Public demonstration set for Tuesday at courthouse

To show residents that the Ohio voting systems are secure, the Lawrence County Board of Elections will be doing a public test of its voting machines on Tuesday.

Toni Topser, deputy director of the Lawrence County Board of Elections, said that most everything the board does is open to the public, including meetings and testing the voting machines.

“Mostly, it is open to the public so everyone can see the machines operate and how they operate so everyone can educate themselves and see that they are operating correctly and properly,” she said.

Lawrence County has 32 polling locations and 38 voting machines.

“There are a couple locations that have more than one machine, so that is 34 machines,” Topser said. “Then we have four machines that go with our runners.”

The process starts with the board workers setting up the machines and making sure they are charged.

“We have a great staff here and they set the machines up in the hallway of the courthouse without the data cards in them,” Topser explained. Then a vendor from the voting machine company arrives and puts in a data card to program the machines.

A stack of ballots is run through each machine to make sure it is counting accurately.

“Then you get a tape that comes out of the machine and then the tape is tabulated just like it is an election,” Topser said.

After a machine is programmed, it is locked and sealed with tamper-proof tape.

“Then we put them in storage until election day,” she said.

The testing of machines begins at People Centered Services in Coal Grove at 8:30 a.m. to test the machines designed for use by the handicapped. After those are tested, the vendor goes to the courthouse to test the rest of the machines. The process takes most of the day to complete.

“We encourage the public, we encourage anyone, to come in and see this,” Topser said. “Because people don’t understand the process. I think the more people come in and see this, the less they would presume things are going wrong.”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said earlier this year that all 88 Ohio counties would get new voting machines by 2020. The legislature passed a bill that will allot $114.5 to replace the current machines, which were purchased with federal funds in 2005 to update the nation’s voting machines after Florida’s “hanging chad” incident in the 2000 election.

The general election is Nov. 6.