Meet your new voting machines

Long time coming.

Harris County’s new voting machine, which county leaders showed off on Wednesday, incorporates old and new technology the county election administrator says will make voting easier and boost public confidence in elections.

The Hart InterCivic Verity Duo, the county’s new model, has a touch screen interface that allows users to quickly make selections. It also produces a paper ballot which voters can ensure accurately marked their choices before submitting it into a scanner.

“I am ecstatic about the new machines,” Harris County Election Administrator Isabel Longoria said. “The touch screen process, the accessibility features, the paper ballot so that people can make sure the selections they made are the ones that are counted — this is all phenomenal for Houston.”

[…]

The Verity Duo stores a voter’s ballot in three separate locations, Longoria said: on two separate hard drives inside the machines and also on the paper ballot that is scanned. The hard copy ballots are kept for 22 months, in case a manual election audit is needed. The paper ballots are printed in English rather than a bar code, which allows humans and computers to read the same document, Hart Senior Vice President Peter Litchenheld said.

The machines are enabled to perform in the county’s four ballot languages — English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Mandarin — and also offer large text sizes for visually impaired voters.

The Harris County Election Administration Office is debuting the new machines in the May joint election. November will be the first countywide election in which they will be used.

See here for the previous update. There’s a video in the story showing how the new machine is used. I think people in general will find the touchscreen interface to be easier and more intuitive to use, but I agree with Campos that the Elections office should do as much public outreach about these new machines as they can. We all know that if it’s this year or 2024, some number of people are going to show up and have no idea that there are new machines and won’t know what to do with them. The best we can do is try to minimize that number. Houston Public Media has more.

Related Posts:

This entry was posted in Local politics and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Meet your new voting machines

  1. brad says:

    Did the Republiqans try to incorporate any racial recognition features into the new voting device to prevent brown or black colored people from being able to use the new machinery?

  2. voter_worker says:

    Hart Inter-Civic has a couple of short tutorials on their YouTube channel. Looks very straightforward to me and a big improvement over ESlate.

  3. David Fagan says:

    In 2015 Democrat Wilburn Bullard III filed a lawsuit about the system’s ability to record straight ballot tickets. Not sayin, just sayin.

    I am going to keep count how many times Manny says ‘racist’ and ‘facist’ I will multiply the number by 10 and that’s how much money I’ll donate to the Republican party.

Comments are closed.