The Macon County Board of Elections will conduct a simulated election with new equipment during the last full week of January.
Elections Director Melanie Thibault told the Board of Commissioners the work will start Monday, Jan. 23, and the actual simulation starts 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 25, and will take two days. The simulation will be at the Carpenter Community Building and the public is invited to watch.
Members of the state Board of Elections will be present. After the simulation, the state board will review the system the county wants to purchase, Thibault said, and that Hart InterCivic is working on those recommendations.
In August, the Board of Elections held demonstrations of two voting systems – the ES&S DS200 and the Hart InterCivic’s Verity system. Since 2005 the county has used the ES&S Unity system, which has technology that is about 40 years old and is now considered obsolete. Counties can only use voting equipment certified by the state.
The Board of Elections voted on Sept. 12 to recommend that the county buy the Hart system. The county is required to hold a simulated election as part of the purchasing process.
At the Dec. 13 Board of Commissioners meeting, Thibault also gave a summary of the 2022 election. Out of the 15,903 votes cast (56.87% of total registered voters), 8,921 were cast in the 17 days of early voting and 6,121 were cast on Election Day. The rest were absentee votes. Thibault said the elections office just finished a 30-day sort and that there were no discrepancies.
Thibault said there was a lot of observer participation, which is up from recent elections.
“We never had it at early voting…we had observers every day from open to close at early voting and they were stationed at precincts across Macon County,” she said. “I hope that they all left the election with more knowledge of the process and the guidelines that we follow.”