Starke County Election Board Plans More Research, Before Agreeing to Voting Machine Upgrades

Posted on November 3, 2017
Author Michael Gallenberger, WKVI

The Starke County Election Board is working to make sure residents’ votes are secure during future elections. Vendor MicroVote is proposing to rebuild the county’s voting machines for a total cost of about $66,000.

The work would include the replacement of screens, processors, and other internal components. That, in turn, would allow for software upgrades, which MicroVote representatives say would make the county’s voting system more secure.

The proposal was first brought to the Starke County Commissioners last week. Before any formal decisions are made, the election board wants to do a bit more research. During Thursday’s election board meeting, Clerk Vicki Cooley said the upcoming Indiana Election Administrator’s Conference will be a good opportunity to do that. “At these conferences, you can meet all these different vendors,” she said. “They will have their products, equipment on display. You can pretend to vote on them. You can see what happens. And we’ll be able to get new ideas.”

At the same time, a question was raised about whether there are any other security features Starke County should be looking into. One idea was having machines that print out a receipt when voters cast their ballots.

Election board members said that may require a switch to a different vendor, something Cooley says isn’t worth doing at this point. “We are in a contract with MicroVote,” she explained. “They were the first one to be certified in our state. When you’re looking at these certifications, that’s the important thing.”

On top of that, Cooley said that MicroVote’s machines are pretty secure already. “When you look at your voting machine, it’s not hooked up to Internet,” she said. “The only way, they say, that a person could hack these voting machines is if they actually walked in with some kind of an apparatus and hooked it right onto the machine.”

After researching the voting machine upgrades during the upcoming conference, the Starke County Election Board plans to meet again on December 7 to decide whether to proceed. It would then be up to the Starke County Commissioners and Council to make a final decision. If the proposal is approved, MicroVote plans to upgrade the machines in 2019, to have them ready for the 2020 presidential election.