By Jesse Serwer
Ultimately, the situation at Defenders was resolved by redirecting voters in Election District 58 to an Election District 62 machine at the same location, while paper ballots were offered at Riverside before its machine was quickly fixed by a mechanic from the Nassau County Board of Elections, which supplies the machines. The two cruised to victory, and won decisively at both Defenders and Riverside, where they captured nearly 80 percent of the votes cast.
While "almost everyone who wanted to vote had the opportunity to vote," Karamouzis said, "it was so strange that two machines broke down on the same day - it was just very odd. " Election inspectors he spoke to at both sites had 44 years of village election experience between them and could not recall a single such problem with voting machines.
According to village administrator Ron Wasson, Rockville Centre was due for a voting machine malfunction after avoiding one for so long.
"While most of the inspectors will say 'I have been doing this for 15, 20 years and I have never had anything happen' it was unusual for us to go for so long without having something like this happen."
Despite the fact that the first machine, in which a small piece of plastic fell into the gear mechanism, and the second, in which the wire that connects to the curtain to close it had snapped, malfunctioned in very different ways, Wasson said "the experience we gained from the first time made it a lot easier to handle the second one."
"Even though it is nerve wracking for candidates, I don't think anybody didn't get a chance to vote," Wasson noted.
Nassau County Board of Elections Chief Clerk Vincent Grasso said it is normal for a village to experience one or two mechanical problems with the machines in local elections like the one in Rockville Centre last week. "The average machine is 30 to 50 years old, and like any mechanical device it has wear and tear and things that go wrong. [That is why]we pride ourselves on having a strong maintenance department."
Either way, the aging lever-action machines that caused last Tuesday's trouble will no longer be a problem as of January 2006, Grasso said, when Nassau County will be required to comply with the guidelines of the Helping Americans Vote, or HAVA act, a 2002 piece of federal legislation intended to assure uniform voter access in the wake of the 2000 presidential election controversy. After months of delay, the New York State Legislature just last week agreed on legislation that will allow local governments to begin buying new voting machines, either ATM-like touch screen devices or optical scan machines. "There are several machines out there, and each county is evaluating them as we speak."
Comments about this story? JSerwer@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 221.
