SMITHVILLE FLATS – Voters pulled its lever for the presidential elections just last year, as they have for every government election since 1934, but the oldest voting machine in Chenango County will be used no more.
Same goes for another relic that still works in this town of approximately 1,400 residents: The two-seater outhouse at the Smithville Center Grange polling site. With no modern facilities, no parking nor sidewalk, and only a pot belly stove for warmth, county elections officials – now in charge of all elections – had no trouble streamlining this town’s two polling places from two to one.
Voting districts across the United States were forced to replace their lever-operated machines with handicapped accessible ones and transfer control of elections from municipalities to counties under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. Never mind that it took New York longer than any other state and a federal lawsuit to actually certify a new machine; fear of change gripped Chenango County equally as hard.
Locally, the switchover involved three years of feet dragging, push-pulling between municipalities and the county for control, and much haggling over cost. Supervisors adamantly protested each move, from agreeing to spend $7,000 for an interim, one-time use machine, to training, storage and maintenance costs that doubled the Board of Election’s annual budget to nearly $450,000.
A chorus of complaints were lodged just last week toward election’s commissioners who were presenting their 2010 budget to the Finance Committee.
“People are not happy. The elderly are afraid of the new machines,” said retiring supervisor Harry Conley, R-Sherburne.
“People will stay home who don’t want to vote on a computer. This whole thing is outrageous,” said Dennis Brown, D-Pharsalia. “Before it’s all over, we’ll probably end up having to sell the new machines back.”
Brown pointed to Essex County in New York, where he said lawmakers had refused to obtain the new machines. “They’re keeping up the fight. You watch, no one will prevent them from voting.”
But after months of educating the public and offering “trial” elections, the primaries in September went off without a glitch. Elections commissioners said not one error occurred with any of the 37 new machines. Voters obtain a ballot from a polling clerk, mark it in a privacy booth and insert it into a scanner. After the voter confirms his or her choices, the scanner deposits the ballot in a secure box.
Cutting back on each voting district’s polling sites has stirred perhaps the most controversy. Voters don’t want to drive further than they are used to on Election Day, said Conley, whether or not it’s a place that had an outhouse or, as in the case of Sherburne, it’s the local barber shop.
“What about the 85-year old who can’t get there?” he asked.
Conley also accused the Board of Elections for being “stingy” with absentee ballots.
Republican Elections Commissioner Harriet Jenkins said age is not a reason for obtaining an absentee ballot.
“We try not to deny anybody an absentee ballot if they absolutely can’t get there, but not just because they don’t want to drive that far,” she said. “That doesn’t fly with the state.”
Amidst all the controversy, perhaps Smithville Deputy Clerk and Elections Inspector Barb Nowalk summed it up best: “The old machines worked perfectly,” she said, and, “You don’t go to the polls to use the bathroom. You go there to vote.”