Wake election workers testing hundreds of machines for upcoming general election
While early voting for the general election in November is still a month away, it's a very busy time at the Wake County Board of Elections, where testing is underway on the machines that will count the ballots.
Bipartisan teams of precinct officials are spending weeks testing hundreds of machines, using tens of thousands of test ballots. The Wake BOE has 273 tabulators that count paper ballots, and about the same number of touchscreen "Automark" voting machines used by people with disabilities.
Each machine is required by law to be tested before every election, and testing requires multiple ballots.
Jacqueline Cameron is the IT manager overseeing the process, which is called "logic and accuracy" testing.
"They're testing our machines to make sure that they are reading the ballot accurately and they're working properly, and we're also kind of doing a stress test to make sure if anything happens, goes wrong or there's any other issues, that we fix it and see it now," said Cameron.
The bipartisan teams feed each machine "test decks," which are stacks of test ballots with known vote totals. Then they compare the machine's count to those totals.
"We’re testing the ballot for all the different ways that ballot could be voted, any way," said Cameron. "We're also testing to make sure that [the ballot] goes in in any orientation."
"In total, we've done about 159,000 ballots. So probably a little bit more when we're all finished," said Cameron.
Cameron said most of the time, when machines aren't working properly, it's a human error.
"[Someone] fed a ballot in too many times or a different ballot style than they were supposed to," said Cameron.
When a machine has passed the test, it’s zeroed out completely, sealed and marked as tested. Then it’s stored under high security at the Wake County Board of Elections until it’s time for it to go out to a precinct.
