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Politics & Government

Many Villages May Switch to Paper Ballots for March Elections

Most of Rockland and Westchester's villages run their own elections, and county officials on the east side of the Hudson don't want to lend out their new electronic machines.

As voters gear up to use the state's new electronic voting machines in next week's general election, some village officials are worrying about the effect the new technology will have on next year's local elections.

Piermont, South Nyack, Upper Nyack, Bronxville, Hastings, Larchmont, Port Chester, Rye Brook, Scarsdale, Tarrytown and Tuckahoe are among the villages in the Hudson Valley that run their own elections.

Usually, village clerks write formal letters requesting the loan of the voting machines.

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"That's normally when we get to the point where we're planning," said Carol Brotherhood, village clerk in Upper Nyack. 

So it was by chance that village officers in Westchester talked about it with officials from their County Board of Elections last month. They were shocked by the answer:  that Westchester's new machines, called optical scanners, would not be available to the villages for local elections, most of which are held in March. 

Currently, most of the county's villages and school districts are in charge of running and financing their own local elections. Rye Brook's next election isn't until March 2012, so it won't be affected in the voting process this coming spring. However other villages, like Scarsdale, will avoid the hassles of what to do in the coming election season because it uses paper ballots to keep the costs of running elections low. Other villages, including Tuckahoe, had relied on borrowing lever voting machines from the county. 

But the federal and state laws mandating the implementation of the new machines prohibit the use of lever machines because they don't allow handicapped people to vote independently.   

"A group of village clerks had met with the county board and asked what the plan is for March, and the county's answer was 'well, you're not getting our machines'," said Tuckahoe Mayor John Fitzpatrick. "Now we're up in arms because we don't have the old lever machines anymore, either."

Westchester County Election Commissioners Reginald Lafayette and Doug Colety did not return calls seeking comment. But one county election official, who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press, said the decision was purely pragmatic. 

"I don't see it as a decision not to allow villages to use the new machines so much as the fact that we don't conduct village elections at all," the official said. "The new voting machines require extensive calibration, programming and diagnostic testing. The villages have no personnel to do this and there are chain of custody issues related to how we dispatch the machines."

John Conklin, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, confirmed that villages are no longer allowed to use the old lever machines. School districts, however, will still be able to use them because they are not covered by the recent federal and state mandates.

"The villages will have to work out the use of the optical scanners with the county, or they will have to use paper ballots," Conklin said.

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Rockland Election Commissioner Ann Marie Kelly said it will be up to the villages whether to use their electronic voting machines or to use paper ballots. 

The new technology won't effect places like Scarsdale, where paper ballots are already used for village elections. Scarsdale Village Manager Al Gatta explained that the system is largely a cost-cutting measure.

"We can run our elections any way we want; we could use ballots, draw straws, or whatever," Gatta said. Using the machines "costs twice as much as using the ballots, and we are interested in spending less money."

Upper Nyack has used paper ballots for at least the past two elections, Brotherhood said. "We have to pay for the machines."

Villages that are used to the lever machines may now have to choose between implementing a paper ballot system or giving up their jurisdiction over local elections altogether.

Fitzpatrick said that he and other Tuckahoe officials are currently mulling over a proposal to let the county handle the village's elections.

"The village can, by local law, hand over the local operations to the county to run, but it may be a lengthy process and it may not be timely enough to do it before March," he said, because the village would first have to hold a series of public hearings before passing the law.

Tuckahoe would be following the lead of  Ardsley, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Pelham, which turned their elections over to the county. 

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