Secretary Of The State Will Give Towns

Optical Scanning Balloting Option

By John Voket

In an exclusive interview Wednesday, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz told The Bee she plans to give all Connecticut communities the opportunity to use federal funds to purchase optical scanning technology to use in polling places.

During this latest conversation related to electronic voting technology conducted with the secretary of the state and members of her staff, Ms Bysiewicz initially responded to a request issued by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM), which is chaired by Newtown First Selectman Herb Rosenthal.

In the November memo, the CCM initially requested that the secretary of the state’s office exercise its “right to cancel, amend, modify, or otherwise change,” its request for proposals for direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. The correspondence goes on to cite significant cost savings and other advantages local municipalities could enjoy, if they were given an opportunity to purchase optical scanning voting machines equipped with technology developed by Automark Technical Systems.

However, Ms Bysiewicz said that the Automark company, on two occasions, declined to submit a proposal to be considered for the statewide voting machine program, which received $33 million in federal funding under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) legislation.

“There are some officials and citizens out there who like the [Automark] technology,” the secretary of the state told The Bee. “But Automark already had two opportunities to bid [to supply] voting machines in Connecticut, first in December of 2004 and again in September of 2005, and they elected not to do that.”

Ms Bysiewicz said her office sent two letters to potential vendors including Automark Technical Systems, asking to show how those companies’ machines could meet the federal and state voting standards.

“I assume [Automark] made that decision [declining to submit a new RFP] because they could not meet all the state voting stipulations,” Ms Bysiewicz said. She went on to say that another company, LHS, that already supplies optical scanning technology in several Connecticut communities including Westbrook, Portland and Westport, did come forward with a proposal.

This comment prompted the secretary of the state to reveal she was drafting a letter to community leaders with the option of using HAVA funds to purchase optical scanning equipment. The secretary of the state’s office had been taken to task by Mr Rosenthal and other Newtown voting officials including Town Clerk Cynthia Simon and Registrars LeReine Frampton and Karen Aurelia, over the potential cost of not only the mandated new voting equipment, but for unknown collateral costs for training, storage, maintenance, and upgrades to DRE machines, which were previously the only type of technology the state was considering for use.

In her discussion with The Bee, Ms Bysiewicz said her office would be making a final decision by month’s end on which of the three machines in contention for statewide use would be chosen. And that pursuant to the renewed request for proposals that was issued September 8, 2005, the secretary of the state planned to issue a memo to all Connecticut municipal leaders offering them two choices for HAVA fund allocations through her office.

“I will write to all [municipal] leaders [asking them] to make a choice,” Ms Bysiewicz said. “Either replace all lever voting machines with the DRE technology we have selected, or have one HAVA compliant DRE machine and two optical scanning machines per polling place.”

Ms Bysiewicz said the letter would be circulated in early January. She said she believed the $33 million in HAVA funding would not only be enough to cover the requests of all Connecticut communities for approved future voting technology, but that she would allocate $2.5 million from the larger HAVA disbursement to fund statewide training programs for voting officials on all the new technology scheduled to be implemented prior to the next general elections in 2006.

“We’ve got $33 million. So once we negotiate with the final [selected suppliers] we will know how much each machine will cost. We believe we will be able to provide full replacements for each town, and each town must have at least one HAVA-compliant machine per polling place,” Ms Bysiewicz said. “The towns will be able to use HAVA money to purchase optical scanning technology.”

In recent weeks, the secretary of the state and members of her staff accompanied University of Connecticut students and staff from the UConn Department of Public Policy who conducted voter surveys of three machines that were finalists for statewide consideration. Those machines were showcased in five regional locations across the state so voters and interested municipal officials could test drive the systems and offer their opinions on which would be most favorable for their use.

“This is really a historic event that the voters themselves will be helping us decide which machine we’ll make available to them beginning in 2006,” Ms Bysiewicz said in a previous interview. She said more than 500 voters tested the machines and offered their opinions to survey staffers at each location.

A spokesperson from the secretary of the state’s office said Wednesday that the results of that poll would be released during an upcoming press conference later in the month.

Contacted Thursday morning, both Ms Aurelia and Ms Frampton said they were pleased to hear that the secretary of the state’s office was now allowing scanning technology to be acquired with the federal HAVA funds. In recent interviews the registrars and other local officials, including Mr Rosenthal, cited the significantly lower initial and long-term costs to utilizing the scanners, versus replacing each mechanical lever machines with up to three new computerized or electronic machines.

Mr Rosenthal was out of state on Thursday, and was unavailable for comment on this latest development.