FORT WORTH (1080 KRLD) - Tarrant County has taken the wraps off its new voting machines.
One of the biggest concerns with the older machines is that they didn’t leave a paper trail of voters’ ballots.
That changes with the new machines.
The voter will enter a blank paper ballot into the machine before making their selections.
“When you're done, everything you chose gets printed on that paper, and you take it out of that first machine and you read it,” says Heider Garcia, Tarrant County elections administrator. “If you're okay with that, then you turn around and you go to the scanner at the end of the room and you insert it, and it gets counted.”
And with the ballot scanner, there are no more hanging chads or pregnant chads — the only chads involved will be candidates named Chad.
“It's not interpreting handmade marks, but (rather) reading text characters printed by another machine,” says Garcia.
Garcia says the new machines will be super easy to use.
“They don't need to do the spinning wheel anymore to vote,” he says. “It's a touchscreen. All the interactions are done directly; you will touch the name of your candidate on the screen.”
And throughout the process, there will be several opportunities for the voter to confirm his or her selections before casting the ballot — right up to the last possible moment.
“If you realize you have something on that print out that you don't agree with, you can spoil it and get another code and try (again),” Garcia says. “And then when you're satisfied, you turn around and say, ‘This is the one I want counted,’ and it goes into the scanner.”
Garcia says most importantly, the new machines put the voters firmly in control of their choices.
“It gives them the ability to say, ‘I'm in control of making sure that my ballot has what I want to vote for,’” says Garcia.
The new voting machines will be used for the first time in the November constitutional amendment election.