Butler County reinstates maintenance contract for voting machines

The Butler County Board of Elections followed county commissioners’ advice and agreed to spend up to $102,471 to reinstate their maintenance contract for 1,688 voting machines and to get on-site support from the vendor for elections. MICHAEL D. PITMAN/STAFF

The Butler County Board of Elections followed county commissioners’ advice and agreed to spend up to $102,471 to reinstate their maintenance contract for 1,688 voting machines and to get on-site support from the vendor for elections. MICHAEL D. PITMAN/STAFF

The Butler County Board of Elections has agreed to spend as much as $102,471 to reinstate a maintenance contract for 1,688 voting machines and to get on-site support from the vendor for elections.

The Board of Elections met Friday and agreed to use every outside service available to ensure trouble-free elections.

RELATED: New voting machines on hold in Butler County

“Let’s make sure our stuff is 100 percent correct…,” board member Todd Hall said. “Since there has been so much conversation of hypotheticals let’s take out all the equations in one shot and be done with it.”

On Monday, Butler County commissioners expressed concern the Board of Elections dropped a maintenance contract, presumably because they thought they would be getting new voting machines soon. The Board of Elections staff let the contract with vendor Dominion lapse at the end of last year because they said they can fix their equipment for less than the $85,000 contract price.

The staff also stopped using the vendor’s on-site election service a while ago.

“In our experience with Dominion and on-site support, they hire contractors to come in when they are providing that support,” Deputy Director Jocelyn Bucaro said. “They are hiring contractors who probably know less about our system than Jay (Klein) and Joe (Andrews) know. Which is why we discontinued the service.”

There is also an issue with 150 broken voting machines the staff never sent out for repair while the extended warranty was in place.

Hall said he couldn’t understand how that happened.

RELATED: Butler County commissioners want voting machine warranty restored

Bucaro said it was “staff oversight.”

“I have a huge problem with that guys,” Hall said. “If we’re paying $100,000 a year for a warranty and we’re not even exercising our option to use the warranty, that makes absolutely no sense. That’s a waste of money.”

Board of Elections Director Diane Noonan said they negotiated with Dominion that if they back-dated the contract to January the 150 machines could be fixed — but that would be an additional cost for the first nine months of this year — or if the contract date is Oct. 1, the BOE will pay to fix the machines. Noonan and Bucaro said the second option would be cheaper.

Board member Kathy Wyenandt asked if they needed the warranty since staff say it’s cheaper to repair it themselves.

“Is this whole thing even prudent for the voters and the taxpayers that we get ourselves into this $100,000 warranty if we technically don’t need it because we do our own repairs,” Wunnenberg said.

She was told they are in the voting business, not machine repair and they need experts in charge.

Noonan said she doesn’t know how much it will cost to fix the broken machines but they will be fixed. On an average election they only use about 1,200 machines but in last year’s presidential they sent 1,500 out to polls.

MORE: Butler County needs 500 more poll workers

Another issue is inspection of the working voting machines to certify them for the warranty. Noonan said the normal price for the the vendor to do the inspection is $40,000. Since the company has worked with the county for so long, it would only cost $8,000 because Dominion will just send people out to observe BOE staff while they are performing their pre-election voting machine testing.

All tolled the board has paid $454,261 for the extended warranty and the on-site election support was $211,580 since they got the machines in 2005. The price for election support in the new contract is $4,500.

Hall said not only does he want Dominion on site but also the commissioners’ technical staff.

“I think we should have all hands on deck to make sure everything is perfect at the end of the day,” Hall said. “If it takes some resources to make sure of that, we’ll see how this goes, but if we throw everything on the deck at one time, at least we can assure the voters we have everything in place.”

Dixon was pleased to hear the Board of Elections and he are “on the same page” now.

“It’s good, it’s just good insurance and it makes sense,” Dixon said.

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