Before an election, there is a lot of planning done, including testing the voting machinery.
Every municipality is required by law to test their electronic voting machines in front of the public at least ten days before each election. The public can observe the testing, which has been conducted for many years. Tuesday morning, the cities of Green Bay and De Pere tested their equipment.
The public testing is a component of our electoral system’s checks and balances.
“Every time we conduct this [the public is notified] and they are invited to come and see, and in recent years, people have begun showing up to watch the public test more frequently. De Pere City Clerk Carey Danen said, “It’s an excellent opportunity to learn and that votes are calculated accurately.
Some of the tested ballots had mistakes on purpose to see if the machines would notice them.
“This is my ‘over-voted’ ballot, therefore we’ll want to make sure that on the screen it’s going to show me that in this election I voted for four candidates when I’m only permitted one,” the voter said. I could only choose one of the three candidates for attorney general. There could only be one candidate for secretary of state, so I chose five. four, and the state treasurer. It did what I wanted it to do.
On election day, a new ballot would be available if you were the voter at this time, according to Green Bay Deputy City Clerk Jaime Fuge.
Transparency is aided by the testing, which can also teach everyone a valuable lesson.
“We even one time had a mother and her home-schooled child come in as part of civic lesson to watch public tests, so that was neat too,” Danen said.
A small number of individuals showed up to see the Green Bay public testing.
De Pere officials urge people to attend, but nobody came up.
“Due to the environment we’ve been in over the previous two or three years, I’ve noticed a rise in the number of queries and worries. People have begun to question how confident they are in what we’re doing, according to Danen.
The proper operation of the process depends on many different factors, with election security being of utmost importance.
The De Pere municipal clerk explained to us that the encrypted memory sticks that are pre-programmed with the candidates for an election are provided to us by the county under lock and key with a tamper-evident security seal so that we have that chain of custody.
The voting apparatus and memory devices are secured and sealed with a tamper-evident seal when the testing are completed, and then the machines are stored in a secret, safe location.
Voting machines go through public testing
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