BROOKINGS – Voters in Brookings County will continue to be able to vote at the poll centers of their choice following a Monday meeting of the State Board of Elections.
During the June primary elections, two counties that use e-pollbooks had software issues, and this resulted in the Secretary of State’s Office beginning work last week that had some in Brookings County worried about the future use of e-pollbooks and vote centers during elections.
Although there were some issues with e-pollbooks in Brookings County during the June elections, the impact was minimal, according to Brookings County Deputy Finance Officer Kristen Witchey.
“We were fortunate here where our problems were pretty minimal. When they went down, we were able to restart the computers and keep on going. But other counties weren’t so lucky,” Witchey said.
The affected computers in Brookings County weren’t down for long; only for as long as it takes to restart the computer.
“When it happened to us, it didn’t happen to all of them at the same time; it kind of went in a wave so that not everything was down at every location all at the same time,” she added. So, the impact at any one station at a given time was minimal and “we were able to continue to function.”
Rather than doing away with vote centers and e-pollbooks in the state, the state board instead will require paper registration lists at each polling location. Brookings County, however, already implements this in its elections.
The thought behind the paper list, according to Vicki Buseth, the Brookings County finance officer, is that if there’s another hardware or software issue, there’s a physical backup available.
Anybody who’d try to vote at multiple locations in order to take advantage of downed electronics in a county that has vote centers and e-pollbooks would be prosecuted, she added.
“What would happen is they’d have a record of (the person voting twice), and it would be something they would prosecute after the fact. They may come up with something in between, but they figure there isn’t going to be a big percentage of people who would do that and it wouldn’t affect the outcome. But, they would have the list to compare and they’d know who did vote twice and they would prosecute them,” Buseth said.
Brookings County is one of seven counties in the state that uses vote centers and e-pollbooks: Brookings, Brown, Hughes, Yankton, Sully, Potter and Hyde. An eighth county – Pennington County – utilizes e-pollbooks but does not implement vote centers.
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
