Unless you live in a small town that hand counts ballots, you'll be feeding your completed ballot into a machine that scans those ovals to determine who you voted for. It then makes an electronic record of the results.
Most
Here's what you need to know about how these devices work.
How many ballot scanning machines do we have in
In all, the state leases around 500 DS200 machines and just one DS850. The machines are distributed by the state to communities with 1,000 or more voters. They are used in more than half of
How do these machines work?
The technology is similar to a digital image-scanning device. Programming in the machine is specific to the ballot for your election district and allows the machine to determine which candidates you have selected. The machine captures a digital image of your ballot as it is scanned, and this data is stored on a proprietary thumb-drive device. It's not the kind of thumb-drive you could pop into your laptop to transfer data. For ranked-choice elections, the data from each of your selections is captured and later used by the state's high-speed DS850 machine to tabulate subsequent rounds when needed.
Do these machines have to meet any performance standards?
The federal
Couldn't these machines or their software be hacked into or tampered with over the internet?
No. Ballot scanning machines in
So it's impossible to tamper with a ballot scanning machine in
No. It is possible that the proprietary software the system uses could be tampered with, but there has never been any evidence that this has happened in
How can we know for sure that the system hasn't been tampered with?
There are a series of security checks that take place for each scanning machine well before each election. This process involves running a set of sample ballots through the machine to ensure it is counting correctly and functioning properly. This is done for all the machines being used in
On top of that, hand recounts of close elections have "historically shown those optical scanners to be incredibly accurate," said Deb McDonough, a member of the voting rights team with the
"We do the programming of all the tabulators' proprietary memory devices in-house in
I'm still skeptical. What happens if something does go screwy?
The state's system for counting votes is backed up by the paper trail of the ballots themselves.
McDonough, with the
Where do voters in hand-count towns put their ballots?
Towns that hand count ballots have voters place them in locked ballot boxes. State law requires the boxes be big enough to accept all the ballots from any election. They must also be designed with an opening that is large enough to accept a ballot, but in a way that no ballots can be removed or tampered with through the opening.
The law requires that boxes be monitored at all times by an election official during the election. The boxes can only be opened and ballots removed for counting or secure storage by authorized election officials. When this happens, poll workers from both of the state's major political parties must be present to safeguard against ballot tampering.
How does ballot counting work with ranked-choice voting?
This is where the state's high-speed optical scanning machine, the DS850, comes into play. In an election that requires ranked-choice voting, if no candidate captures more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of counting, the thumb drives containing the optical scans of the ballots are transported from each town to
But what about those towns that are hand counting ballots?
Those towns will send their ballots in locked and sealed boxes to
(c)2020 the Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.