest size that must be available is 2 to 3 times that. If DREs are selected, will the BOE set the print size default to the larger size to facilitate voter verification and the required 3% manual audit? What will you do to assess the cost and personnel needed for the manual audits with each print size?

8. Have you obtained information from other jurisdictions about maintenance costs and cost overruns for systems similar to those that have been presented to the Suffolk BOE? Will taxes have to be raised to cover these ongoing costs? Will you work with the NY State contracting office to ensure that contracts do not allow price gouging on maintenance?