Steve Burns
WMAL.com
ROCKVILLE – (WMAL) Gone are the touch screens at each polling place, replaced this year with the old fashioned pencil and paper – and a scanner.
“You’re going to have a paper ballot with ovals next to the candidates’ names. You’ll fill out the oval completely next to the candidate of your choice,” said Montgomery County Board of Elections spokeswoman Marjorie Roher. “You’ll walk it over to a scanner and that’s where the vote gets tabulated.”
Roher said the new system should allow votes to be totaled faster, allowing for faster returns and results. The scanner also makes a digital copy of each ballot should they need to be reviewed later for a recount. She said it’s worked smoothly so far during early voting.
“We were able to get people in and through the polling place very quickly and I anticipate the same on Primary Day. It’s really a question of how quickly you make your selection,” Roher said. “This is our first election with this new equipment so we don’t know what’s going to happen until we do it for the first time. But we’re certainly, certainly expecting results to come in by 11:00 if not sooner.”
Roher is hopeful robust early voting might have siphoned off some crowds that otherwise might clog the polls on Primary Day itself, but still urges people who want to avoid long lines to think about casting their ballots sometime other than on the way to work in the morning.
“First thing in the morning you are likely to see a line. If your schedule permits you to go to the polling place midday or even after work, you’ll find the lines are going to be less than they will be early in the morning.”
The polls are open from 7 am to 8 pm across Maryland.
One expected advantage of the new system is that it will take much less time for returns to come in once the polls have closed. Under the previous touchscreen system, every touch screen at each precinct has to be individually uploaded in order for its votes to be counted. Under the new system, there will only be one – or, in some cases – two scanners at each voting site to be counted, and officials expect that will greatly decrease the time needed to tabulate the results.
WMAL will have complete coverage of the Maryland primary throughout the evening Tuesday night.
Copyright 2016 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: MD. Board of Elections/youtube)
