By Sean Bailey / Staff Writer

Just two weeks before the November election the issue of the reliability of Whitley County’s voting machines was brought into question by a group of citizens at Whitley County’s regular monthly fiscal court meeting Tuesday.

Paul Cummins, who brought the issue to the court during last month’s meeting, began the discussion during the public comments portion of the meeting, by clarifying his doubts about the county’s voting machines — and not the officials running the election.

“We aren’t fighting the people, we are fighting the machine, and we are still fighting the machine. We feel that we can’t depend on it, and that’s the most basic right in a democracy system we have,” Cummins said.

Cummins and a group of voters loosely known as Citizens for a Better Whitley county are concerned that elections results could be tampered with because electronic machines lack a “paper trail”. They argue that a paper trail would make it harder to tamper with Whitley Countain’s votes.

Currently, the county uses electronic machines that don’t have the same “paper trail” that some machines have.

Cummins said there is a long list of studies done by respected universities like Princeton and Stanford and national media sources like CNN and the New York Times call the reliability of electronic machines into question.

The county received $162,000 in grant money earlier in the year to buy additional or new voting machines. Cummins questioned what the county would be doing with the money.

County Clerk Kay Schwartz, who is also in charge of the county’s elections said there hasn’t been a decision on what to do with the money yet.

“We basically didn’t make any decision. The machines we have are working. According to the attorney general there hasn’t been a proven case of voter fraud in Kentucky. We basically haven’t decided to do anything with the money until the state approves some of the other equipment,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz said 96 of Kentucky’s 120 counties use similar machines to Whitley County’s machines. Schwartz said, she, as the county’s election organizer would go along with whatever the court decided would be the best choice for the county. She added, though, that the cost of all the additional equipment required for paper ballots would be high.

Schwartz said she hadn’t research the various voting machines herself, the machines that Whitley uses are approved by the state.

The discussion between the nearly “standing room only” crowd became heated at times. One man who identified himself as a election officer said he hadn’t seen any problems in the years he has worked the election. From his view the electronic machines that caused problems in other states were connected to modems, which Whitley County’s are not.

The election officer, also said that because the votes at the end of election night have to equal the number of people who came to the poll, officials would be able to spot possible fraud if it had occured.

Other community members who spoke said they and neighbors had discussed not voting on grounds that they couldn’t trust the current machines.

One man asked why there was resistance to changing the machines, if it would make voters feel more secure.

“There is no resistance, it just that what we have is working. There’s been over 200 people on the ballots since May of 95 and there hasn’t been a problem before,” Schwartz said.

The May 1995 election was the first time the current machines were used.

Vincent Ellis, who describes himself as an auto-engineer that works with computers similar to the voting machines, said his concern is that there is no way to “audit” the results.

Ellis argued that paper “back-ups” would allow a third-party to come in and compare the paper trail to the electronic machine results. If there was a descripncie, there would be evidence.

Judge-Executive Pat White Jr. asked Schwartz too look into the cost of the additional machines.

Before the long discussion of the voting machine, the fiscal court approved the creation of four Fiscal Court committees, headed by the court’s magistrates.

Judge White said the committees will allow magistrates to delve deeper into the “operations” of the court. The committees are Road/Construction Infrastructure Committee, Solid Waste/Enviroment Responsibility Committee, Emergency Services/Prepardeness Committee and the Budget Finance Committee.

White said the state auditor and Department of Local Government recent took the stance that counties committees like these to, as Judge White put it, “better involve everybody in the court and foster better communication.

The court also approved the creation of a Cemetery Board. Judge White said the “genesis” of the board came from a century-old cemetery that lies on National Park ground close to the Tennessee border.

Federal laws prohibit community members from cutting trees down on the protected land, but as White said, some of the trees are growing around old gravesites.

“All of the timber in the cemetery is protected assets, you can’t clean up the graves because federal law prohibits it ... it’s shameful to see the condition of some of the graves,” White said.

The creation of the board will allow the county to clean-up the sites, and also allow the county to apply for grants that could clean up similar cemeteries.

In other fiscal court business:

• The court approved the Judge-Executive to re-enter into an inter-local agreement between area law-enforcement agencies for the Unlawful Narcotics Investigations Treatment and Education Inc. (UNITE). County Attorney Paul Winchester described this agreement, as the county continuing it’s support of the UNITE program.

• The court approved the purchase of three vehicles for county use at a state auction for a total price of no more than $15,000.

• The court awarded a bid to Whanye Supplies for a new loader/backhoe. Judge White said the Whayne supply bid made a used backhoe available for the county at a “substantially cheaper” price than a new backhoe. White said he was glad to do business with a local company, adding that doing business with local company’s creates jobs in the county.

• Approved a resolution authorizing the approval of illegal open dump application. The grant’s money, if secured, would go toward further combating the county’s open-dump problem.