Marion County’s voting machines are ready for the election
INDIANAPOLIS (MIRROR INDY) — Marion County’s voting machines are ready for the 2024 primary election.
A little more than 100 of the county’s voting machines were tested at the eastside Election Board Service Center on Friday, April 5, with no issues. State law requires 5% of a county’s voting machines to be tested publicly ahead of an election.
The tested machines were randomly selected by Ball State University’s Voter System Technical Oversight Program, the organization that advises the Indiana Election Commission on voting machine certification.
During the test, the machines were opened and inspected before sample ballots were fed into a tabulation machine.
“We’ve pre-marked test ballots and we know what those results are anticipated based on how we mark those ballots,” said Patrick Becker, elections director for the Marion County Election Board. “And then we tabulate those ballots, and we make sure that the results equal what we’re expecting.”
Becker said Friday’s public test was likely the third time some of the machines were tested ahead of this year’s primary election. The county election board does logic and accuracy testing on all machines after the ballot is ratified. He said vote by mail equipment is also checked.
“When we talk about testing, we do extensive testing on all of our devices, all of our mobile connectivity devices, all of our e-poll books,” Becker said. “Anything that’s going to be deployed out in the field, we do a lot of work to make sure that it’s working.”
Marion County has 2,008 of the machines that voters use to cast their ballots and 380 tabulation machines. The machines are not connected to the internet.
Brent Stinson, deputy director of the Marion County Election Board, said the public tests are important because they help build trust in the election process.
“We want people to be confident in their voting machine,” Stinson said. “That when they show up and they vote in person, either at an early voting site or on Election Day, that the machines have been tested, everything’s been fulfilled and that they can vote confidently on these electronic machines.”
No previous tests have resulted in an error, Stinson said. He said if a mistake did happen, it would likely be from someone marking a ballot incorrectly or incorrectly feeding the ballot into the tabulation machine.
“So if there were an anomaly, it would most likely be human error,” Stinson said. “Somebody punched the wrong button on the screen, got a wrong tabulation, we would do the entire test over again.”
Early voting begins Tuesday, April 9, at the City-County Building. Additional voting sites will open Tuesday, April 27. The Indiana primary election is Tuesday, May 7.
Mirror Indy reporter Darian Benson covers east Indianapolis. Contact her at 317-397-7262 or darian.benson@mirrorindy.org. Follow her on X @HelloImDarian.