Marion County Clerk Steve Fox is concerned about going through another election cycle this year with the county’s current election equipment.
The comments came at Tuesday night’s county board meeting as board members were given a demonstration of new equipment that would be easier to set up at the polling place, have another level of security, have fewer potential issues on election day, and produce election night results more quickly. Voters would still be able to vote on a machine or on a paper ballot.
Fox says he’s been patching together the current system for several years.
“For the County as a whole, it’s the software side of this whole thing. So that equipment we’ve had for the last 15-18 years, we can make it run. We can make the OS’s run in the polling place, and make the touch screen line up. It’s the software that we use to set it up, the vendors use to program it, and more importantly the software we use to upload the results at the end of the night. And if that dies we have nothing and I don’t think we can risk that, we are too close to that.”
No cost estimate was given, but a proposal will be made at the February meeting where Fox hopes the county board will take action.
“I need to have it on my floor early April at the best and train all these judges, my staff, and techs. We will still be pushing to get all that done, but I think we can pull it off.”
Fox noted several other area counties have moved to the proposed system, with only Marion and possibly Franklin County remaining on the current system. He says the county board couldn’t directly use federal COVID-19 relief money to purchase voting equipment, but they could free up necessary money by moving eligible expenses out of the budget to the grant funding.
