TUPPER LAKE - Franklin County, along with four other counties, will switch to using electronic voting machines exclusively by this year's elections.
"We believe it is time to go ahead and go forward with one voting machine instead of three different ones," said county Board of Elections Republican Commissioner Veronica King.
The announcement from Franklin, Jefferson, Lewis, Oswego and St. Lawrence counties followed on the heels of Essex County's passage last week of a resolution requesting the state make it legal for counties to keep lever voting machines in addition to the one electronic voting machine that is already available at each polling place in the state.
King said the county Board of Elections is planning many voter education opportunities, including a booth at the Franklin County Fair and possibly Tupper Lake Woodsmens' Days, so people can try the machines before the September primaries and Election Day on Nov. 3.
"That way, when it comes in November, they will already have seen and used the machine and will feel more comfortable in doing so," said King.
The state Election Reform and Modernization Act requires that all lever voting machines be done away with and all voting machines be electronic.
The press release announcing the plan said ERMA is not optional and compliance is mandatory.
Since there is already one electronic voting machine at each Franklin County polling place, due to a federal judicial order that required every polling place to be accessible to people with disabilities by 2008, the county will only need to add a few electronic machines to the more populous polling places like Tupper Lake, Harrietstown and Malone, and remove all the lever machines.
Malone and Burke have already been using electronic voting machines for around 15 years, but the touch-screen models in those towns will also be removed in favor of the optical-scanner machines elsewhere in the county.
The ImageCast machines by Sequoia were chosen because they allow the voter to mark a paper ballot that is then scanned into the machine and counted. County and state officials preferred the paper trail of the ballots themselves over other models that generated a paper trail from input into the machine.
Essex County officials, along with voting machine activist Andrea Novick, said last week they mistrust all electronic voting machines because they can easily be hacked into.
"I can't say that they're not hackable, because I'm not an expert on it, but I don't believe they are," said King.
ImageCast machines have seals on each part of the device that needs to be secured, King said.
"It's very visible if a seal has been tampered with," said King.
The federal Help America Vote Act will cover most of the costs of the new machines, with a 5 percent match of around $18,000 coming from the county.
For details on both lever and electronic voting machines, go to vote-ny.com.
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Contact Jessica Collier at 891-2600 ext. 25 or jcollier@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.