This November will be the first time Nashville residents are required to use an electronic voting machine in the town’s election.

On Sept. 30, the Nashville Town Election Board conducted a public test of its new Expressvote machines, a hybrid digital and paper system.

In-town Nashville residents are the only Brown Countians who will vote this fall, as only town offices are on the ballot. Nashville has not had a need for a separate election 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.

The Nashville Town Election Board voted unanimously on Aug. 16 to enter into a contract with Election Systems & Software (ES&S). The cost was $1,320.

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ES&S account manager Michelle Brzycki attended the Sept. 30 machine test to walk board members and interested residents through the process.

When voters enter Town Hall, they will show ID, sign an electronic poll book and receive a paper ballot with a barcode at the top indicating what precinct they are in.

Residents who tested the machines on Sept. 30 were instructed to insert their ballot into the machine, matching the notch on the ballot with the notch in the machine.

Usually, all town candidates for office register as nonpartisan, but this year, one candidate is running under a party label: Ray Mogdlin, a Republican for town council District 2. For that reason, voters will be given the option to vote a straight Republican ticket if they wish.

“There’s nothing in the law that says the town has to be nonpartisan,” said Brenda Young, the incumbent clerk-treasurer. “This is the first in my time of 33 years that anyone has filed a party. Because there is a party, the law requires that the party ticket is what is listed first,” she explained.

If voters don’t wish to vote straight ticket, they should hit ‘Next’ on the screen, but they may see a warning. “Because you didn’t vote for a straight party, it’s warning you that you didn’t vote for as many people as you could have. In that race, straight party, you didn’t pick one and you could pick one. That’s what that warning is telling you,” Brzycki said.

Voters can hit the ‘Previous’ button to vote straight-ticket if they actually wanted to do that, or they can continue to vote in individual contests by selecting ‘Next.’

Three races will be on the Nashville ballot: town council Dist. 2 (candidates: Alisha Gredy and Mogdlin), town council Dist. 3 (candidates: Jane Gore and Mike “Possum” Roberts), and clerk-treasurer (Young is the only candidate).

All 1,010 Nashville voters will vote in all contests regardless of where they live.

After selections are made, voters will be brought to a review screen. At any point, voters may click on a contest to go back and change their vote. When the screen displays their votes in the way they intended, they will hit ‘Next’ and then ‘Print card.’

Voters can then look over their printed ballots before feeding them into a vote counting machine.

Brzycki said poll workers will be trained to watch for voters who don’t print their ballots and walk away from the machine thinking they have cast their ballot already. “The law was recently clarified that if that does happen, and the person does leave, that the bipartisan (election) judges are supposed to come and complete it, then tabulate the vote,” she said.

Any Nashville voter who doesn’t want to vote on Election Day or can’t be in town then will be able to go to the polls on a date before Election Day to cast an in-person absentee ballot. Those dates are listed in a separate column in this election section.

Early votes will not be counted until polls close at 6 p.m. on Election Day. Those ballots will be placed in a sealed envelope and then into a ballot box which is locked with two locks: One with a key held by a Republican Party representative and one in the custody of the Democratic Party representative. Representatives from both parties will feed those votes into a separate machine on Election Day, and the totals from both machines will need to be added to get the total number of votes for each candidate.

Mail-in ballots and paper ballots collected by the traveling board, which goes to people who are disabled, can also be fed into the vote counting machines.

The new voting machines also have features to make them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, such as a panel that allow voters to navigate the screen using arrows, and the ability to plug in headphones. There’s also a zoom option, and a ‘Screen’ button that will black the screen out if a poll worker has to come assist a voter at the machine, so that the poll worker can’t see who the person is voting for.

The machines also have a battery backup in case of a power outage.

About a half-dozen residents test-voted the Washington 2 and Washington 3 precincts on Sept. 30. They also practiced voting straight party then changing their vote selections later in the process, and even submitting the ballots upside-down in the vote counting machine.

Young said the biggest selling point for the town in getting these machines was that actual paper ballots would be used.

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.

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Brown County voters are encouraged to come to the Brown County Public Library on Wednesday, Oct. 9 to try out several different types of voting machines and give feedback to the Brown County Election Board.

The county election board, which will conduct the countywide election in 2020, has not yet decided which machines county voters will use.

Vendors from several different companies that are vying for Brown County’s business will be set up in the lower level of the library between 4 and 7 p.m.

One of the machines to be tested is similar to what the town will use in its election next month.

Town and county voters are welcome to attend and give their opinions about which voting machines they like to use best.

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