The following comments are submitted on behalf of the Electoral Board and General Registrar for the County of Floyd.  We request that our comments be considered in the deliberations.  Amy Ingram, General Registrar, will be in attendance at the public hearing. 

If the primary concern in regard to WinVote reliability is the security of the machines from wireless access, then the solution is to disengage the wireless feature.  The wireless feature is used to collate the election results from all machines onto the master machine.  The wireless feature is not necessary to the conduct of an election – it merely makes it easier to tabulate results. 

Turn off the wireless feature and manually calculate the results from each machine, and the security concern is solved.

Officer training and the response capacity of Electoral Board members are also important factors in machine performance.  The manner in which problems are addressed can impact voter confidence just as the status of the machine can.  We are not surprised that a competing wireless system may have interfered with WinVote operations.  We experienced a wireless failure upon setting up machines in one precinct where communications systems are present that we suspect may cause wireless interference -- but the machines were otherwise functional.  Our machines operated normally during the election process, and we thought we would be manually tabulating at the close of the election, but in the end the wireless functionality became responsive. 

We believe that the knowledge and skills of the equipment operators are fundamental to troubleshooting and the successful operation of the system.  Our understanding is that the testing performed to support the decertification threat was performed without changing the wireless setting, and without much, if any, WinVote-operational expertise. 

Voter confidence also can be impacted by an ill-planned equipment change.  We will not be conducting a primary in Floyd, and cannot imagine being thrust into the position of the localities that must find an alternative means to conduct an election in less than two months.

Some of our WinVote machines are showing signs of aging electronics, and we are working with our local government to fund the purchase of new voting equipment.  Our locality is in the process of securing a loan for capital improvements generally, and it’s a hard pill to swallow.  

In the 2013 general election, one of our board members went to another locality on Election Day and observed the use of optical scan machines.  He observed the use of hand-cast optical scan ballots and tabulation problems that were caused by the manner in which the ballots were marked by hand.  We learned that hand-cast optical scan ballots have their own set of problems.

Instead of using a system of hand-cast optical scan ballots, we want to replace our WinVotes with machines that provide touch screen casting and printing of an optical scan ballots.  Most importantly, our voters have become accustomed to voting on touch screen machines.  The company called Democracy Live is on the cutting edge of such technology, and an affordable price.  However, the Democracy Live systems are not yet certified. 

Floyd County objects to having limited choices, or being in a position of buying equipment that will not be preferred in the long run.  There can never be confidence in a system acquired against our interests.  If there is a lack of buy-in, the system will be sour from the start.