Vanderburgh County Clerk Takes Delivery of First New Voting Machines

Vanderburgh County Clerk Takes Delivery of First New Voting Machines

Evansville, Ind.— On Tuesday, August 18, 2020, Vanderburgh County Clerk Carla Hayden announced that the first of the new voting machines have arrived. Hayden said, “These initial machines will be used for training and demonstration purposes. The balance of the voting machines will be delivered over the next few weeks for use in the 2020 General Election.”

On August 11, 2020, Vanderburgh County Commissioners signed contracts for the purchase of the Unisyn OpenElection FreedomVote Tablet. The new machines replace the iVotronic, a paperless voting system that Vanderburgh County has used since 2004. “When I became clerk, one of my goals was to bring new voting machines with a voter-verified paper audit trail to the voters of Vanderburgh County,” Hayden said, “When we purchased the iVotronics sixteen years ago, they were state of the art.

Today, they are relics.”Voters will still make their selections on a touchscreen as they have for the past sixteen years, but the voter will perform the final review of their choices on a paper ballot. “The paper is the ballot, so the voter has not voted until they deposit the ballot into the ballot box,”

Hayden said, “The touchscreen does not record votes. It is for selection purposes only and then a ballot with these choices is printed. Once a voter is satisfied with their choices, they run the paper ballot through a scanner that reads the ballot and then it drops into a ballot box for retention.”

The entire purchase totaling $2,012,121 was made using federally appropriated 2020 HAVA Election Security Grant funds. Hayden said, “If we had to rely on local funding for this purchase, it would have been cost-prohibitive. By working with Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, we were able to access federally appropriated funds and provide the new equipment at no cost to the taxpayers of Vanderburgh County.” In addition to the purchase price, Vanderburgh County will receive a refund of $248,070 for election support expenses incurred by the county year-to-date.

Demonstrations of the new voting machines will be available in the Vanderburgh County Election Office, Room 216 of the Civic Center during normal business hours.