Public test for school election is May 1
The Cascade County elections office is holding the public test of the tabulator machine 10 a.m. May 1 in Exhibition Hall.
Cascade County uses the DS850 and DS950 models from Election Systems and Software, or ES&S. The model is a digital scan central count tabulator, according to the Montana Secretary of State’s office.
Tabulators are not connected to the internet.
ES&S machines are certified by the state for use in elections across Montana and most counties use some model of a tabulator.
Ten counties hand count paper ballots, according to SOS.
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State law requires public tests of the tabulators before elections.
The county will also test the ExpressVote system on May 1.
Readers asked The Electric about the rotation of school board candidate names on the ballot for the Great Falls Public Schools election.
Terry Thompson, who was appointed as the county’s new election administrator in February, said her office had several questions about the rotation and provided the information that SOS had given to her office on the question.
State law has a requirement for candidate name rotation for most elections, but a provision pertaining to school trustee elections states, “names of candidates on school election ballots need not be rotated.”
Thompson told The Electric that she made the determination to rotate the school board candidate names because she was trained to rotate names on the ballot.
In the information Thompson shared from SOS, she said scientific studies have found that candidates who are listed first may receive statistically more votes than when they are listed further down on the ballot.
“The rotation statute is there to help mitigate that phenomenon. Rotation of candidate names has been in statute from at least 1947,” she said.
The ES&S tabulators are programmed to recognize the rotation by the encoding on the ballot to know which candidate name is associated with which bubble located on the page.
According to ES&S, there’s a master barcode along the left edge of the ballot and the top and/or bottom that the machine uses to recognize the location of a marked oval.
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The tabulators don’t read the names, rather they use digital imaging technology to recognize the position of the filled-in oval then uses the master barcode to determine the grid coordinates of that marked oval and then queries the database for the candidate name assigned to that location to record the vote, according to ES&S.
The count board will begin preparing mail ballots cast in the GFPS, Centerville Public School and Fort Shaw Irrigation District elections in Exhibition Hall on May 6 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The public may view the process but are required to sign a confidentiality notice to do so, according to the county elections office.
Preparing and counting mail ballots will resumed at 8 a.m. May 7 until the count is completed, according to the elections office.
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Some readers told The Electric they hadn’t received their ballots late last week.
Thompson said that all ballots were delivered to the post office at 12:30 p.m. April 22.
She said the post office notified her office on April 23 that not all ballots had been sorted on Monday for Tuesday delivery, “which could be expected with 32,000-plus ballots having to be sorted and bar coded for delivery.”
Thompson said her office fielded some calls on April 25-26 from voters who hadn’t received their ballots yet. She said they were asked to contact the elections office if they hadn’t received a ballot by April 27.
She said her office was researching why some ballots hadn’t arrived by the end of the week.
Thompson said that UPS notified her on April 29 that the 450 GFPS ballots that had to be reprinted locally on April 21 were found elsewhere in the country.
