Centre County Commissioners voted 2-1 yesterday to accept a contract that will bring new optical scan voting machines to the county at a cost of more than $1 million.
At their weekly meeting yesterday, commissioners Rich Rogers and Jon Eich voted in favor of an Election Systems and Software (ES&S) contract that will provide the county with 200 new voting machines at a cost of about $1.1 million with an annual hardware cost of $58,000.
Credits of $140,000 owed to the county by ES&S will offset the cost of the machines, Rogers said.
Commissioner Steve Dershem voted against the contract. In the past, Dershem has said the purchase's impact on the county's budget is too large for him to support. He also does not have as much of a problem with the current machines as the other commissioners do, he said.
"I don't have the same level of dissatisfaction," he said.
The contract provides the county with 100 optical scan machines and 100 AutoMARK machines. Using the new machines, voters will fill out traditional paper ballots, which will be read through the electron scan machines. The AutoMARK machines are designed to help disabled people fill out their ballots, which will then also be sent through the optical scan machines.
The new machines will replace the county's current touch-screen machines. Groups such as Concerned Voters of Centre County were in favor of new machines because, unlike the optical scan machines, touch-screen machines cannot provide a paper trail.
Voters will spend about the same amount of time voting as they did with the machines, and before the election the machines may be put out in public so people can test them and get used to them, Eich said.
The machines are expected to arrive at the end of September. That timeline will provide enough time for poll workers to be properly trained, Director of Administrative Services Timothy Boyde said.
Re-selling the old machines was mentioned, but Eich stressed the importance of being cautious.
"I'm a conservative guy," he said. "I'm not willing to move those machines until we have the new ones."
Even if the county had chosen not to buy optical scan machines, up to $300,000 would have had to be spent to buy new touch-screens to replace machines which were about to be decertified, Rogers said.
"I can't justify wasting that money," he said.
Rogers has had complaints about dealing with ES&S in the past, but said the county is "between a rock and a hard place" because ES&S makes the best machines.
