OSWEGO — Labette County is looking at purchasing new poll site tabulators in the coming months to streamline the voting and counting process and add several more layers of security.
Angie Frison and Chris Kurland of Election Systems and Software, Omaha, Nebraska, discussed the tabulators and their functions with current poll workers, county commissioners and members of the public on Monday.
The county is considering purchasing 10 DS300 tabulators for $8,350 each. The county now has 15 voting locations and those tentatively would be reduced to nine. The county clerk’s office would get the 10th tabulator.
Kurland said about 54% of the voting precincts in the country are using similar tabulation methods and 61 of Kansas’ 105 counties are using poll site tabulators.
The tabulators scan ballots that voters feed into them after marking their ballots at the polling locations. The tabulators provide feedback to the voter. This feedback includes that their vote was counted or that there was an issue with the ballot, giving voters the opportunity to cure the problem at the polling location. If a voter marks the ballot incorrectly, such as marking two candidates in a race where only one was to be selected, the machine will share this. Without fixing the problem, this race would not be counted on the voter’s ballot.
Frison said the tabulators serve an educational role in the voting process because of this feedback.
“It really helps with accuracy and getting what the voter truly wanted,” Frison said.
The ballot remains in a privacy queue for this process and the ballot remains private.
“That’s just a little thing, but those little things add up and they make a big difference,” she said.
Voters will follow the same routine as they currently do to vote. Voters still check in at the poll pad and election workers will hand them the correct ballot for their precincts. Voters will fill out the paper ballot the same way as they now do. The
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change comes in depositing the voted ballot. Instead of placing the ballot in the secure box, the voter will feed the ballot into the tabulator, which looks like a scanner.
After polls close for the day, the machines tabulate the results at the polling locations. These results are delivered to the county clerk’s office on an encrypted thumb drive locked in the machine so a final tally can be recorded and released to the public.
Frison said the tabulators have layers and layers of security. While registration can happen online, votes are marked on paper ballots. Votes cannot be taken online and voting tabulators are not connected to the internet, she said.
“There cannot be anything that is attached to the internet when we’re talking about our votes,” Frison said. “That is a federal law. That is a law every jurisdiction in the country has to follow.
“The first line of defense in our democracy is the paper ballot, and it’s not going away,” Frison said.
Americans With Disabilities Act-compliant voting machines, Express Vote, will remain in the polling sites too. These devices create a paper ballot that will be fed into the tabulator as well.
Since 2018 in Labette County, ballots have been driven from polling locations to the courthouse, where they were fed into a DS450 scanner. The counting time varied.
Frison said the tabulator machines should take some pressure off the clerk’s office and other election workers on election night. The tabulators also help with reconciliation because of the detail of information that’s stored and available.
“So there’s all these layers that we can look at if we need to, and they all have to match up,” Frison said.
The machines also have a battery backup that will allow them to keep operating in the event of a power failure. A slot in the machine can be opened to accept ballots in the event of a power outage. These ballots could then be scanned after power is restored.
She said the elements of the machine are not accessible to voters when they scan their ballots. Everything is locked down. The USB stick, which holds data from the tabulator, also has layers of encryption and security.
Starting the tabulator will just be another routine of opening the polling location. The machine will be plugged in, poll workers need to verify that any votes still in the device are zeroed out (this will generate a report) and another button is pushed to open the polling location. Prompts guide the poll workers as well. Making sure the machine count is at zero is key.
“You cannot move forward without that zero report tape. It’s almost the most important thing we do, and so it’s automatically going to print that for you,” Frison said.
If purchased by the county, the tabulators will be used in the November general election unless there is a primary in August.
