New Haven Independent

Gone are the old voting machines on which people pulled levers to pick their candidates. This is the first time optical scanners have been used statewide or citywide in New Haven. Many New Haven wards still used the old mechanical machines during the 2007 mayoral elections. Now everyone fills in ovals on a piece of paper and then runs it through the optical scanner to record votes.

In New Haven, only one scanner malfunctioned, at the polling station at Urban Youth on Dixwell Avenue, according to Av Harris, communications director for the Secretary of the State’s office. It was quickly replaced with a spare.

The errant scanner — it refused to accept the ballots — was replaced within a half hour after it failed at about 9:30 a.m., said Vivian C. Hilton, the moderator at the 21st Ward, where the malfunction occurred.

“They came right way” with a replacement, said said.

In the meantime, the voting didn’t stop, Hilton said. The ballots were collected from voters and then stored in a lock box until the replacement scanner arrived, she said. Because the ballot-counting mechanism on the machine still functioned, all the votes that were posted before the machine failed were safely counted, she said.

There are 31 polling places in New Haven. Officials have a total of 52 scanners available in the city.

“Overall, it’s been kind of quiet,” on the malfunction front, Harris said.

Harris said some people have reported the counters on the optical scanners that register the votes did not move when they inserted their ballots. He said it could be that the counters reacted to the ballot insertion before the voter looked, so it appeared it hadn’t moved when in fact it had.

It also could be that the experience of Susan Honeyman, a voter in the 26th Ward, was repeated in other places in the state.

Honeyman (who’s married to this reporter) said she was sure she was looking at the counter when she inserted her ballot, and the counter didn’t move. She reported the problem to moderator Raymond Lopes Jr., who assured her the counter had moved before she realized.

Harris said if in fact the ballot insertion had not moved the counter, that error would be caught at the end of the day.

The moderators were required to compare the number of voters who checked in at the polling station to the number of votes recorded on the scanner’s counter. If they do not match, he said, then the ballots would be removed from the scanner and counted by hand.

Each vote would be counted, he said.

In the 26th Ward, at the Davis Street School in the Westville, more than half the registered voters had cast ballots by 1:30 p.m., according to Lopes.

“It was packed this morning,” Lopes said, adding that the voters’ line wound around the school gym, gone out the door and down the 75 feet to the sidewalk and along the sidewalk about 150 feet in front of the school.

“There were people knocking at the door a quarter after 5 this morning, asking to vote,” Lopes said. “It’s been steady ever since.” Only after about 1 p.m. did the number of people waiting to vote number fewer than a couple of dozen.

“At about 11 a.m., finally were able to wait inside the building,” Lopes said.

A number of elderly and handicapped people were moved up in line so their waiting time was as short as possible, and nobody who who was line jumped complained.

“There was not one complaint,” Lopes said.