Despite fears, county voting machines can’t be hacked
Staff writer
In spite of national anxiety about hacked voting machines — including assertions by a former county commissioner this week that local polling equipment is vulnerable — election workers say the system here is pretty simple.
You mark your ballot, either the old-fashioned way with a pen on a paper ballot or via a touch screen that marks votes on a paper that looks like a grocery receipt. Either way, a paper ballot is fed by the voter into a stout black tabulator that looks like an ATM on wheels.
“All these machines do is mark your ballot,” deputy county clerk Michelle Looper said during the first day of early voting Monday at the courthouse.
A few dozen of Marion’s more than 8,000 voters had been in by mid afternoon. Election Day is Aug. 4.
Electronic touch screens are set in a row of three tabletop “booths” shielded from public view.
Former commissioner Diane Novack contended in a presentation Monday to the county commissioners that those touch screens and the tabulator have connectivity capability similar to that of a cell phone. She cited studies that suggest fraud could be “caused by malicioius software interacting with modems on ballot counting equipment.”
Looper said the voting equipment used by the county was certified by the state. There are no modems, and there is no connection to the Internet, she said. The equipment is “basically a dumb box until you put a flash drive in it, and it loads the ballots.”
Every step in the process depends on paper said Looper, a certified election clerk.
The process is this:
When voters arrive, poll workers check them in using an electronic poll book and hand them either an old-fashioned printed ballot or a blank sheet of ballot paper for the touch screen device.
“Everything’s paper,” Looper said.
If using the machine, voters insert the blank paper into the ballot marking device.
“Then it pops up your ballot questions, just like what’s on your ballot, and then you just mark it,” poll worker Brenda Kimberley said.
Because it’s a touch screen, the device can adapt to different needs.
“It’s great for people that have any kind of disability because you can zoom in. It can read it to you,” pollworker Diana Costello said.
Voters scroll through the contests and make choices on the screen, instead of filling in ovals by hand.
Once voters reach the end of the ballot, they can review their choices and then ask the device to print out the marked paper.
The ballot comes back out through the same slot where the blank sheet went in.