Grants will help make voting easier in Vernon County

By Steve Moyer

Nevada Daily Mail

Vernon County is getting some help meeting the requirements of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Secretary of State Robin Carnahan announced that the county could receive up to $335,650 in one-time funds to update voting equipment.

"I want to make it easy to vote and as hard as possible to cheat," Carnahan said.

HAVA is a set of reforms passed by the federal government following the 2000 presidential election. HAVA requires each polling place be handicap accessible and have one accessible voting machine for people with disabilities. It also requires that all voting machines give voters a second-chance option, just in case they made a mistake and voted for two or more candidates in a race.

Vernon County Clerk Tammi Beach said that the money is greatly appreciated but that it is insufficient to pay for all the changes required by HAVA in Vernon County's 34 polling places.

"In addition to the accessible voting machines, each polling place must be handicapped accessible," Beach said. "I checked with (Vernon County Prosecutor) Lynn Ewing and in his opinion each polling place must meet the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements. Right now only one precinct meets the requirements. You can't have gravel parking lots, that doesn't provide a safe, slip proof surface. You need concrete or asphalt parking spaces, and there are other issues that keep the polling places from meeting the requirements."

Beach said some hard decisions had to be made -- and not just in Vernon County.

"County clerks across the state are combining polling places," Beach said. "I believe that is what Vernon County must do also. We must use resources that already exist and use them to their capacity."

Beach said there has been some discontent with the plan to combine polling places but costs are going up, grants can only cover the costs for some of the polling places and the only option would be to pass on the increased cost to the taxpayers.

"There have been some complaints," Beach said. "But there were polling places with very few voters, especially in the April, 2005 election."

Beach said that whether turnout was heavy or light the costs remained fairly even. "Nine thousand forty-five votes were cast in the general election in Nov. 2004," Beach said. "It cost about $28,000 for that election. In April, 2,180 votes were cast and it cost about $24,000--not much difference."

Beach said the costs really came into focus when she looked at how much it cost to provide services, per vote, at the smaller polling places. "In the general election we had polling places with as few as 80 voters, In April we had polling places with as few as 11 voters," Beach said. "The average cost per polling place was $365 in 2006 that will be $11,670 per polling place. For the polling place with 11 voters, the cost was $33.18 per vote in 2005. In 2006, that would cost $1,060 per vote."

Beach said she had planned to combine the Schell City, Harwood and Blue Mound precincts into one polling place located at Harwood.

"That was after the survey was done and they said it would be cheaper to modify the Harwood polling place to meet the ADA requirements, but then Schell City said they would pay for the cost themselves," Beach said.

In the future, Vernon County will use the same machines that were used for the June 7 water district election. The machines use paper ballots that are optically scanned at the polling station and have a memory module that is removed after the election and taken to the county clerk's office to total the votes.