MONTICELO — Sullivan became the latest New York county to pass a resolution urging the state to repeal the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) and allow counties to keep using their lever voting systems.

This brings the total number New York’s county governments who have passed such resolutions to 10.

Sullivan County joins Columbia, Dutchess, Essex, Greene, Rensselaer, Schuyler, Ulster, Warren and Washington counties. The Association of Towns of the State of New York has passed a similar measure, and more local governments are said to be considering resolutions.

The resolution approved unanimously by the Sullivan County Legislature states that ERMA's requirement to change voting systems is unnecessary, "inappropriate, and exorbitantly costly" to taxpayers, and that lever machines are more accessible to senior citizens and others unfamiliar with computers.

The Election Transparency Coalition (ETC), a non-partisan non-profit organization dedicated to transparent elections in New York, continues to encourage counties to stand up to the mandates of ERMA, which would force all counties to abandon their lever voting systems by next year.

“More and more counties are realizing that just because they’ve used federal funds to acquire computers which enable citizens with special needs to create ballots, doesn’t mean it's too late to preserve the superior and reliable vote counting system afforded by our lever machines," said Andrea Novick, an attorney representing the Coalition. "Counties are looking at the excessive costs they will incur if optical scanners are employed to count votes and recognizing the unfunded mandate that ERMA truly is. Particularly at this time when budgets everywhere are tight, it's outrageous for the State to require counties to surrender their affordable lever voting system, which has protected our constitutional rights by enabling demonstrable control of the count, to an unaffordable computerized system that violates our constitutional rights by relying on secretly programmed software, proven vulnerable to undetectable manipulation. County governments object to being put in this position, as they should."