FORT SMITH -- Sebastian County has agreed to participate in an Arkansas secretary of state pilot program under which it will receive new electronic voting equipment valued at nearly $1 million.
After a presentation at Tuesday's Quorum Court meeting by Rob Hammons, Election Division director in the secretary of state's office, justices of the peace voted 11-1 to accept the $986,815 appropriation and purchase 167 voting machines, along with tabulating equipment.
The county also will receive electronic tablets that will allow the county clerk to eliminate compiling and printing the bulky voter roll books for each voting place. Instead, voter information will be downloaded onto the tablets on which voters will sign in when they go to vote.
The county also will receive two laptop computers on which to tabulate the votes.
County Election Commission Chairman David Damron said the county's current voting equipment, some of which has 30-year-old technology, is obsolete, and he was excited about the opportunity to replace it.
"I think it's an incredible opportunity," Election Commission Coordinator Suzanne Morgan said.
After a two-hour meeting with Hammons on Tuesday morning concerning the new equipment, the commission passed a resolution recommending that the county convert to fully electronic voting. The county now offers voters paper ballots, as well as electronic voting.
Depending on how busy an election year is, Sebastian County spends between $20,000 and $50,000 a year printing ballots. Converting to all-electronic voting would eliminate that expense, Sebastian County Judge David Hudson said.
Quorum Court members had just minutes to consider during Tuesday's meeting the pros and cons of participating in the pilot program before voting.
Hammons told the Quorum Court that if the county wanted the free voting equipment, it had to decide immediately because the secretary of state's office has to submit its orders by Friday to Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., for the voting equipment.
The secretary of state's office has accepted the Election Systems & Software as the vendor for the integrated electronic voting equipment for the entire state for nearly $30 million, about $4.5 million more than the next nearest proposal.
Secretary of state's office spokesman Chris Powell said in an email Wednesday that the Arkansas Legislature approved the spending for the voting equipment in Act 151 of 2015, but the appropriation was not actually funded.
The money for the pilot program will come from the County Voting System Grant Fund, Powell wrote. Currently, the fund has more than $2 million. The secretary of state's office will spend $1.5 million this fiscal year on the new voting equipment and the remainder on installation of the system.
In addition to Sebastian County, Boone, Columbia and Garland counties have been chosen for the pilot program.
County clerks in Boone and Garland counties said they have been notified of the invitation to participate in the pilot program, but their quorum courts won't address formal acceptance of the state's invitation until they meet in the middle of next month.
Garland County Clerk Sarah Smith and Boone County Clerk Crystal Graddy said they were glad to be getting new equipment.
"We are on board to be a test county and are happy to do so," Smith said.
Officials in Columbia County were not available Wednesday to comment.
In a news release Wednesday, Secretary of State Mark Martin thanked Sebastian County Clerk Sharon Brooks, Columbia County Clerk Sherry Bell, Smith and Graddy for serving on a voting-system advisory board. The clerks said the board aided the office in providing a list of voting equipment needs and rating vendor proposals.
Powell wrote in his email that Boone County was chosen because it was a medium-sized county with all-electronic voting and used voting centers. Columbia County currently doesn't use equipment from Electronic Systems & Software. Sebastian County is a large county with paper and electronic voting.
Garland County had experienced a number of problems during the last election cycle, and the office wanted to include it in the pilot program to help address those issues, Powell wrote.
Hammons told the Sebastian County Quorum Court members Tuesday that the voting equipment would be available in time for Sebastian County to use it in the primary election in March and potentially the school election in September.
The timetable for supplying the equipment to the rest of the state will be determined by funding, Powell wrote.
"We would like to deploy a new system statewide before the 2016 General Election," Powell's email said. "The Legislature and the Governor are actively working with us to determine a funding source."
The 167 voting machines will be enough to replace the equipment Sebastian County has now, which election commissioners said was inadequate to avoid long lines at the polling places. They said 83 more machines, for a total of 250 machines, would be a sufficient number.
Hammons said the county would have to pay for any equipment beyond the 167 the state was allocating for Sebastian County. Election commissioners told the Quorum Court the additional machines would cost about $381,000.
Election Commissioner Lee Webb said Wednesday that delaying the purchase of the additional machines for five years could increase the cost to nearly $1 million.
Hudson said the county didn't have enough money to buy all the additional machines at once because of recent expenditures and spending commitments the county has made.
He and Quorum Court members noted that the county paid out more than $4 million in the past year for its share of a new aquatic center and has committed $1.2 million for expansion of a county emergency medical services station in Greenwood.
Hudson proposed Tuesday that the Quorum Court allocate $200,000 from the county's general fund balance to purchase some of the additional voting machines, then pay for the remaining $181,000 in machines through a five-year lease-purchase plan.
Some Quorum Court members disputed Hudson's assertion that the county had enough money, pointing to financial records that showed the general fund balance had only about $20,000. The Quorum Court then put off a vote on spending the additional $381,000 until next month when it can get and review a report on the availability of funds.
Election officials said converting to all-electronic voting would simplify the process for voters and poll workers.
Morgan said that when a person arrives at the polling site, a volunteer will be able to scan in a driver's license or identification card, or type in a person's name to locate the person on a tablet she said looks like an iPad. The poll workers won't have to flip through pages of the thick voter roll books anymore.
When the person signs on to the tablet, it will spit out a small piece of paper marked only with a bar code that the voter will feed into the voting machine, Morgan said.
The bar code will tell the computer what ballot the voter should use, and it will appear on the screen for the voter to mark.
Once the voter is finished, Morgan said, the paper will feed out for vote verification before it is taken back into the machine to be recorded. The paper ballot will be saved inside the machine in case it is needed for a recount, for example, she said.
The votes on the machine will be recorded on a thumb drive that will be returned to the courthouse, where it will be plugged into one of two laptop computers to be tabulated.
Metro on 06/18/2015