(TNS) – Election officials in Pima County are preparing to implement the first year of replacing district polling places with polling stations and electronic ballot books ahead of the August primary.
The Pima County Board of Supervisors approved the locations of 129 voting centers in a 4-1 vote Tuesday, which will replace polling stations where voters must personally cast ballots within the constituencies in which they live. Now, voters will be able to vote anywhere.
The board approved the move to polling stations in February, making Pima County the last county in Arizona to adopt electronic ballot books and the 12th county to adopt polling stations.
Through a contract with TENEX, the District Elections Department receives election management software that will replace the paper lists, string of records, and forms used for manual voter verification. Now, election department staff will screen voters on an iPad that will print out a voting district ballot card.
The electoral district has designated 129 voting center locations throughout the county and approved by the Board of Directors, which are more concentrated in urban areas and remain largely in the same location as polling places historically used in rural areas.
Most of the technology needed to run the voting center model has arrived in the county, including 400 electronic poll books and cradle point devices that provide secure internet access to iPads.
But the delivery time for the primary tool for implementing the new system is approaching the August 2 primaries.
The county has not yet received any on-demand polling printers but expects to receive them in shipments from the second week of June through the third week of July.
Once the voter is registered, the electronic ballot book will send a ballot card for the races in which the individual qualifies to vote. According to Constance Hargrove, the new county election director who began the position on April 4, there could be about 1,500 people with different voting methods.
“Unlike district voting, where they may have two or three different voting patterns, voting stations should have one voting pattern for each voter in the district,” Hargrove explained.
She said the shipment delays are due to supply chain issues affecting a variety of industries globally.
Supervisor Steve Christie, the sole dissenting voter to approve voting center locations, put “Voting Center Implementation” on the board’s agenda on Tuesday and asked Hargrove about her administration’s progress.
“What is the more serious and negative issue that if nothing happens on this schedule, what keeps you up at night?” Kristi asked.
Hargrove said on-demand ballot printers are her biggest concern because of the extra time it takes to manually issue paper ballots.
While the county expects to receive the ballot printers in time, it still has contingency plans in place. By June 3, Hargrove said, it will have to make a decision on how many spare paper ballots it will need to order for voting center locations.
“Instead of having printers print ballot papers for voters, clerks and judges would actually have to pull the ballot papers out of the filing cabinet, basically, and issue the ballot to the voter,” she said. “Sort of back to the old way where we print out a batch of ballot papers, we have on site to issue to voters. That’s the worst case scenario if we don’t get printers.”
The EMB expects to have paper district ballots ready in the event of a printer failure, but in the event of connectivity issues, voters will use temporary ballots.
“Voting stations are pretty much – if you’re in an urban area – about 3 miles away; you can drive to another station and cast your vote, that physical location may still be there,” Hargrove said. “If they are in a place where they are not related, it is better to vote on a provisional ballot. That way, it is looked at after the election, and if you see that person has already voted, it will not be counted.”
I asked Christy Hargrove if preparing for polls was a “three-legged chair” and whether “just one element would bring the whole system down.”
“Absolutely not,” Hargrove reassured the supervisor.
“Because we used to work the old-fashioned way, even though it was a district-based system, we can go back to that even at the voting center,” she said. “It’s not going to be effective. It’s not going to be that easy. But we can definitely go back to that.”
Election workers will undergo training on the new process two weeks before the primaries, and Hargrove said all equipment will be ready by the November 8 general election.
© 2022 Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, Arizona). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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