Voter Access vs. Student Safety

East Hampton school officials have come out against using schools as polling sites on Election Day, calling it a major security threat, but the Suffolk County Board of Elections defended its use of schools as a practice that promotes widespread voter access.

“I find it completely unacceptable that they are allowed to hold elections here. . . . I don’t only have to worry about 900 students who could do something, I now have members of the public walking in on a constant flow from 6 a.m.,” said Adam Fine, principal of East Hampton High School, which was a polling site on Nov. 3.

His comments were made during the Nov. 4 meeting of the East Hampton School Board, and he was among a number of administrators and school board members who shared the same opinion.

In some years, the district is closed to students on Election Day, depending on the way the dates of the school calendar fall. This year, though, district officials have said it was too tight a calendar to have off on Election Day.

J.P. Foster, the school board president, and Jackie Lowey, a school board member, agreed with Mr. Fine. In fact, Mr. Foster said, East Hampton school officials refused to sign the contract earlier this school year with the Suffolk County Board of Elections to allow the high school and elementary school to be used as a polling site. “We’ve asked the board of elections to not have it here,” Mr. Foster said. “We did not have a lot of choice. This doesn’t need to happen here. There are plenty of other municipal buildings.”

However, when it comes to voting for school boards and budgets, Mr. Foster called it “a double-edged sword.” It’s a different risk, he said, because most of the time there are fewer people coming to vote in school elections than general elections. “You still have safety and security concerns that you would have to deal with,” he said. “It’s a tough one. It doesn’t eliminate the concerns, but the mainstay is the volume is way different.”

Richard Burns, the district superintendent, explained following Tuesday’s special meeting that the board of elections threatened a lawsuit if East Hampton barred voting in the district.

“We were so stymied by them,” he said. “We’re very upset by that. In an era when we’re so concerned about school safety and making every effort to keep our kids as safe as possible, having unidentified adults in the building while school is in session doesn’t make sense to us.”

However, Ms. Lowey suggested last Wednesday that “we can turn the heat up.”

“Let them take us to court,” she said.

Colorado’s Jefferson County, the state’s third-largest county, banned the use of schools as polling sites after the 1999 school shooting in Columbine. The Associated Press reported in 2014 that election officials in Greenville County, S.C., struggled to find new voting places after eight schools were removed from the list of polling sites that year. After the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, that school district restricted community access, including use of the schools as polling sites. A presidential commission explored the issue for several months in 2013, finding that a quarter of all voters in 2008 and 2012 cast their ballots in schools. The commission collected testimony from across the nation, determining that despite security concerns, schools were the preferred polling sites “with almost no exception.”

“Schools really fit that mold on what we’re looking for. We do try to alleviate any sort of interference with the schools’ activities,” said Mark Gallo, an assistant Republican commissioner of the Suffolk County Board of Elections.

State election law gives individual boards of election the authority to designate polling sites within their jurisdictions. Mr. Gallo said schools are ideal because they are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, because their facilities are often large enough to accommodate several voting machines and lines of voters, and because most election districts have schools within them or nearby.

“To find alternative places is a feat,” Mr. Gallo said. “Not to say that we haven’t done it before if we have a situation in a school that doesn’t work anymore, but the fact is that there are times that we can’t. It’s the best option and we don’t want to disenfranchise the voters.”

The day after Election Day, East Hampton Village police initiated a lockout in all three East Hampton school buildings when a suicidal man thought to be armed with a knife had said he was heading to the nearby Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter. Had that actually occurred on Election Day and voters were prohibited from entering the building, the local Republican and Democratic parties would have had to go to court.

“If there is a reason why a polling place is very suddenly inaccessible, if it makes it so that the voters are unable to vote, candidates will go to court and ask the judge to write an order keeping the polls open at that one polling place for whatever period of time he or she thought was appropriate, extending the time voters may vote,” Josh Price, the senior assistant Republican commissioner with the Suffolk County Board of Elections, explained.

About 60 percent of Suffolk County’s 337 polling sites are schools, among them the Wainscott School District’s original school building and the Sag Harbor School District’s Pierson Middle and High School. Stuart Rachlin, the Wainscott superintendent, said that while the old building was used for voting, children were not permitted to go there. There were no security concerns. Pierson was closed this year on Election Day for professional development for its teaching staff, but Katy Graves, Sag Harbor’s superintendent, said the district is typically open on Election Day. She said she does not have any concerns over the use of the school building as a polling site.

“One of the greatest strengths that we have as a nation is polling that is free and accessible,” she said. “School buildings are very free and accessible places.”