Secrest said the new machines will come with a warranty. And they were no longer covered by a warranty or updated software support. Board staff were having a more difficult time finding replacement parts for the old machines. Travis Secrest, an administration assistant for the Stark County Board of Elections, said the board had to purchase new machines. The cost before insurance proceeds and a rental credit was $840,000. The board rented and then bought refurbished 2005 models to replace all of the old ones. Many of those machines, purchased for $3.9 million in 2005 with federal funds, were permanently damaged when the roof at the Board of Elections former downtown Canton location collapsed during an April 2013 rainstorm. The old voting machines the county has aren't the original ones it purchased and debuted in 2005. Secrest said one main difference is the new machines use encrypted USB flash drives while the old TSX machines used memory cards. Diebold later spun off its voting machine unit, and Dominion later bought the assets. The Stark County of Elections will turn over to Dominion its 15-year-old touch-screen voting machines, which originally were sold in 2005 by what was Diebold-Accuvote-TSX machines. The vendor Dominion Voting Systems also is offering a trade-in credit of $1.71 million. The deadline to purchase the equipment and get the state funding was the end of next year. The state is covering $3.27 million of the cost as part of a state program to help counties upgrade their voting machines. "It's an extraordinarily good deal," said Johnson. However, the Stark County commissioners will only have to pick up $1.47 million of the cost. The total cost of the equipment is $6.45 million. The optical ballot scanners are used to scan absentee mail ballots, provisional ballots and ballots cast at polling locations by voters who don't want to use touch-screen machines. But it's not a huge change."įollowing the recommendation of staff, the board voted 4-0 Wednesday afternoon to purchase 1,450 Dominion ImageCast X Kit Prime VVPAT touch screen voting machines that each cost $3,500, four high-speed $25,000 optical ballot scanners with more memory capacity, $11,560 ballot printers, a $17,000 server that tabulates votes and a long list of other election equipment. So there will be things that people have to get used to. The way the paper trail is shown is slightly different. It's very similar," said Regine Johnson, the deputy director of the Stark County Board of Elections. "You put the card in the bottom versus the side. Voters are expected to start using the machines in the primary. CANTON After about three years of shopping around for new voting machines, the Stark County Board of Elections finally found a deal that it likes.Īnd the machines will work very similarly to the touch screen machines many Stark County voters have become accustomed to using the past 15 years.
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