Blind and wheelchair bound voters won't have to depend on volunteers to fill out their ballots this November. All they'll have to do is pick up the phone. The state entered into a one-year contract with Kentucky-based IVS to provide one voting machine accessible to residents with disabilities to each polling place in the state. Under the system, voters will be able to cast their votes through a phone and then have a paper ballot faxed back to the polling station for verification. The IVS machines will allow the state to meet the requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act, which was passed in 2002 and which requires states to allow voters with disabilities to vote privately and independently.

Christopher Kuell, second vice president of the National Federation of the Blind of Connecticut, said the machine will finally allow blind voters to cast their ballots in privacy. In previous elections, Kuell went to the polling station with his children, who helped him fill out the ballot.

Blind people have always had to rely on others to help them vote," said Kuell, a Danbury resident who has been lobbying Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz's office for the new technology since the 2000 presidential election. "This is only an interim solution, but at least now I know that in November I can go out and vote and I can do so in privacy."

On Saturday, voters with disabilities got to test out the new equipment at the Disability Convention 2006, which was held at the Connecticut Expo Center in Hartford. Though using the IVS phone system took longer than it would take to fill out a paper ballot, most users were pleased with the results, said Dan Tapper, spokesman for Bysiewicz. "The new technology seemed to be very user-friendly," Tapper said.

Tapper said that voters who are blind, confined to wheelchairs, or have brain injuries or cognitive disabilities will benefit from the new technology. Under the vote-by-phone system, a poll worker uses a designated phone to dial into the computerized system, which checks the caller ID to make sure the call came from an authorized location. The system then asks the poll worker to hang up the phone and wait for the system to call back. Once it calls back, the poll worker is asked to enter a password and the voter's precinct code and then to leave the booth to allow the voter to vote privately. After the voter makes his selections by pushing phone keys, the system prints out a ballot and reads it back to the voter for verification. The voter can then decide whether to cast the vote or to discard it and start over.

Eileen Watts-Bosco, Republican registrar of voters in Wolcott, said that while the process can take as long as 15 minutes, it is simple and should help attract voters who previously stayed away from the polls on Election Day. "Most of these people have chosen in the past to vote absentee, so now that these machines are in place we may see more of them deciding to take the road to the polls," she said. "That's why they were put in place. To give people the option of voting independently."

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