School district changing voting machines

The Rockville Centre School District will be using scanning-type voting machines for the first time for its budget vote in May.

The machines, which voters should be familiar with from other elections in recent years, have users fill out paper ballots which are then scanned and recorded by electronic machines. They are replacements for the lever-style machines that New York used for decades.

When the state had to switch to electronic machines by law, exceptions were made for school districts to allow them to continue to use lever machines. But that exception expires this year, so the district will have to switch.

“We’ve been very accustomed to utilizing, up until this past year, what are now antiques,” said Superintendent Dr. William Johnson.

At the Board of Education meeting on Feb. 3, District Clerk Jacqueline Wong, who is in charge of the district’s elections, explained what the switch will mean for the school district.

The first change is the cost: the district has to pay the Nassau County Department of Elections to rent the machines for $300 each. Wong said the district is looking to rent six machines for the vote in May.

In addition to the machines, the district has to purchase ballot boxes, a one-time cost. The boxes go inside the machines and collect the ballots. The district would keep the boxes for use in the next election, after the machines are returned to the Board of Elections.

However, with the new machines comes the cost of printing ballots for each election.

“What I did was I looked back at the past 15 years,” Wong said. “The highest vote was in 2010 when we had 4,700 voters. I’m ordering 20 percent above that, which will be about 6,000 ballots. That’s 40 cents per ballot, so about $2,400.”

The district will have to purchase ballots for each budget vote, which is one of the reasons many municipalities were against the switch to the scanning machines. This year’s vote will be on May 17 in the gym at South Side High School.