In 2020 elections, Brown County voters will encounter a new, but familiar way to vote: on paper ballots.
The Brown County Commissioners and the Brown County Election Board approved a voting machine vendor that uses a combination of paper and electronic equipment to record votes.
Voters will mark their choices with a pen on a paper ballot; then, those ballots will be scanned into an electronic “optical scan” machine to record the votes.
Ballots that are fed through the machine receive a mark on them so that it’s clear they have been counted. Those ballots will be retained in a locked bin, so if there’s any question about election results, the paper copies can be retrieved and checked.
In July 2019, the Indiana Election Commission started the process to require a voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, on voting systems, to increase election security and confidence. Electronic or “direct record” voting machines could print a paper trail of votes, but they were not visible by individual voters. By 2029, all voting equipment in Indiana will be required to have a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.
In addition to this new, paper-based voting system, Brown County will continue to use electronic poll books for voters to check in when they go to vote.
The county stopped using paper poll books in 2016, opting instead for a tablet-looking system that automatically finds a voter in the registration list when he or she presents an ID, instead of having poll workers find names in a binder at the voter check-in table.
In the fall of 2016, Brown County conducted its first all-electronic election, meaning that all voters, except those who requested mail-in absentee ballots or were visited by the traveling election board, used touch-screen voting machines and electronic poll books. The reason for the touch-screen machines was because the machines the county was using to scan paper ballots wouldn’t have been compliant with recent changes to state law.
Election officials at the time also saw advantages to having everyone use electronic voting machines, including that “overvoting” — voting for more people than allowed for an office — was not possible to do, and that there were options to increase the type size or contrast to help voters read their choices.
The county’s contract with its current vendor — the same one used for more than a decade — expired in 2016, but the county continued using the same vendor, GBS, for 2018 elections under the terms of the expired lease.
In 2019, the election board took this opportunity to reevaluate the county’s election systems, also keeping in mind the concerns that some groups have brought up about election security with all-electronic voting systems.
The process
The election board organized a “vote night” at the library one October evening at which voters could test the machines that six companies were offering — poll books, voting machines or both. Voters were asked to rate that equipment on ease of use, vote security and confidence.
Mock-voters rated the RBM system highest in “ease of use” and second-highest in “confidence.” RBM’s total score ranked third overall (by one point) among the four machines voters tried.
Then, the election board created an “RFP,” or request for proposals, spelling out what information voting machine companies should provide in their bids to serve Brown County. On Dec. 10, the board interviewed those companies, and board members independently scored each one based on cost, reliability and efficiency, ease of use for all voters and impaired voters, ability to provide upgrades, vote safety and accuracy, and ease of integration with the county’s currently owned systems (the poll books) in case they had to be reused.
The board came to a unanimous consensus on which equipment it wanted to recommend to the county commissioners, and the commissioners agreed with the board’s recommendation.
The county received three bids for paper-based ballot systems and four bids for electronic voting systems, and two bids for poll books.
The company that will be providing the main voting system — paper ballots and the machine to scan them — is RBM. The line of the equipment is called Unisyn.
RBM’s bid on this paper-based ballot system was the middle one in terms of cost, at $177,470.
All of the electronic voting system bids were significantly higher than the paper-based systems. Electronic system bids ranged from $232,168 to $333,735.50.
“As you know, if you’ve read the RFP, the most significant criteria was security and confidence, and we felt that the Unisyn system provided that,” election board member Mark Williams said at the Jan. 9 meeting.
How it works
“As paper ballots are scanned, there is a digital photograph made of each ballot … and there can be programs so if there is an undervote or an overvote, that the ballot will not be immediately accepted; it will come back out of the scanner with a notation on the screen as to the location of the undervote or overvote,” Williams explained.
The voter will feed the ballot into the scanner, so he or she will be there to fix the problem if the scanner finds one with that ballot.
“If it’s an undervote, that gives the voter a chance to readdress the issue before they present their final ballot. If it’s an overvote, you have a spoiled ballot, and they have to go through the process of getting another ballot,” Williams explained.
“The voter is in complete control, and it’s very simple.”
The county also chose a company to provide the poll books that voters sign in on when they check in at the polls: VR Systems Inc. Its cost was the lower of the two companies that bid, at $32,719.
