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Agreement reached on equipment
YOUNGSTOWN
The Mahoning County Board of Elections finalized a lease-to-own agreement for its paper-ballot voting system being used in today’s primary election.
The equipment, first used in the November 2011 general election, costs $733,300. Voters use paper ballots and then go to optical scanners that read and count the ballots.
The board on Monday approved a deal that offsets a portion of that cost and doesn’t require the county to make a payment from the general fund until next year.
Election Systems & Software, a Lincoln, Neb., company that sold the new paper-ballot system as well as the previous electronic touch-screen voting system to the county, will receive $266,200 shortly as a first payment.
The board is selling its old equipment to ES&S for $201,000 with another $65,200 coming from state and federal grants, said board Director Joyce Kale-Pesta.
ES&S will receive a payment of $233,550 next year and the same amount in 2013, she said. After the last payment, the county will own the election equipment.
The county paid about $3.8 million for the touch-screen voting system, used between 2001 and 2011, with federal funds paying $2.1 million of it.
Also with Tuesday’s primary election comes a new policy that should speed up election results, Kale-Pesta said.
During the November 2011 election, pollworkers at each precinct had to count by hand the number of vote sheets in each machine and make sure it equaled the number of voters who signed in to cast ballots. Results to the elections board in November weren’t done until 10:49 p.m. last November.
Not having to count ballots at the polling locations will cut an hour off the time it takes to post election results, Kale- Pesta said.
The board voted Monday to promote Kale- Pesta, a Democrat, to director, the first woman to have that job in the county. That means Thomas McCabe, a Republican and director for nearly seven years, is the deputy director. In anticipation of the change, the board last month increased the salary of the deputy director to the same amount as the director, $63,860 a year.
The board also replaced Democrat Robert Wasko as chairman with county Republican Party Chairman Mark Munroe.
The board made county Democratic Party Chairman David Betras, at his first meeting, its vice chairman.