Williamson County election officials are still dealing with some lingering mistrust after an apparent miscount in Franklin’s city elections in October. They hope to right that with new voting machines.
The new system, leased for more than $500,000 from Electronic Systems & Software, is similar to the previous ones made by Dominion. The voter uses an electronic touch pad that marks a paper ballot, then feeds it into the scanner.
Elections administrator Chad Gray says the similarity was intentional.
“We want to make it easy for voters to vote,” Gray says. “But we don’t want to make it easy to cheat. And I think we have lots of controls in place to monitor that sort of thing.”
Last fall, poll officials detected problems with the Dominion electronic voting machines. An investigation published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that with the Dominion “anomaly,” the number of votes cast in half the precincts did not match with the number of ballots received.
The commission found a coding issue was resulting in valid ballots being sorted to provisional status. Dominion has since implemented a fix to its source code, but Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett recommended in March that Williamson County use new machines, despite the tight window for training poll workers.
As with every election, Gray says bipartisan poll officials are monitoring the balloting, and he’s making sure the numbers of votes and ballots line up at the end of each day. But some voters are still leery.
“I’d much rather see a hand ballot than a machine ballot,” says Franklin resident Jeff Schupe, who voted early over the weekend. “But the reality is we’re all subjected to the same thing.”
Shupe says at this point it feels like a fully paper system might be the most reliable option.
The Electronic Systems & Software machines are also used in Metro Nashville. Like the Dominion system, voters use a touch pad to mark the ballot, then insert it in this optical scanner.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM