Ballot Machines Tested at Muni Building on Wednesday

Wednesday morning, the Council Chambers at the municipal building became the scene of a mock election, as batches of ballots, marked up randomly, and in some cases very incorrectly, by a third party,  some with too many selections or markings out of the proper area, others no longer exactly flat.

The nine machines, one for each precinct, were put through their paces with the sample ballots by a crew of election workers and election wardens, all  under the eye of Town Clerk Nancy Danello and Assistant Town Clerk Dyan FItzgerald. Also present was the Observer, Steve Sherlock from Franklin Matters (who recorded audio of the whole process) and a few members of the public.

At the start of the process, around 9 am, Danello explained the testing process as well as the series of actions that will be taken to handle mail-in ballots and early voting ballots between October 28 and November 5 -- and the various checks and balances and procedural steps used to ensure accuracy. "I'm a former banker," she quipped, so I believe in thorough checking processes...

The testing, twice on  each machine, was completed by 11 AM with records of the tabulations for each machine sent off to the Secretary of State and a manual comparison of "votes" counted electronically compared to the results from a manual count. All performed as expected.