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For about a half hour Monday morning, the Kosciusko County Election Board discussed whether or not to keep using encoders during the fall election.
In the end, they voted to continue using them for November’s general election.
“We’ve been having a lot of issues with the encoders. Some of it is poll worker error, and the rest of it seems to be they are draining the power of the iPads. They are constantly be recharged,” County Clerk Melissa Boggs explained to start the discussion.
She received an email from Scott Fox, who worked the election at the North Webster Community Center. They would get the iPad charged up to 30%, but as soon as they stuck the encoder into the iPad, it would drop down to 20% or less quickly.
“That seemed to be an issue across the board at all the (vote) centers with the encoders. We’ve reached out. We were advised to get different cords in the past. We’ve accommodated and got the different cords we were suggested to get, and still no improvement there. We bought the cases that go over the encoders, thinking that maybe it would hold it into the port better, making it charge faster and easily, and, unfortunately, that didn’t seem to make much of an impact either,” Boggs explained.
She said they’re at an impasse, and with using the encoders they risk the iPads losing complete charge (during election day). If they update their iPads to newer ones, which she said they’re close to having to do, she wasn’t sure that would make a difference or not.
Bill Morton, Democrat representative to the Election Board, explained with vote centers, any voter in the county can walk into any vote center in the county and vote.
“So we have an electronic voting list in the form of an iPad where the machine scans their identification, usually, and pulls up their voting record. Then they are able to vote,” he said. “But we have, in Kosciusko County, typically some 100 different ballots, especially in the spring, and so the judge needs to be able to go over the machine and pull up the correct ballot for that voter.
“So what the encoder does, it’s kind of like your credit card. It’s got a memory on it, and the iPad writes the ballot onto that card so that when the judge goes over to the panel, where the voter actually votes, they simply have to insert the card in and then the machine pulls up the correct ballot.”
Morton said if they don’t use the encoders, “then there’s a printout that’s made at the iPad, and then the judge has to go over and enter that information into the panel in order to select the correct ballot for the voter. So the encoder has the benefit of making that easier for the judge, quicker for the voter and more accurate because we know the correct ballot is going to be given to that voter.”
He said he’s very reluctant to eliminate the encoders, but they’ve been through this problem now with the encoders for several elections and there doesn’t seem like there’s much of an alternative to doing something about it. They tried different strategies to improve the ability of the iPads to keep a charge while the encoder is in use, but those all turned out to not be too successful. When they replace the iPads with a new generation, Morton said he hopes the encoders will be improved as well.
Clerk’s Office Chief Deputy Ann Torpy said they still have to pay $2,500 even if they just use the encoders for early voting. She said the encoders makes early voting move faster for the poll worker, and they can charge the poll pad over night the night before, but it’s the cost. The $2,500 flat fee is a charge from Microvote to set up the encoders to work on the poll pads.
Morton said their options included saving $2,500 and not using the Encoders at all, or just use them for early voting.
Austin Rovenstine, Republican representative to the Election Board, said the third option would be to continue using the encoders.
“I am deeply worried myself about poll worker error. In the primary of 2024, we had a poll worker who was entering the same voting location for everyone who came into the vote center. And there were enough miscast ballots in that race to have made a difference in a couple delegate races and a precinct committeemen race, and I think we were very lucky that those are races that people don’t care so much about. You don’t get paid to be a precinct committeeman or delegate, you have to pay to be a delegate. So, if this had been a county council race, or a school board race, or a commissioner race - commissioner would be countywide - but if it had been something people cared more about, then they could have filed a petition to have a special election and we could have had to do the entire election over again, which would have cost us a lot more than $2,500 and would have been a lot more embarrassing,” Rovenstine said.
Despite the Encoders having been inconvenient, expensive and difficult, he said he was more concerned about not having the encoders. He understood the deep frustration people have had with them.
Lynn Howie said, “I worked at Christ’s Covenant until the last two elections, and we have had enough voters there that if we did not have the Encoders, it would take significantly more time. I also think it takes significantly more care and we actually, when we didn’t have the encoders, we had several of the workers that - you think that they’re trained, you think that they know what they’re doing and we’ve already gone over it - and they push the wrong button and they get the wrong ballot and nobody notices it. And the person goes home and says, ‘I didn’t get to vote for so-and-so,’ and by George they didn’t. It’s because somebody pushed the wrong button when they were choosing the ballot. That makes me very, very nervous.”
Torpy said when she was the clerk, she reached out to Microvote and other county clerks that use them, and “it sounds like it’s only a Kosciusko County issue. I do not believe that statement, that these other counties don’t have the power draining that we have. We have the original block that came with it. We went out and bought new ones, a stronger one. Those didn’t work at all. I don’t know what’s causing that.”
She said they’ve exhausted all the options, but she’s hoping getting new poll pads in the future will help, but they’ve done a lot of research and sat down with Microvote. Other counties say they don’t know why Kosciusko County’s pads drain so fast.
Morton eventually made a motion to use the Encoders for the general election, and Rovenstine seconded the motion, which passed unanimously.
