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The Wake County Board of Education has
selected voting machines, software and
ancillary equipment to be used for the
May 2 party primary and afterward. It
comes with a price tag of $3.2 million
and change.
Wake will have about $2.42
million from the federal government, but
the remainder will come from county
funds. The U.S. Congress voted to
include $39 billion when it passed the
Help America Vote Act that, along with
state action has required new voting
equipment across North Carolina and much
of the United States.
Dr. John Gilbert, chairman
of the three-man elections board and a
retired professor of political science
at North Carolina State, said the
federal funds will cover the costs of
the optical scan machines and the
special machines for handicapped voters.
The federal money, Gilbert
said, “will more than replace the
machines we are losing, but as a result
of that federal law every voting
district in the country must have
handicapped-accessible equipment. That
expense was going to be out there
regardless.
“There will not be enough to
pay for the one-stop sites that we would
probably have in addition to the [board
of elections] office here,” Gilbert
said.
There will be only one
one-stop site for the May 2 primary, and
it will be at the elections board office
on Salisbury Street in Raleigh.
The one-stop voting sites
were very popular when they were first
used in 2004 to help cut long lines and
waiting in the election that covered
everything from the President of the
United States to county commissioners.
“We had twelve one-stop sites in 2004
and 90,000 people used them,” Gilbert
said. “We assume that it [the number of
sites and number of people using them]
will go up.”
For that reason Cherie
Poucher, director of the elections
board, included a request for 117 of the
touch-screen machines at $3,295 each in
the list of required equipment. The
touch-screen machines, which can be
programmed for all the various precinct
ballots, would be used at the one-stop
sites, eight at each site.
The elections board will not
ask for the money for those touch-screen
machines this fiscal year, Gilbert said.
“We’ll have to ask for the funds to buy
those in the new fiscal year for any
one-stop sites we would have in the
fall.” The county’s new fiscal year
begins July 1.
Gilbert said one-stop voting
sites do require more than regular
precincts to set up and staff.
The county had been using an
optical scan machine that is no longer
manufactured and was not certified by
the federal or state government.
When asked what they would
do with the 200 or so unusable machines,
Gilbert said, “Cherie suggested that
maybe we could sell them to Louisiana
where they lost a lot of voting
equipment, but that seems unlikely to me
because the equipment hasn’t been
certified by the feds.”
The equipment and cost the
election board plans to purchase within
the calendar year include:
- 117 touch-screen
iVotronics at $3,295 = $385,515.
- 210 optical scan Model
M100 at $4,995 = $1,048,950.
- 210 modem upgrades at $200
+ $42,000.
- 210 AutoMark terminals for
disabled voters at $4,950 = $1,039.500.
- 240 tables for AutoMark
terminals at $400 = $96,000.
- training classes for
election board staff and precinct
workers = $48,800.
- Model 650 high speed
scanner for absentee ballots = $46,200.
- Dell computer configured
to vendor specs = $25,213.
The costs of setting up and
printing the ballots are in addition to
the $3.2 million, and the selected
printer will have to go to Omaha, Neb.,
for training at the Election Systems &
Software headquarters.
For more information about
the voting machines and the selection
process, go to the Jan. 11 issue of the
Gazette, which can be found in the
archives. |
