MANSFIELD, Ohio – The Richland County Board of Elections recently was approved to receive state funding to help recoup the cost of purchasing electronic pollbooks, according to Richland County elections director Paulette Hankins.
A Sept. 14 news release from Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced that the General Assembly appropriated $12.7 million to aid county governments in covering the cost of upgrading to e-pollbooks during the biennial budget, which was approved on June 30.
While the majority of the state grant will be used to help counties implement e-pollbooks, Richland is one of 21 Ohio counties that already uses the technology – all of which are eligible to apply for funds to help recover a portion of the upgrade cost.
E-pollbooks have been used countywide since 2009.
Hankins said the board was approved for up to $131,000 from the state, which represents 85 percent of the total cost. The remaining 15 percent will come out of the board’s voter equipment fund that was started in 2000.
“It wouldn’t be anything out of the county general fund that will have to be approved by the commissioners or anything,” she said. “That money is in there and set aside for specific voting equipment that we would need.”
The state funding is intended to cover up to 85 percent of each county’s purchase cost with funds being distributed based on the number of voters in each county, according to Husted’s news release.
The Richland County Board of Elections is using the state money to cover the cost of upgrading its current e-pollbook system, according to Hankins. The new devices and software have been ordered and should be in use for the upcoming November election.
“They take the place of the hard-copy roster at the polls where the pollworkers flip through to find your name and your address and what not,” Hankins said of e-pollbooks.
Richland County first implemented the technology in 2007, getting roughly one-third of the e-pollbooks it needed that year.
It received the remaining two-thirds the following two years.
The new devices are made by the same company – Election Systems and Software [ES&S] – the county used for its previous generation of e-pollbooks. ES&S gave the board a trade-in allowance on the old equipment, Hankins said.
Unlike the older technology, the new e-pollbooks have Bluetooth technology and built-in peripherals – eliminating extra cords and speeding up the polling process.
“This one has a built-in scanner on the back of it, a camera where you lay the license down and it actually reads it and brings up the correct voter’s name,” Hankins said. “It also has a built-in signature pad right on the screen and also brings up the comparison of what the voter signs and what we have on record as that voter’s signature.”
Furthermore, with Bluetooth technology, larger precincts will be able to use two e-pollbooks because the software can communicate between multiple devices.
The previous devices could not communicate with each other, which, according to Hankins, meant that a person could, in theory, have voted twice had two devices been used at the same location.
“It would have been conceivable that a voter could have come to one line in the morning and vote and the other line in the evening, and it wouldn’t be marked that they already voted,” she said.
One of the biggest benefits with e-pollbooks is that when it pulls up a voter’s name and pollworkers find and verify that it’s the correct address and birthday, a voter access card is created with the appropriate split, precinct, and ballot, Hankins said.
The system, which is run through software on a tablet, completely eliminates pollworker error.
“Before, using paper ballots, you had to sort through and figure out which district that voter is in, and many of our precincts are split between either school districts, house districts, and a couple are split by townships, the state senate and congressional districts,” Hankins said.
The technology also allows for fewer provisional ballots at the polls and hasty voter history reports.
The General Election is Nov. 3, and the deadline to register is 9 p.m. Oct. 5
For information on the Richland County Board of Elections, visit its website.
“It wouldn’t be anything out of the county general fund that will have to be approved by the commissioners or anything,” Paulette Hankins said. “That money is in there and set aside for specific voting equipment that we would need.”
