Ballot-scanning machines that will be used for the upcoming presidential primary elections on March 5 were tested at the Board of Registrars’ meeting Monday.
Lynnfield Town Clerk Amanda Haggstrom, Board of Registrars members Carolyn Scollard and Anne Patriquin, and election staff members Wendy Larovere and Melissa Ripley were there to supervise and conduct the testing of 110 test ballots.
Testing is required before each election according to Massachusetts regulations. The purpose, Haggstrom said, is to ensure that machines will properly count votes, and reject votes and ask voters to re-do them if needed, as voters are entitled to three ballots.
“These are if the voter over-voted, which is where they vote for two instead of one, under-voted, created ambiguous marks, or did not fill in a circle correctly or put other incorrect marks instead,” Haggstrom said.
Testing also ensures that write-ins are detected, so they can be placed in a separate container and hand-tallied by election workers afterward. Another purpose is to see if paper jams or rips happen, especially since the Commonwealth has made the ballots thinner, according to the town’s election staff.
After encountering and solving a slight problem with two paper ballots getting stuck together, the election officials successfully tested 110 ballots. The mock results listing the number of votes for each candidate were then printed out from the scanning machines in a long, receipt-like paper.
After resetting the machine data back to zero, Haggstrom enabled the scanners’ security measures, ensuring that the memory cards that record the data will not be tampered with. She also put stickers on the machines that, in the event that they are tampered with, will let election workers know the day it happened.
This Saturday, there will be an advance removal and processing of ballots for early votes and vote-by-mail ballots that the office have already received, which will be open for the public to observe. More information about this event is available through the calendar on the town’s website.
“We’ve mailed out around 2,000 ballots for the presidential primaries,” Haggstrom said. “And I checked the other day, we have gotten around 300 to 400 back.”
