$1M state voting mandate: Carbon bracing to budget for purchase of machines

The state is requiring all counties to update their electronic voting machines by next year, and Carbon County officials are saying it may cost upward of $1 million to complete the state’s mandate.

On Thursday, the county commissioners approved a request to accept the allocation from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which is the 2018 HAVA Election Security Grants, in the amount of $71,394.86 to be used toward the purchase of new voting equipment.

Commissioner Thomas J. Gerhard said the allocation amounts to covering approximately 5 percent of the county’s total bill for the new voting machines.

Commissioner William O’Gurek said the unfunded state mandate requires all counties to have the new voting machines in place next year, is going to be a big hit to the county budget. The estimates to replace the 125 electronic voting machines are coming in anywhere between $600,000 and $1 million.

“If there is anything that will throw a budget out of whack it is an unfunded mandate like this,” he said. “Nonetheless, we will adopt a tentative budget on Nov. 13 and in it will be a budget line item for probably $1 million to purchase new machines, which will be some knock to the taxpayers. $71,000 helps, but it is no where near what the mandate is going to cost us.”

The commissioners said that they have not yet decided on a machine but looked at three so far.

The new machines must also include the ability to have a paper trail.

The problem with that, O’Gurek said, is going to be an added cost each election because the county will have to print out approximately 40,000 paper ballots.

“Printing all those ballots ... and then you get 15, 20, 30 percent (voter turnout) in some of the precincts, so we will be throwing away stacks of paper,” O’Gurek said.

Nothstein also questioned storage because the new machines will also be larger than the current machines.

“It’s creating a lot of headaches,” he said.

The last time the state required counties to move to an electronic voting machine was following the 2000 presidential election when George Bush wasn’t declared the winner of the presidential election until mid-December. Glitches involving pregnant and hanging chads in Florida, uncounted votes, confusion, and calls for recounts, caused the delay.

At that time, the state introduced the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which covered approximately $470,000 of the bill for the new machines.

The electronic voting machines Carbon County uses now have been in place since 2006. Before that, the county had been using pull lever machines since 1949.