City Clerk and Henry Vilas Zoo.
Voting Equipment
Maribeth Witzel-Behl talks about the election equipment. The County Clerk has a sample in their office if you want to stop by. It is the DS200 which is the next generation of the Optec III Eagles which we have used for 17 years. If we purchase the equipment now the county will pay half the cost. We want to get 98 machines, not 90 like the document says (typo), the dollar amount is correct. That is the number that we currently have, 10 machines to spare in case there are issues, that happens most when it is raining and the ballots get wet and jam the machines.
Chris Schmidt asks what is the difference with the new ones. She says that they will be easier to use. You just hit a button to open and close the polls, you don’t need to remember which number to use. There is a touch screen to use if the ballot needs to be overridden and actually the voter can take care of it themselves. When the voter feeds their ballot into the machine it scans the ballot and if they filled it out wrong it alerts the voter that they made a mistake (circled or checked instead of filled out properly) and it asks the voter if they want to retrieve their ballot to fill it out correctly so it can be counted. Rather than wait for the election official. It will tell you thank you for voting if all is good. There is no diverter in the back of the machine to separate write-in votes from the other ballots, but election officials have to go through them all in anyways. The one thing that she doesn’t care for, the print of the results is smaller font but better ink. Th next version will have larger font and we will automatically get that. That is not a show stopper, you can view everything on the screen.
Denise DeMarb asks if there are any problems with the current machines. She says they are reliable, so it is sad to let them go, the one issue is that the area they stored them in flooded and they don’t know how many got water in them, they know three are completely corroded from that. They have not tested the other machines to find out which ones work. The other issue is that in the next few years they may have issues and the wiring may go bad from the flood.
DeMarb asks if we have to replace a bunch of them, will we donate them to other places. She says we get $500 for each one we trade in, the company will take them. DeMarb hopes they will donate them someplace since they have trouble counting ballots in other parts of the country.
Anita Weier asks if they are still storing them in the same place. Witzel-Behl says they are still at the Village on Park and Jeanne Hoffman is looking into other sites that would not be in the basement. They don’t have other sites at the moment but they are looking in to it.
Henry Vilas Zoo
No presentation, therefore no questions.
