The Marshall County Election Board members scheduled a public test of voting machines Monday morning.
Marshall County Clerk Deb VanDeMark explained that there are so many machines the board has to test prior to Election Day.
“VSTOP (Voting System Technical Oversight Program) sends us a list of machines that we need to test,” said VanDeMark. We have 94 machines and we need to take five percent of those and test them. It comes out to 4.7 machines so I rounded that up which is five machines. One of the machines needs to have a VVPAT.”
A VVPAT is Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail machine that prints out the list of candidates a voter chose prior to hitting the confirm vote button on a MicroVote machine. They will be required for every machine by 2024, according to recent legislation. County officials are hoping that state funding will be available to purchase the machine. To come up with that amount of funding by 2024 would be fairly costly to election and county budgets.
VanDeMark further explained that a printout from the voting machine is initially performed during the public test to show there are zero votes on the machines. Then every precinct is tested and each candidate gets one vote. Following that, a printout should show that every candidate received one vote to ensure that the machine is functioning properly. If all is good, the machine will be cleared and a third printout should show zero votes so the machine is ready for Election Day.
The board members were able to get the required number of machines tested with media and one other person present.
