Elections will cost counties

   By Paul Brooks   Times Herald-Record    24 September 2005
      The curse of the hanging chad is striking towns in the mid-Hudson. It could cost millions of dollars.
   Voters will remember the hanging chad from the 2000 presidential election in Florida. The debacle prompted Congress to pass the Help America Vote Act.
   In New York, the law puts county boards of elections in charge. They take over the job from town officials, the ones who have run elections locally for years.
   The new job means the county boards are in charge of buying, storing, maintaining and moving the voting machines. New ones are supposed to be coming, but the purchases are behind schedule. The county has to hire and train election staff, manage and keep more records. All that means more staff, six in Ulster County, for example, according to Tom Turco and Kathy Mihm of the county's Board of Elections. They outlined the impact at a meeting of town supervisors this week.
   "It's huge," Mihm said.
   The tab is big, up to $600,000 in Ulster and $797,000 in Orange. Sullivan Republican Election Commissioner Fran Thalmann said her office will not meet with budget administrators until Oct. 5 and has not yet figured out the HAVA impact. Given the population of the county, though, it will probably be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
   The final decision on what to charge towns, if anything, rests with the county Legislature, Turco said. Orange County Executive Ed Diana will decide the issue, according to Elections Commissioner Sue Bahren. "We're anticipating we may very well do a charge-back," she said.
   Towns will find the additional costs hard to absorb. Diane McCord, clerk for the Town of Esopus, said she budgets about $17,000 for elections now. The charge-back from Ulster County could be $33,000. "This is a big heave-ho in my budget, let me tell you," McCord said, "but we don't have any choice."