This is not the same company that had been providing the poll books for past elections, and that could mean a monetary penalty to the county for breaking that contract. The election board learned over the summer that the previous contract had an auto-renew clause unless it was canceled by a certain date, and the board didn’t know about it until it was too late. Williams said last week that the county commissioners and their attorney would be handling the details of getting out of that contract.
Williams said that of all the poll books they looked at, VR Systems had “by far the superior product.”
Election board President Amy Kelso said what she liked in particular about those poll books was that if they lose a connection to the internet — which they need to have to keep the voter sign-in list current — they store several hours’ worth of data in them which can then sync back up when internet is restored.
In 2018, poll books at a couple precincts had connection and power problems, causing the lines of people waiting to check in and vote to grow.
The systems used in the 2020 elections will not be the same election systems that in-town Nashville voters used in the fall of 2019. The Nashville Town Council contracted with a different vendor, ES&S, for the voting machines it used last year. That was the first electronic election the town had ever conducted.
Members of the League of Women Voters of Brown County, who often attend election board meetings, celebrated the county’s decision to move to paper ballots.
The League of Women Voters of Indiana as well as the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine had supported having human-readable and auditable paper ballots for the 2020 election.
League President Shari Frank said the process by which the board evaluated all the options “could be a model for the whole state.” Kelso said that the process helped to take emotions out of the equation.
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Attention, Washington 1 voters: If you’re used to going to North Salem Methodist Church on State Road 46 East to vote, that’s not where you’re going to go anymore.
On Jan. 8, the Brown County Commissioners voted to move the polling place for Washington Township precinct 1 to The Pentecostals church at State Road 46 East and Mt. Liberty Road.
The reason was because of concerns about traffic coming quickly off the hill near North Salem, causing some near-misses with voters leaving or entering the parking lot.
The polling place change will take effect for the May 2020 election. Affected voters will be receiving a postcard about their new voting location.
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Candidates seeking public office this year may now begin filing their declarations of candidacy for the 2020 primary election.
The filing period opened Jan. 8; it will close at noon Friday, Feb. 7 for candidates seeking a major political party’s nomination, or at noon Tuesday, June 30 for independent or minor party candidates. Write-in candidates have until noon Monday, July 6 to file their declarations of intent.
Local offices on ballots this year and people who have filed to seek those offices as of Jan. 15 are:
- County recorder: (R) Mary E. Smith
- County treasurer: (R) Andrea A. Bond, (R) Carlos Lopez
- County surveyor: (D) David Harden
- County commissioner District 1 (Hamblen Township): Blake Wolpert (R) (Incumbent and President Dave Anderson-R is not seeking re-election.)
- County commissioner District 3 (Van Buren Township and Washington Township voting precincts 1-3): (R) Jerry Lee Pittman, (D) Ron Fleetwood
- County council at-large (three seats): (R) Dave Critser, (R) Judith A. Swift-Powdrill
- Republican precinct committeemen (one from each voting precinct in each township): Cindy Rose Wolpert (Hamblen 1), Diana McDonald Biddle (Jackson 2), Ben Phillips (Van Buren)
- Republican state convention delegates (at large, six needed): Diana McDonald Biddle, Ben Phillips, Cindy Rose Wolpert
- Democrat state convention delegates (six needed): M.K. Watkins, Linda Welty, Linda Lawson
Two school board seats will be on the local ballot for the general election in November. They will represent District 2 (Jackson Township and Washington Township voting precinct 4) and District 3 (Van Buren Township and Washington Township voting precincts 1-3).
State and national offices on ballots this year are:
- President of the United States
- U.S. representative Dist. 9
- Indiana governor
- Indiana attorney general
- State senator Dist. 44
- State representative Dist. 65
Candidates have to live in the district they are representing.
Contact the Brown County Clerk’s office, on the first floor of the Brown County Courthouse, for more information. Forms and information also can be found at in.gov/sos/elections/2395.htm.
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The deadline for residents to register to vote in Brown County in the May 5 primary election is midnight Monday, April 6. You may register at the county clerk’s office, at Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles offices, or at indianavoters.com.
Local election officials stress that it is important for all residents to check their voter registration status. A series of statewide mailings went out last year in an effort to “clean up” voter lists of people who were deceased or no longer lived in their listed county. If a second postcard was returned “undeliverable” to the state voter registration office or if there was no forwarding address, it is possible that that voter was put on the “inactive” voter list.
The Brown County Election Board plans to publish a list of “inactive” voters within the next month or so so that people can take steps to make themselves “active” if they were made “inactive” by mistake.
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