Privacy becomes an issue with new scanners
System is deemed a success despite some complaints
Elections commissioners consider the new electronic scanning machines a success in the general election, but they plan to do more in the future to promote voter privacy.
Voters on Tuesday filled out paper ballots at tables with small cardboard partitions to provide privacy. The ballots then were put through optical scanning machines and retained to leave a paper trail.
“We felt at the Board of Elections that [the election] was successful,” Elections Commissioner Ralph M. Mohr said. “The big concern the day after are the privacy issues. We knew we only had a temporary solution . . . that we are going to address long term.”
Alternatives could be stand-up booths with curtains or the use of higher partitions, Mohr said.
Mohr said there were some complaints from people who preferred the privacy provided in the curtained election booths with levers, which were still used in Buffalo on Tuesday.
John Marrow, of Orchard Park, was one of them.
“I felt there wasn’t enough privacy where you sit down and mark your ballot,” Marrow said.
Others, like Jeff Barton, who voted at St. Barnabas Church in Depew, found the new system to be a more “relaxed” way to vote.
“I could sit down and actually read the amendments. In the booth, I always feel rushed, like people are waiting,” Barton said Tuesday after casting his ballot.
Marrow also was one of a number of people voicing dissatisfaction with election officials hovering around the new electronic voting machines. He said he felt “uncomfortable” when poll workers observed him as he submitted his ballot.
Elections Commissioner Dennis Ward pointed to poll workers concerned about ballots getting jammed in the new machines, as well as helping others who sought their assistance to scan their ballots.
“That’s just something we’re going to be working on, and it’s something that will also be working itself out in a few years as fewer people ask for assistance,” Ward said.
Some people also complained they weren’t informed by poll workers about the propositions on the reverse side of the ballot, although it was pointed out on the face of the ballot.
Mohr said that some poll workers trained prior to the propositions being certified for the ballot might not have reinforced it but that most were trained to do so.
Still, more people voted on the Erie County proposition using the scanning machine than those using the lever machine in Buffalo by 20 percentage points.
In Buffalo, 8,120 people voted on the proposition out of 15,932 ballots, a 51 percent average. Elsewhere in Erie County, 89,094 people voted on the same proposition out of 124,607 ballots cast, a 71 percent average.
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