INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Supervisor of Elections Leslie Swan appeared before the County Commission Tuesday to let commissioners know the county needs to replace its voting machines prior to the next presidential election cycle.
Two factors have converged to make the change necessary, according to Swan. The first is a state mandate that voters with disabilities vote in such a manner that there is a paper trail of their ballot. The second is that the manufacturer of the voting equipment now used by the county has been purchased by another company that no longer provides upgrades or replacement parts.
Currently, disabled voters use a touchscreen to cast their ballots, which does not create a paper trail, and the county cannot adapt the machines to comply with the state requirement for a printed record because of the change in ownership of the election equipment supplier.
“Dominion wants to sell new equipment, not spare parts,” Swan said, referring to Dominium Voting, the company that acquired the manufacturer of the county’s voting machines. “They are not going to invest in research to upgrade the old machines.”
Swan said it will cost approximately $1.4 million to purchase new voting machines and software for the county’s 22 polling locations.
She plans to get through the 2014 gubernatorial elections with the current equipment and then install new technology prior to the presidential preference primary in January 2016.
“I wanted to let the commissioners know well ahead of time that the change has to be made so they can figure out where the money is going to come from,” Swan said.
She suggested several partial funding sources to the commission, including a grant from the legislature. She also said the county might be able to get the equipment cheaper by joining with other counties to buy in bulk and that the existing equipment might have some trade-in value.
She floated the idea of taking part of the funds out of one fiscal year and part out of another to minimize impact on the county budget, but County Administrator Joe Baird said he is not prepared to make that decision until he sees what the rest of next year’s budget requests look like.
He said that since the requirement for a printed record of ballots cast by disabled voters is an unfunded state mandate, the county should ask the legislature to pay for the new equipment.
Even though the state is forcing the change on the county, which will probably end up paying for it, Swan said the new equipment will be a big improvement over current machines.
With the existing machines, runners have to take results from polling places to the supervisor’s office for tabulation, which creates a delay in reporting election outcomes to the public, but the new machines would have a modem feature that will allow nearly complete results to be posted on the county website within a few minutes of polls closing.
Existing machines also have a battery-powered component prone to failure that would not be a feature of the new machines.
“We are one of only two counties in Florida – us and Palm Beach County – that have the old equipment,” Swan said. “I don’t want Indian River County to be the place where there are problems with voting.”
