An item of new business on the Gays Mills Village Board Agenda concerning updating voting machines at no cost to the village generated lots of discussion. In fact, representatives of other villages attended the meeting to urge Gays Mills to approve the upgrade of voting machines.
Years ago, the other 16 polling places in the county, including Prairie du Chien, all of the townships and the larger villages, got the voting upgrade. The new voting machines use paper ballots, which voters fill out with an ink pen. Voters insert the completed ballot into a scanner which records the votes. When the last votes are cast, the clerk presses a button and the machine produces the vote totals for each candidate in each race in the election.
Voters also have the option of putting their ballots into a locked ballot box and have them hand-counted by poll workers after the election concludes.
Gays Mills Village Trustee Kevin Murray expressed doubts about using the new machines and feared losing the hand-count could undermine the integrity of the election.
What’s at stake for the polling places is a deal the county has to replace the five village’s current voting methods with the upgraded method that can use a scanner for the count and still have a hand-count option.
Central Command, which facilitates the county municipalities in vote tabulation, has offered the county five machines for the total price of $2,000 or $400 each. The regular price for this type of voting machine is $2,000 each.
The county found funds in the election fund that could be used to cover the entire $2,000 cost to obtain the five machines. So, there will be no cost to the villages. Central Command placed one condition on the lower sale price, all five villages must approve installing the upgraded voting machines.
If Gays Mills does not approve it, the other four villages, including Bell Center, Mt. Sterling, Lynxville and Steuben, will not get the upgraded voting machines. All of the other four villages have already approved the plan to install the new technology for optical scanning of the ballots.
Gays Mills Village President Harry Heisz introduced the agenda item by noting that election tabulation is increasingly a problem. He noted one option is the ballot scanning provided by the upgraded voting machine.
When the other 16 polling places in the county chose to upgrade to electric counting, Gays Mills and the other four townships chose to go a different route.
One problem with the current touch screen machines still used in the five villages is that voting technology is no longer supported.
Central Command approached the county to see if there was interest in getting all the polling places to use optical scanning.
Currently, half the voters in Gays Mills use paper ballots, which are hand counted. The other half use a touch screen technology to cast their votes.
Those from other villages attending the meeting emphasized that all voters would actually be voting on a paper ballot, which would be saved. Some would use the optical scanner and others could use the ballot box. However, the actual ballots used would be identical paper ballots.
Contacted later, Crawford County Clerk Robin Fisher, explained that while the new paper ballots can be scanned those same exact ballots can be dropped in a ballot box and be hand-counted.
Trustee Kevin Murray remained committed to voting on paper and having a worker count that ballot.
Village trustee Larry McCarn pointed out that a major difference from the first time the village was approached with this option to change to the new system of scanning ballots the village was going to have to pay for it. This time there is no cost to the village.
Village Trustee Kim Pettit said she wouldn’t want to have to do paper ballots.
The issue was tabled so more information could be gathered about hand counting the ballots.
In other business, the Gays Mills Village Board:
• approved getting inspections done of some potentially blighted buildings on Main Street to definitely establish their status of disrepair
• approved a water simplified rate application
• discussed taking over maintenance of Railroad Street from the county beyond the pool toward the fairgrounds
• discussed taking action on junk cars in the village per the ordinance
