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County adapts well to new era of voting

OBSERVER Photo Early voting was one of the challenges facing the county Board of Elections in 2019.

The Chautauqua County Board of Elections rallying cry for 2019 was loosely lifted from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” “It’s not our place to wonder why. It’s our place to do our die.” Translated, New York state passed a dizzying amount of new election laws in early 2019. Some were controversial for some voters and to us at the Board of Elections, we simply implemented the changes as best we could to benefit our customer voters.

Along with our small staff, we took on the 2019 task of rolling out state mandated Early Voting for the voters of our county with Early Voting stations in Jamestown, Dunkirk and Mayville.

Early voting was state mandated for just one site in a county our size of less than 100,000 registered voters and the easy path would have been to comply with the law and offer Early Voting just at our Mayville county seat office. However, everyone knows that we are a county of the north and a county of the south. We have two distinct and different population masses of Dunkirk-Fredonia and Jamestown-Lakewood and it was our view that the population centers needed to be served.

The Board of Elections reward for taking on the extra work and effort of three Early Voting Poll sites was to have the third highest county Early Voter turnout percentage in all of New York State. A further validation that we were successful was the positive feedback from our customer voters and few technical failures. Other counties in New York state were not as fortunate as Chautauqua County and they found a bright media spotlight highlighting technical problems and in other cases very low Early Voting participation.

A key component of Early Voting was the roll out of electronic poll books. New to our state, the electronic poll books allows voters to sign-in to vote on an ATM like terminal with an immediate signature comparison and real time communication with the two other Early Voting Poll sites in real time, so as to not allow a voter from voting twice at a different site on any Election Day.

Many counties in New York also rolled out electronic poll books for the recent November General Election with good results. We took the go slow approach and will be implementing electronic poll books at all poll sites in our county starting with the April 28 Presidential Primary.

All costs associated with Early Voting were adequately covered by New York state in 2019. The Board of Elections proposed budget for 2020 was cut by the county executive $50,000 and the amount was not reinstated by the County Legislature in the final budget. We are hopeful that we can find internal efficiencies and savings to cover the cut, or that the state will provide a permanent source of funds in 2020 — and the future — to help.

Election Night, the Board of Elections provided a new and more readable live election results website reporting page that had rave reviews. Results were fully reported in the county by 10:20 p.m. and our county was the first in New York state to fully report. The election reporting webpage was developed by Board of Elections staffer Chris Burt, who also was the technical go-to guy for the roll out of electronic poll books.

The Board of Elections continues to be the principal operator of two on-site printing machines, which it owns and are housed in the former county print shop in a partnership with the Information Services Department. With the exception of county tax bills and nearly all election printing, the majority of county printing is completed using an outside vendor. Chautauqua County is one of just a few New York State counties that prints all ballots, poll books and election materials in-house saving county taxpayers nearly $500,000 over the past ten years. Chris Burt and Nacole Ellis head up the ballot, poll book and election items printing.

We are particularly proud of our relationship with villages, school districts and fire districts outside of villages and cities in Chautauqua County, when compared with many — not all — counties in New York state.

¯ Over the past decade we have partnered with 11 villages to move elections to November at a cost savings to village budgets. Westfield is the only the only village that the Board of Elections acts as its chief election officer for March elections and Sinclairville is the only village that continues to run its own elections.

¯ All 18 county schools use county owned voting machines and the Board of Elections fully supports each schools elections. Districts are charged back the fair cost of elections. Very, very few school districts in New York have full county support for school elections.

¯ The Board of Elections will be providing electronic poll books for the small city school districts of Jamestown and Dunkirk for the May 19 elections. Additionally, any county school district that decides to adopt the Board of Elections voter rolls will be serviced with electronic poll books.

¯ Fire Districts outside of villages and cities elect fire commissioners using Board of Elections assembled voter lists for the fire districts.

Coming up is the busiest of the four-year cycle of elections with the election or re-election in 2020 of president. The November election, history tells us, will see a 70% turnout of the 77,087 active county voters — 24,820 Democrat, 26,394 Republican, 1,934 Conservative, 444 Working Families, 164 Green, 184 Libertarian, 4,628 Independent and 18,519 non-affiliated voters.

The elections of 2019 are March 18 village elections; April 28 Presidential primary; May 19 school elections; June 23 state/local/federal primaries; November 3 General Election and December fire district elections. New hours for village and primary elections are 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. with nine days of early voting to proceed each of these elections.

Offering all of our services in Spanish and English is an important part of our mandated operations in Jamestown and Dunkirk. This is a federal requirement.

Luz Torres provides all in-house Spanish translations and services all Spanish speaking customers. Administering grants, managing requests for proposals for unique election items and managing the budget is the role of Donna Sanderson. Absentee voting is administered by Lori Stearns and Chelsea Babcock. Tony Popielarz and Ruth Eckstrom train the nearly 600 regular and alternate election inspectors needed to operate poll sites. Daily, the entire Board of Elections staff tracks the movement and registration of nearly 80,000 county voters and services the nearly 500 elected officials of the county.

As in the case of any business or government operation there are certain things we live by and in conclusion we wish to share them with you.

¯ Voters are customers.

¯ The Board of Elections staff are not bureaucrats and are not to act in a bureaucratic manner.

¯ Information requests are provided the same day as requested, if possible.

¯ All media requests for information or quotes are answered immediately.

¯ Phone calls are returned the same day they are received, or the next morning if the call came in off hours.

¯ E-mails are answered as soon as received.

¯ Votechautauqua.com is to have as much information as possible to allow voters to be able to lookup what they might need.

¯ We are here to serve the candidates and voters.

Norman P. Green and Brian C. Abram are Chautauqua County Board of Elections commissioners.

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