For years, Johnson County served as a model for voting in Indiana.
Counties turned to Johnson County officials when they were deciding whether to make the switch to vote centers or which technology to use. Some looked to Johnson County for guidance on how to handle a growing population, and therefore a growing voter population.
Now, the county’s newly elected clerk is looking to other counties for best practices after its former longtime vendor failed the county’s 104,000 registered voters on Election Day and in the days leading up to it.
Clerk Trena McLaughlin has been on a mission since she took office last month to find better — better equipment and software, better pay for poll workers and more voting sites.
She reached out to several county clerks with questions about their voting systems. Her goal was to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly, what is least likely to fail local voters again, she said. In the end, she found the answer, and the Election Board, which she serves on, and Board of Commissioners agreed to buy or rent all new equipment for this year’s municipal election.
They still have a decision to make moving forward about which vendor they want to purchase equipment from and have manage all elections after 2019, which is expected to be a more than $1 million undertaking.
She’s one of six officials who had a hand in deciding whether to switch vendors and which one to go with. At the very least, she wanted the county to switch electronic pollbook vendors, an option she started weighing more than a month ago, as soon as it became clear the county’s long-time vendor, Election Systems and Software, wasn’t going to make amends with the county following its software failure last year.
Counties she got feedback from include Bartholomew, St Joseph, Morgan, Monroe, Hancock, Jackson, Vigo and Wayne, McLaughlin said. She reached out to more than that, but did not hear back from all of them, she said.
She looked at three vendor options, and quickly realized that most surrounding vote center counties — Bartholomew, Hendricks, Morgan and Shelby — use KNOWiNK e-pollbooks, which Johnson County recently decided to go with as well after nearly two decades of using the same, outdated ES and S equipment.
In fact, about half of Indiana’s 92 counties use KNOWiNK tablets.
Hendricks County has used locally owned and operated MicroVote, the service provider for the KNOWiNK tablets, since the 1990s, and haven’t had a single problem, said Laura Herzog, who has been that county’s elections supervisor for 25 years. In fact, Secretary of State Connie Lawson was the Hendricks County clerk when officials chose MicroVote, Herzog said.
“We feel that we have the best of the best when it comes to voting equipment,” she said.
KNOWiNK comes in on the higher end of costs for e-pollbooks. Johnson County will pay the company $166,250 this year, and about $33,000 annually for 90 e-pollbooks, which should be enough for both this year’s municipal and next year’s presidential elections, McLaughlin said.
By comparison, another option Johnson County looked at would have cost $153,200, and then $11,700 annually.
Hendricks is almost identical in size to Johnson County, and its communities, such as Brownsburg, are experiencing similar growth. Hendricks has a few thousand more registered voters.
Indianapolis’ neighbor to the west recently made the switch to vote centers from precinct voting, and used the new model on Election Day for the first time last year. A big reason they finally made that switch was Johnson County’s success with vote centers, Herzog said.
She was devastated to hear what happened last year in Johnson County, because it has always been a model for the way counties around the state vote, she said.
“We studied Johnson County extensively before we made the switch to vote centers. They’ve been a model for all of us (elections supervisors). We were all so shocked when we heard that this had happened. There’s not a single elections supervisor in the state who didn’t feel bad for Susie (Misiniec, former Johnson County clerk),” Herzog said.
Morgan County also uses KNOWiNK e-pollbooks, and has since 2016. The county has used MicroVote since about 2004.
“We haven’t had any problems. Both go out of their way to take care of anything we need,” Morgan County Clerk Stephanie Elliott said.
“If I’m having issues with machines, if they can’t walk me through it, they’re here within an hour.”
During the last election, lines in Morgan County averaged about 15 minutes. That’s pretty typical, Elliott said.
“I think you pay for what you get. We paid for what we got, and we do get a good service,” she said.
For voting machines, the election board chose to go with Chicago-based RBM Consulting, which reached out to the county and offered to help with this year’s election after hearing about its fallout with ES and S.
The county will rent at least 80 new machines and receive election services from the company in 2019. Leasing the machines, including licensing and software fees, will cost about $130,000.
The brand new equipment will include a paper trail, which state legislators have been pushing to make law, and makes the process easier for poll workers and election officials on Election Day, because they will not have to wait to tabulate all votes that were cast early. With the new machines, it is expected to take each voter about 1.5 to 2 minutes to cast a ballot during this year’s municipal election.
McLaughlin also looked to other counties when deciding how much Johnson County should be paying its poll workers. Some of the counties she talked to paid less, others paid more. With a recent change the Election Board approved last week, local poll workers will now make $5 to $15 more per day, putting them at the higher end of what poll workers around the state make.
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”At a glance” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Here is a look at the counties that use KNOWiNK electronic pollbooks and RBM for election services and machines.
Counties using KNOWiNK:
Adams
Allen (Fort Wayne)
Bartholomew (Columbus)
Blackford
Boone
Clark
Clay
Clinton
Decatur
DeKalb
Dubois
Fountain
Greene
Hamilton (Carmel)
Hendricks (Avon)
Henry
Huntington
Jasper
Jay
Jefferson
LaGrange
Lake
Lawrence
Marion
Marshall
Miami
Morgan (Martinsville)
Noble
Owen
Pulaski
Putnam
Randolph
Ripley
Rush
Scott
Shelby
Spencer
St. Joseph (South Bend)
Steuben
Switzerland
Vermillion
Wabash
Warrick
Wells
Whitley
Counties using RBM:
Floyd (New Albany)
Jackson
Montgomery
Vigo (Terre Haute)
[sc:pullout-text-end]
