Floyd County debuts Vanguard Vault system to bring voter verification to the polls
When reviewing a ballot, a voter can also reject it, retrieve it, and make corrections before submitting it again. The scanner also flags certain problems, such as overvotes, which occur when a voter selects more candidates than allowed.
Voting in Floyd County is looking a little different this time around. Voters check in, mark a paper ballot, and feed it into a scanner as usual. But this time, voters can take one additional step: verify their selections on the scanner’s screen.
The county’s new voting machines offer a feature called “voter verification” that was included in a major revision of voting-system specifications by the federal government.
Hart InterCivic Inc. of Texas, Floyd County’s vendor of election equipment, said it was the first manufacturer to have voting equipment certified to the new federal standards.
Hart recently sold Floyd County 11 precinct ballot scanners and eight additional devices designed to assist people with disabilities for $155,118, according to General Registrar Sarah Campbell. The purchase also included two ballot printers.
They were tested and put in service for the upcoming General and Special Election on Nov. 3. The system had handled more than 1,800 early ballots as of Thursday afternoon and will be deployed at each of the county’s five precincts on election day.
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Called the Vanguard Vault, the system positions a scanner atop a large, black, locking ballot box. When the scanner pulls in a marked paper ballot, it presents the voter’s selections on screen with a button used to “cast” the ballot.
“If they’re happy with everything, they hit ‘cast.’ The machine takes their ballot into the ballot box,” Campbell said. “I think it makes people feel, ‘Oh, it is reading it correctly.’ They’re pretty smart machines.”
When reviewing a ballot, a voter can also reject it, retrieve it, and make corrections before submitting it again. The scanner also flags certain problems, such as overvotes, which occur when a voter selects more candidates than allowed. Depending on the problem, the voter may need to correct the ballot or mark a new one.
Voter verification slightly increases the time it takes to vote, but it hasn’t caused any issues, the registrar said.
Miriam Gregory called it “awesome” as she exited the early voting precinct Thursday. “In case you make a mistake or something, you could look at it and fix it right there,” she said.
Connie Woods found the feature a useful check on the machine itself. “It’s nice to verify that it’s working correctly,” she said.
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Floyd needed new voting equipment because its existing voting systems had exceeded their lifespan. The expected lifespan of voting equipment is about 10 years.
Many municipalities still use older voting equipment that meets previous federal standards but lacks voter verification. The transition to the new standards will take time.
Known as Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0, the new standards represent the first major upgrade in election equipment specifications in more than 20 years, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission.
Only Hart’s equipment has been federally certified as meeting the new standards. Virginia is one of only six states authorizing the use of the upgraded Hart equipment; Floyd is one of six Virginia municipalities using it this election, according to Hart.
“Is Floyd County on the cutting edge? The answer is yes,” said Steven Sockwell, a spokesman for Hart.
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With election security being an issue of public concern, the government and device makers say they have refined voting equipment to guard against remote access and physical tampering. Floyd’s equipment operates without a connection to internet.
To guard against tampering, Hart’s system enables election officials to lock various ports and doors on the machinery and further secure them with numbered, tamper-evident tags. As long as the tags remain in place, Campbell said, the operator “can tell that nobody has tampered with any of the machines.”
After the polls close on election night, precinct officials will obtain unofficial vote totals from the machines and communicate them to Campbell by phone or text. She will enter the totals into a state election database that posts them online, according to current plans. Official results are due out about Nov. 10.
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