Board Of Elections Selects Voting System

The Bertie County Board Of Elections has selected a new Voting System. This change is mandated by the State of North Carolina since the State is changing our rules and invalidating the system that had been previously selected by the county. Though the action by the State of North Carolina forces us to make a new voting system selection, it also allows us the opportunity to go in a much better direction for the future.

Carol Woodard, Shirley Davenport, Carroll Britt And Emma Johnson (Bertie County Elections Board)

Problems with the totally computer based systems (their lack of any kind of manually researchable audit trail) has had many leading computer experts insisting that a manual audit trail (that could validate the vote totals) had to be made a part of the systems. This was difficult to retrofit to the totally computer based systems (such as the ones we previously bought for Bertie County). It is also true that computer systems only have a useful life of 3 to 5 years and our system was already getting dated. Changing at this point thus works out well for the county.

Tammy Gaskins Demonstrates iVotronic System

The new vendor selected for Bertie County has included the manual verification process as an integral feature of their new system. Designed around this better concept from the start, it makes for a more secure system and is predicted to reduce overall costs at the same time. The design does not use the punch card method that was discovered to be so seriously flawed in the 2000 elections down in Florida, but uses a superior technology called optical character recognition (or OCR).

Voter Booth For Manually Marking A Ballot

Tammy Gaskins of Printelect (marketer of the iVotronic System) gave a demo of the new system selected, to all of the precinct personnel who will have to operate it in our upcoming elections. One of the nicer features was a special computer terminal that assists the blind, older voters and handicapped in marking their own ballot without depending on someone else. It permites the blind to mark their ballot using a headset wtih audible controls. Those with limited sight can enhace the ballot by enlarging the letters as much as is needed to read it. It even permits them to write in candidates.

Touch Screen Station For Marking Paper Ballot (For Blind And Handicaped)

The general consensus is (within the limitations of what you can discover in any demo) the system appeared to be a good selection and worked the way it was designed to work. It is much simpler and easily understood.

Precinct Managers And Workers Practice Voting With iVotronic System

As noted above, a superior design feature of the system is the return to a physical ballot to assure voting integrity. Below are the front and back of the ballot form that is used for the new system.

Front Of Sample ballot

Rear Of Sample Ballot

The ballot vault is where you place the ballot after you have made your selection. You do this by sliding the ballot into a slot on the top of the machine. The system is smart enough that it does not matter which end you put in or whether it is face up or face down.



Ballot Vault With Computerized Ballot Verifier On Top

The optical character reader (OCR) and computer system verifies your ballot for you, and makes sure that you know if there are any overvotes or undervotes. Once you are satisfied with your ballot, you confirm the ballot and it is deposited into the vote bin. The vote bin is sealed and cannot be tampered with.

A grant has been secured that will pay for most of the new system cost making it fairly inexpensive for us to change to the new system.