Mineola Voters to Use Lever Machines in March Elections

They always say get it in writing.

Mineola residents may have to go back to using paper ballots for this year’s village elections. The Board of Elections has said that the new electronic voting machines, mandated under the Help Americans Vote Act (HAVA), will not be available for the village elections in March.

Proprietary software used to operate the optical scan machines in the recent November election was limited to the county and state-wide races. Purchasing the software for each individual municipality was deemed too cost-prohibitive by many of the villages.

The electronic machine votes were the subject of a great deal of controversy during the recent election between former Mineola Mayor, now , and former . The various boards of elections across New York state have determined that the safest idea is for villages to go back to using paper ballots.

Martins introduced legislation into the State Senate on Wednesday that would allow villages to use the old lever machines this March, possibly until the electronic voting machines become available. State Rep. Michelle Schimel has introduced counterpart legislation in the Assembly.

School districts were given a two-year waiver to use the lever machines because they fall under education law and not election law.

Martins said that the legislation was introduced because of the close proximity of time to the local elections and to also alleviate the villages from having to incur the cost of both electronic voting machines and purchasing paper ballots.

Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli has also been pursuing a suit to restore the old lever machines and  on the basis that the machine may have no functionality in which it may be connected to the internet, wifi or receive radio transmissions. The Nassau machines also have four USB ports while other machines have at least two, in which portable modems could be plugged in.

An average of 3,000-4,000 voters cast ballots in the village elections each year. Under HAVA, villages and other voting districts would have to purchase 110 percent of the number of voters in their municipality to ensure a ballot was available so everyone could vote.

HAVA also requires that the only paper ballots used be scan-able ballots compatible with the electronic machines, which many older residents reportedly had difficulty using in the November elections.

“I’m confident that whatever mechanism we have to take, our elections will still be secured,” village clerk Joseph Scalero said at Wednesday’s  meeting at the . “There will be some sort of method to ensure that no voter is denied the right to vote and each vote is cast once.”