Voters in the Nashville municipal election in November will use a voting system that is a hybrid between digital and paper.
The Nashville Town Election Board voted unanimously on Aug. 16 to enter into a contract with Election Systems & Software (ES&S).
In-town Nashville residents are the only Brown Countians who will vote this fall, as only town offices are on the ballot.
The machines ES&S will provide go by the brand name Expressvote.
Voters will make their candidate choices on a touch screen, but then the machine will print a paper ballot where voters can check to make sure their votes were recorded correctly. The voter would then feed that paper ballot into a machine that would read and record the number of votes for each candidate.
The national League of Women Voters has been pushing for the use of a “voter-verified paper auditing trail,” or VVPAT, in elections. The Indiana General Assembly approved legislation over the summer that makes a paper audit trail mandatory starting in 2029.
In case of a recount, the Expressvote machines will allow ballot counters to manually review votes from the paper ballots.
The town had received quotes on election systems from three different vendors. ES&S was the lowest by far, as this is a new Expressvote machine and Nashville will be a “pilot” location for it. The cost to the town will be $1,320.
ES&S also will provide an electronic pollbook for town voters to use instead of signing in on paper pollbooks.
Three races will be on the Nashville ballot: town council Dist. 2 (candidates: Alisha Gredy and Andrew Tilton, independents, and Ray Mogdlin, Republican), town council Dist. 3 (candidates: Jane Gore and Mike “Possum” Roberts, independents), and clerk-treasurer (Brenda Young is the only candidate).
Nashville has not had a need for an election board for more than a decade, as the last time it had a contested election that didn’t fall during a county election cycle was in 2003.
Nashville Town Election Board members are “Buzz” King as the Republican representative, Linda Lawson as the Democrat representative, and Young as the town clerk-treasurer.
