New voting system to wait until after November presidential election
Shelby County won’t upgrade its voting system until after the November presidential election, which is the last election of the year.
However, a part of the new system that voters will not use or see will be in use starting with the Aug. 6 election night vote count.
Shelby County Elections Administrator Linda Phillips has been wary of making the switch to the new system starting with the most popular election cycle in local politics in terms of voter turnout. And following up on the August election, Phillips says she expects a “record turnout” in November because of voter interest.
As a result, she said, “voters will not see the new equipment in November.”
“We’ve reached the reluctant decision that it’s simply not possible to, in this time of pandemic, get everyone on staff familiar with it, get everyone trained,” she said. “It’s just going to have to wait. However, we are using the new components for the scanning of the mail-in ballots.”
The new components are upgraded digital scanners to be used for absentee ballots and other paper ballots.
“At least two have broken down in every election cycle,” Phillips said of the older scanners. “So, we have four new high-speed scanners that will allow us to scan ballots much more quickly.”
Phillips has been apprehensive about using the old scanners with an expected flood of perhaps as many as 20,000 absentee ballots because of pandemic concerns and a state court order that allows voters with concerns about the COVID-19 virus to apply for and get an absentee ballot.
Since those initial concerns, she has said the Election Commission staff can probably handle the expected uptick in absentee ballots for August. Her ongoing concern is a larger tide of the mail-in ballots for the November election.
Linda Phillips
The comments by Phillips came on the WKNO-TV program “Behind The Headlines,” hosted by Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian. The program airs on WKNO Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 8:30 a.m. The program can also be heard of The Behind The Headlines Podcast.
The mailing of absentee ballots for the August election was delayed as a statewide judicial retention race was added to the ballot unexpectedly. But by last weekend, the Election Commission started mailing out the absentee ballots as applications were processed.
“We paused production of the ballots because Gov. (Bill) Lee had appointed a judge … that would have required us to have a retention race on the August ballot,” Phillips said. “So we halted production of the ballots because from an election administrator’s standpoint, having ballots out there that have it wrong is an epic nightmare. You want to have a horrible election, try that.”
She halted production of the ballot to include the state court of appeals retention race on the recommendation of Tennessee Elections Coordinator Mark Goins.
“Unfortunately, the printer of the ballot when we released it made a mistake that delayed it a week,” Phillips said.
The new voting system to come after November is similar to the current one, with voters making their choices on touchscreen machines that will be a tech upgrade. The new step in the process for voters is a paper readout of the choices the voter has made. The readout can be reviewed and then fed into a digital scanner. The image is part of an audit trail as well as the paper readout that goes from the scanner into a locked ballot box.
The system is a first in terms of the paper trail that voters see and verify while they are voting.
There is already a paper trail, or tape, posted at election day polling places after they close. It is a printout of the results from the disks on each machine at a polling place and is part of election procedures.
The new voting system also includes giving voters the option of voting a hand-marked paper ballot that is available already as an option for voters with disabilities.
Watch this week’s episode of Behind the Headlines at the top of the page or listen to the podcast.
Produced by Natalie Van Gundy
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Behind The Headlines 2020 Election Linda Phillips Shelby County Election CommissionBill Dries on demand
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Bill Dries
Bill Dries covers city and county government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for almost 50 years covering a wide variety of stories from the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1978 police and fire strikes to numerous political campaigns, every county mayor and every Memphis Mayor starting with Wyeth Chandler.
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