Four Questions: Eastchester Town Clerk Explains New Voting Process

The kids are back in school and the summer whites are packed away until next Memorial Day. If that weren't enough to keep up with, there's an election next Tuesday, September 14th.

Party candidates will be chosen for several big races: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and US Senator. Around the state, voters will choose Congressional representatives, State Assembly members and judges.

This week, we asked Linda Doherty, Eastchester's Town Clerk, four questions about what voters can expect when they go to cast their ballots on the 14^th.

There are new voting machines across Westchester County. Can you describe the voting process?

It's virtually the same. Just like at the bank where we used to go to a teller and now we go to an ATM, there isn't much of a difference.

In the past, it has been a lever machine. Now you're going to fill in a circle on a ballot like an SAT test. And you will feed that ballot into an optic scanner. So how your vote is recorded changes, where you vote has not.

For the primary you will be given a ballot, depending on what party you are registered to—Democrats will be given a Democratic ballot, Republicans will be given a Republican ballot and Conservatives will be given a Conservative ballot.

You will then proceed to an area that's called a booth, but it's really just a privacy area where there are partitions. You can complete your ballot simply by coloring in the circle of the person you want to vote for. You're given a privacy sleeve so when you're walking around, no one can see who you have selected with that ballot. You can put it in the sleeve and go over to the machine which will be designated with the election district you live in. So where you signed in—if you signed in at 16, you then go to machine 16 and there will be someone there to help you.

With an optic scanner, you just simply place your ballot and it will go in. And you can put it in upside down, backwards, there's no wrong way. The machine will read the ballot no matter how you place it in there. If for some reason, it says vote for one person and you vote for two, you will be given your ballot back. The machine will not accept it. You will be given another ballot and the inspectors will take you back to the table to complete another one. There is a process they have to follow when that happens by which they indicate where you signed in, that you were given a second ballot. It [the incorrect ballot] gets ripped up, but it is preserved in their election materials. It's ripped—no one can do anything with it, but we collect it back and you are given an opportunity to complete another ballot.

You can bring someone with you—an aide or ask an inspector. There will be someone from each party there. At every polling place there is also what is called the "Plan B" machine—a handicapped accessible machine available to people. A quadriplegic person could vote using this machine, it has a puffing mechanism. We have audio set-up. If someone has tremors  or doesn't feel they can vote on the ballot by filling in the circles, they could go to the "Plan B" machine.

How can I find my polling place and what do I need to bring with me to vote?

Where you go to vote, your polling place has not changed. In many cases the people that help process you, the same men and women that have always worked are being assigned to the same places. The inspectors are the same.

Election law requires you bring ID. It is always good to carry ID.

Use the New York State Board of Elections Website to quickly find your voting site.

How many people help with the election process? And how do they count all those ballots?

Within a polling place there are three or four election districts, there are optic scanners for each district and a "Plan B" machine. Sixteen polling places in Eastchester, 39 districts.

There's an entire department at the County level called the Board of Elections. Just in the town of Eastchester, we have sixteen polling places, each them will have two Democrats and two Republicans assigned, as well as other workers who are registered voters. Each of the Plan B machines has two people. So just in the Town of Eastchester, we have 188 people that are working in the polls for the primary and also for the general elections.

What other duties does the Town Clerk handle?

We handle elections less and less. Over the last five years, the Board of Elections has centralized the elections process at the county level. So now it's just a tiny part of what we do here. The Town Clerk's office is the keeper of the records of the town. So our records that date back to 1660, reside in our vault as well as all permanent records since then. We help maintain current records.

I keep the minutes of the Town Board and resolutions and work a lot with departments as they have to research how things were passed, when they were passed. Every piece of paper the State determines, every piece of paper has a retention, so you have to save something permanently or for six years, our office helps the other offices do that and stores and retrievals. We do permitting here. We issue about 3,000 parking permits. We do some restaurant licensing, film permits... if someone wants to film a movie. You get a dog license here, fishing and hunting licenses, marriages...

All FOIA requests are processed through this office and all bids are done through All FOIA requests are processed through this office and all bids are done through the office, if the town needs to purchase something over $10,000 the bid lists are maintained here. And various and sundry other things.

I'm the registrar of vital statistics. So death certificates are filed here, marriage licenses are obtained here. And in the past ten years since I've been here, we've had one birth. The clerk in Bronxville has one a minute since Lawrence Hospital is there, but we don't have a hospital so we've only had one birth. Somebody didn't quite make it to the hospital.