St. Joseph County voters got the chance to preview new electronic voting machines at the Charles Martin Youth Center in South Bend Thursday afternoon.
The OpenElect Voting Optical Scan machines are made by UniSyn Voting Solutions. They feature digital touch screens and are designed to prevent issues like undervoting and hanging chads that cause vote recounts.
Murray Winn is the Republican representative on the St. Joseph County Election Board. He says part of the reason for getting new machines was that the old ones were breaking down. It became difficult to find replacement parts to fix them.
Winn says it will cost the board somewhere “in the millions” for the new machines, but more than 145 of them will be ready at all polling sites by November.
Meantime, Indiana officials are launching an election system upgrade adding devices to perhaps 1,000 electronic voting machines around the state that will display a paper record to voters.
Those devices are intended for placement before the May 2020 primary on 10% of Indiana's paperless voting machines, which election officials say are still used in up to 58 of the state's 92 counties. The State Budget Committee is set to vote Friday on releasing $6 million for that project.
Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson says adding the devices will help improve voter confidence that their ballot is being correctly counted. Lawson had initially sought up to $75 million for adding the equipment to electronic machines, but scaled that back at the request of state budget writers.
