By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
Ellis County election officials got a look at a second company’s electronic voting machines Tuesday.
The demonstration was presented in commission chambers of the county Administrative Center in Hays by Adkins Election Services, Clinton, Missouri. The company has placed its partner Unisysn voting systems in most of the counties of Missouri and Iowa, as well as 21 Kansas counties, including Russell and Gove.
Legislation approved in 2018 requires that all Kansas counties be able to perform a post-election audit. The audit will require a hand recount of paper ballots. The aging iVotronic machines used in Ellis County do not produce a paper ballot.
A three-person team demonstrated the Unisyn OVO OpenElect Voting Optical Scan (OVO), a comprehensive and secure paper-based digital optical scan voting system. It both validates and tabulates ballots at each precinct.
The self-contained ballot counter, about the size of a Hays refuse polycart, includes a color touch screen display for voters, ballot scanner and precinct report printer. Ballots are recorded and then deposited into a locked ballot box, each of which has a capacity of more than 5,000 ballots.
There are numerous locks and seals on the OVO for security.
Price of the OVO is approximately $5,000 with a cost of 28 cents per ballot. The system, built with components, scans and validates full-page, multiple page, two-sided ballots as well as those on the OpenElect Freedom Vote Tablet (FVT).
The smaller tabletop FVT was shown next. On this system, voters have the option to initialize their ballot by scanning the bar code created by a poll book and then navigate through the ballot using a touch screen. A voting interface with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) features is also available. Freedom Vote produces a printed ballot which may reviewed by the voter prior to being scanned.
“One difference between this tablet-based machine and the ones you have been using is instead of ‘cast ballot’, this one says ‘print’,” Brad Bryant explained to the group as the machine kicked out a narrow paper ballot. He also noted the FVT requires voters to scroll down the entire ballot, read as a single page, before a ballot can be marked.
Holding the ballot up, Bryan reiterated that “this ballot has been marked and printed, but not cast. It’s not cast until it goes through here,” he said as he pointed to the much larger OVO.
The FVT cost is approximately $3,000. The ballot price is also lower than the OVO at 10 cents each.
At the end of the election day, poll workers will remove a memory stick from the OVOs and take it to election headquarters where the encoded results will be read by a laptop computer.
Currently Ellis County has 69 iVotronic machines that are deployed at 10 polling sites throughout the county.
The election officials, poll workers, county employees and interested residents also were shown the Unisyn OpenElect Voting Central Scan (OVCS) which would reside at election headquarters. The bulk scanner is designated to read absentee and provisional ballots and to perform vote counts. It can also produce a write-in image report for manual processing.
A third vendor is scheduled to present its voting system to the county Thursday morning at 10 a.m. in commission chambers.
Sales representatives from Election Systems & Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Neb., were in Hays Feb. 5.