The write-in campaign has been maligned and defended vigorously in a debate rendered meaningless by the Village of Great Neck’s constitution approving of a write-in campaign. One should not be blamed for such a legal action. True, the election was totally chaotic, running into midnight, and vote counting (canvasing) stretching into the wee hours of early morning, generating overtime work without pay for the staff.
Our election process in Great Neck is primitive at best. Machines with levers are functional and somewhat better than the so-called computer scanners that are anything but sophisticated. The official slate consisted of four candidates for whom four levers were assigned by immobilizing four more.
For writing in, however, at least 10 (maybe more) slots were available.
Of these, first one was much larger than the rest, and voters had no way to know which slot was for which candidate. For writing in four names, some used slots 1-3-5-7, some used 2-3-4-5, some 1-2-3-4, and some used 2-4-6-8 or 3-5-7-9.
This made it very challenging for the poll inspectors to count the votes assigning them to the appropriate candidates. A lengthy discussion and meeting of minds held before beginning the vote count averted the otherwise inevitable bad blood.
The slots for writing in are at the top of the machines, making it nearly impossible to reach them, open them, hold the pencil in one hand, list of names to be written in the other, and try to squeeze in the full name into an extremely tight space, which is obliquely placed, with no easily visible numbers.
It did not help the situation either, when one machine’s write-in mechanism failed. With almost 50 percent of the voters requiring assistance from their friends or from the staff created potential privacy issue, not easily alleviated by voluntarily using the paperless machine (that is, obviously voting for the official slate).
There was not enough room at the polling station for securely manually marking paper ballots in complete privacy. That also generated long lines, adding to those caused by a malfunctioning machine, and the other one being able to accommodate one write-in voter every 10-15 minutes, as compared to less than a minute required to pull the levers.
These serious issues need to be addressed before the next election, if we really want it to be democratic one.
Dr. Bharat S. Shah
Great Neck
