Douglas County uses new voting machines
“(In years past) they used a pencil, now they can use a pen,” said Douglas County Deputy of Elections Keith Campbell. “That’s probably the only major difference.”
In accordance with the Help America Vote Act, Douglas County will be using new electronic voting machines that will allow voters to verify that they cast their votes as they intended, and a second chance to correct those votes if they made a mistake. The county is also outfitted with new equipment that enables disabled citizens to cast their votes without assistance, and allows election officials to tabulate and report the results of the elections much more quickly than before.
Campbell said the actual voting process changes very little. The voter will still fill out a paper ballot with a pencil or a pen. When they have completed their ballot, they will insert it into a scanner which reads the ballot to ensure that each vote was accurately recorded. If the ballot is marked incorrectly, the machine will notify the voter, who will then have the opportunity to cast the ballot as is or to discard the mis-marked ballot and fill out another one.
“It gives voters a chance to know that once they’re at the polling place, if there’s something wrong with their ballots, they have a chance to fix that,” said Campbell. “In prior elections, mis-marked ballots came to the courthouse to be counted, so the voter wasn’t there to fix their votes.”
The county is also using new AutoMark machines, which Campbell said helps the visually impaired and physically disabled vote without the assistance of another person, an important stipulation of the Help America Vote Act. The AutoMark is equipped with an easy-to-use touchscreen and headphones for visually impaired voters. The ballot is inserted into the AutoMark machine, which then marks the choices for the voter. When the individual is finished voting, the AutoMark provides a neatly marked ballot which is then inserted into the scanner like all other ballots.
The voting machines tabulate the votes as they are entered, and are capable of providing vote counts throughout the process. At the end of voting, the workers load up the ballots and remove a data card from the machine that contains the final vote counts. The machine also produces a printout that lists the number of ballots counted. The ballots and data cards are taken back to the courthouse where the final votes are calculated after double-checking the totals of the number of ballots collected and the number of votes recorded on the printout.
In the past, the individual ballots were counted in the courthouse, which was often a very lengthy process.
“Anyone who was here prior to this last primary is accustomed to results not being available until 3:00 in the morning at the earliest,” said Campbell. “We were done at about 9:30 p.m. (after the primaries in August). It really speeds up the process quite a bit.”
After the final vote tallies are calculated and released, the paper ballots are safely stored in tamper-proof bags for twenty-four months. In the event of a recount, the paper ballots will be available for a verifiable physical tally.
Campbell said that the primaries went “pretty smoothly”, and now that the election workers have gained experience from the primary elections, he expects the midterm elections to proceed with minimal problems.
“We’ve been training the poll workers on how to use these new machines, and that has been an important issue for our office,” said Campbell. “Overall we’re excited about Nov. 7. We think it will go really well.”