DuPage gearing up for election

Even though the primary is more than a week away, the DuPage County Election Commission already has invested hundreds of hours into ensuring every vote counts.

Commission employees at an Aurora warehouse have spent the past month testing the touch-screen electronic voting machines and optical scanners that will be used on March 20.

“The mission of the election commission, really, is to make sure things are safe, they’re secure, they’re accurate, they’re verifiable (and) that they’re bipartisan in nature,” said Robert Saar, the commission’s executive director.

Roughly 80 percent of the DuPage voters in the upcoming election are expected to use optically scanned paper ballots. The optical-scan method lets voters make their choices by filling in ovals on the ballot — much like a multiple-choice test. The ballot is fed into a scanner to record the results.

In addition to paper ballots, DuPage’s 336 polling places will each have one touch-screen electronic voting machine.

“There were groups out there that made a lot of noise against touch-screen voting,” Saar said. “But when I go out and speak (to the public), invariably one of the first three questions is ‘Why don’t we have more of these machines?’ The public actually loves them.”

The electronic machines print paper receipts that voters can look at to verify their choices were tallied accurately. Those slips are later used in state-required audits.

Then there’s the extensive testing that’s done to make sure the machines are working properly. The tests, which takes up to six hours per machine to finish, include an electronic logic and accuracy test. DuPage also has testers manually cast votes on every machine.

After similar testing is done on the optical-scan system, Saar said the county’s voting equipment is secured through a series of safety protocols that includes several uniquely numbered seals over sensitive electronic components.

The equipment then is locked inside large metal cabinets that moving companies deliver to polling places a day before the election. “Each one of these represents a voting location in the county,” said Saar, as he stood by rows of the so-called “precinct carriers.”

Once a polling location closes, the equipment is returned to the carriers, which are then secured. The entire process is overseen by a bipartisan group of election judges.

Bipartisan teams also are responsible for sealing and delivering memory cards from the various voting machines to the election commission’s main office in Wheaton. In addition, tabulating machinery is kept off computer networks to prevent hacking.

“At the end of the election,” Saar said, “you would see a cradle-to-grave story that’s told by audit trails and documents and that sort of thing as to who did what when.”