An estimated 200,000 ballots are expected to be turned in for the November presidential election, Kitsap County officials say.
To process those votes the auditor’s office is upgrading its election equipment and moving its vote-counting operation to a larger space. Officials hope to have the changes made by the primary election next month.
“It’s a great opportunity to make sure we are keeping up with all of the modern security and measures to keep our elections safe,” Auditor Paul Andrews said. “By having speed equipment and software we can continue providing the safe, secure and fully transparent process of elections.”
The new equipment, which carried a price tag of $558,500, includes tabulation machinery and ballot-sorting units. Tabulation equipment reads ballots and tallies the vote counts. It also monitors all activity surrounding the ballots.
“The system keeps records of the activity that we do throughout an election. It generates log files of when we log in and log out, and when we add ballots,” Andrews explained.
In recent years, more people and groups have submitted public disclosure requests to review voting equipment logs, the auditor said.
The new tabulation equipment is also more secure, Andrews said.
“Somebody can’t hack into it. It is better encrypted. This software is locked up to the point that if we do upgrade, we have to send the entire unit back. We can’t get inside of it at all.”
The vote-counting equipment is self-contained and not connected to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or the internet, he explained. “There is nothing that I was concerned about with the previous system. This one is just better.”
In addition to increased security, the new tabulation equipment can scan ballots faster. “If we did twenty (ballots) a minute, we now can do thirty,” he said.
Counting votes quicker will reduce labor expense, Andrews noted. “The cost of elections is labor. The longer it takes to scan the ballots into the system, to get them tabulated, the more it costs.”
Tabulating votes faster also means results will be announced sooner. “The thing we hear a lot from the public is they’d like to see the final results faster, and this system will allow us to do that,” Andrews said.
Quicker sorting machines track that the voter has cast a ballot and captures their signature. The machine can process 100,000 ballots an hour compared to 30,000 the old unit could handle, he said.
Meanwhile, staff at the auditor’s office have counted votes in the county administration building on Division Street for 17 years. The operation outgrew the 800-square-foot space. “Kitsap keeps growing. We have more voters,” Andrews said.
November ballots will be processed in a more expansive location, six times larger than the previous one. The site is a building in an industrial park on Imperial Way SW, near Bremerton National Airport. The relocated operation will continue to be open to observers and be live-streamed on the auditor’s website for the public.
“We are going to have a camera on the ballot-sorting machine, outside the tabulation room and several on the processing room. You’ll be able to see all aspects of the process,” he said.
The old vote-processing area and equipment have been mothballed but will be available in event of an emergency, Andrews said. For example, if ballot counting operations were disrupted in Clallam, Jefferson or Mason counties—due to fire or flood, for example—officials would be able to use the administration building area to tabulate votes.
