Election day is less than 6 weeks away and the Erie County Election office is already busy testing the logic and accuracy of the machines that will scan and county your votes. What is typically a routine process is getting extra attention, because of the tightly contested presidential race.
Karen Chillcott, Erie County Clerk and Clerk of Elections said, "We're testing all the equipment to make sure that it's calibrated properly, that it's going to read all of the votes properly, and we've received a test deck from the ballot printer and we're feeding those through our machines from Dominion and we're making sure that those all add up properly."
That test desk is stacked with intentional problems and errors to make sure the machines identify and process those issues. "We have ballots that have no votes on them, we have ballots that have been over voted where people selected more than one candidate, we have ballots with ambiguous marks or big black marks on them -- people think this isn't going to count, we're going to look and see how that looks when it goes through the scanner, how's that going to be tabulated," Chillcott said.
A similar testing process is underway on about 800 warehoused voting machines and touch screen voting machines that will be set up in each Erie County polling precinct in time for election day, November 5.
Chillcott confirmed that security is now much tighter with access limited and special viewing windows and areas set aside for possible national and international observers both at the warehouse and in the election office at the Erie County Courthouse. Chillcott said she has been getting calls, requests and inquiries. "We are getting a lot of attention, we have news channels from across the country and across the world who are interested in Erie County." the clerk of elections explained. "I guess that historically we're picking 94% of the presidents here, we're in a bellwether state and are a bellwether county."
If you've been in the Erie County election office before, to register to vote or maybe fill out an application for a mail-in ballot, what used to be a wide open counter, is now all protected by tall security glass. And where there used to be a swinging half door for employees and visitors to walk right in to the election offices, now there's a secure glass door with sign-in required and electronic badge access only.
The clerk of elections told Erie News Now that all of the changes are based on a safety and security assessment made last spring by the Department of Homeland Security. "Early in the spring we met with Department of Homeland Security and they conducted a security assessment with us and that's looking at our cyber and physical security," Chillcott said. "Any of the recommendations that they made we've taken under advisement and made the changes you see today."
The new measures are all about protecting Erie County votes and the people and technology that count them.