New Voting Machines Unveiled During Primary Elections

Smithtown residents will head to the polls Tuesday to decide which Republican candidate will take on incumbent Tim Bishop, D- Southampton, for the House of Representatives first district seat, in addition to voting on candidates in the attorney general, senate and gubernatorial races.

Suffolk County voters will find themselves using new machinery and ballots at the polls for Tuesday's primary election.

Two representatives of the county's Board of Elections recently demonstrated the new system to about 25 voters in Huntington, walking people through the new steps each voter will take.

Gone are the mechanical levers and curtained areas, replaced by paper ballots, scanners and privacy booths, all part of a federally mandated changeover brought about by Florida's fiasco in the 2000 presidential election. New York State becomes the last state to fall in line with the Help America Vote Act, which, among other things, requires a paper trail of each vote cast.

After checking in at a polling place, voters will proceed to the new booths, mark their ballots and then take them to a scanner designed to read and record their choices in about 12 seconds. Polling places with multiple electoral districts will have machines designated for each district, which will not be able to accept ballots from other districts.

Voters will mark their choices by filling in ovals on paper ballots, which could be two sided, with candidate contests on one side, referendum or questions on the other.

Peter DeNigris, a trainer, said the machines had the ability to address or head off several problems, such as "over voting" (making too many choices in any given category), ambiguous markings, such as using a checkmark or X instead of filling out the oval, or ballots that are blank.

People who overvote will hear from the machine, literally, which beeps to warn voters of the error and asks them in an on-screen message if they still want to cast that ballot or revote. If the voter proceeds with the overvote ballot, every selection on the ballot is counted except that in the overvoted category. The machine will return ballots with ambiguous markings so voters can fix them.

To ensure privacy, marked ballots can be enclosed in a paper sleeve to ensure privacy as voters carry them to the scanners, and newly arriving voters are discouraged from walking behind those already in the process of marking their ballots.

Polls are open from 6 a.m. – 9 p.m. In the Smithtown District, polling locations include New York Avenue, Mills Pond Elementary and Smithtown West High School. To find out where to vote, click here. For more information, call the Board of Elections at (631) 852-4500.

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