Sharing is Caring: NY Counties to Share Ballot Printing Costs

[Image courtesy of aliciacowan]

My friends over at Pew recently featured this story as part of their Election Data Dispatches – and it’s too interesting not to share …

According to the Utica Observer-Dispatch, New York’s Oneida and Schenectady Counties are entering into an arrangement to share ballot printing costs:

The Oneida County Board of Elections is hoping to cut the cost of printing election ballots in half.

The county has entered into an intermunicipal agreement with Schenectady County to print the ballots, instead of using more expensive Fort Orange Press.

“Schenectady was very receptive to doing our ballots,” Democratic Election Commissioner Russell Stewart said. “We know they know how to do it and there is a savings.”

It’s the first time two New York counties are working together this way, Stewart and Schenectady County officials said.

The arrangement is aimed as a cost-savings measure but it also appears to be the result of two new election officials looking for a different approach to election administration:

Stewart and his Republican counterpart, Rose Grimaldi, are in their first year as commissioners, and said from the beginning that they wanted to make the board more efficient and economical.

When they started looking at printing costs, they found that several other counties had purchased their own printers and were making their own ballots.

But rather than asking for printers, they checked whether the other counties — Schenectady, Albany, Washington, Chautauqua, Erie and Onondaga — might be willing to work with them.

Schenectady was interested and the price was right: 26 cents per ballot, instead of the 57 cents charged by Fort Orange.

The deal is a win-win, Schenectady County elections officials said.

“We are providing our excess capacity to Oneida County and they are helping us defray costs,” Democratic Commissioner Brian Quail said. “I think the whole thing is very mutually beneficial.”

One especially interesting aspect of the story is the fact that Schenectady’s printing capacity is the direct result of federal funding under the Help America Vote Act:

Nationwide, the way elections were operated changed after the contested presidential election of 2000. The Help America Vote Act allocated money to help local boards of election find better ways of ensuring that votes could be accurately cast and counted.

That’s when many such boards did away with the old lever-operated voting machines and purchased electronic voting machines that require printed ballots.

The Schenectady County Board used about $200,000 of the money it received to purchase two printing machines of the grade required. On average, that county had been spending about $90,000 a year on printing.

Time will tell, of course, if this arrangement works for both counties – but for now, it appears to be yet another example of local boards coming together to help one another cope with the demands of election administration.