At 9 a.m. on March 30, a witness from both parties attended a test of Dent County’s voting machines by Dent County Clerk Angie Curley.
Dent County uses no electronic voting machines but does utilize automated tabulation machines. These machines must be tested prior to an election to ensure proper tabulation.
“I send a letter to the chairman of each county committee, and the test shall be observed by at least two persons designated by the election authority, one for each major political party,” shared Curley.
David Borg, the chair of the Dent County Democrats, and Shannon VanKirk, Dent County Collector, a republican, were the two witnesses present at the test, according to Curley.
“It all tabulated correctly on the first test. Then we also do a manual (test),” said Curley. “Everything is a paper ballot. There’s a paper ballot trail. They go through that and we pick a candidate or ballot measure and do an actual physical hand-count with that test deck.”
Curley said there are many checks and balances to ensure the elections are secure, including photo ID verification, non-networked equipment, and testing of the tabulation machines both before and after the election.
“You’ve got pretesting, you’ve got election day, and you have post testing. Our machines are not hooked to the internet,” she said.
“Everything has a paper trail in Missouri. So even though we do electronic tabulating equipment, we always have a paper trail. Always. That’s why we do today, which is a pre-testing of all the equipment. Then you have election day, and after the election is closed and you have unofficial results, the verification team has to pull 5% of a polling place turnout, and they actually open the ballots and do a hand count of a ballot measure or a candidate, sometimes both. They make sure that the tabulating electronic machine is calculating correctly. I can tell you we’ve never had anything come out any different. The tabulating machine has always counted correctly."
