Vote is in: New ballot-counting machines a hit

Municipal clerks say new vote-counting machines that many Maine communities received as part of a federal initiative drastically cut down the time previously spent hand-counting ballots a week ago, on Election Day.structural steelEven so,The internet is the best place to start your search for wholesale fashion zentai suits. You do not need to run from one store to another in search of affordable prices. A little research on the internet will land you at the website that offers high quality sunglasses at wholesale rates. the new technology didn't come without hiccups.Solar light Some voters in Belgrade and Waterville witnessed problems in the way the machines took the ballots, resulting in slight delays.Most election clerks raved about the new machines, however."We had the totals by 9:30, and that's including the few hand counts," Sidney Town Clerk Shawna Foye said. "We probably would have been there till 4 or 5 in the morning with a couple tables if we had to hand-count.solar mounting"The election staff in Waterville was concerned initially when one of the machines that accepts ballots appeared to stop working, but City Clerk Patti Dubois said she discovered it was simply being "finicky." Waterville already had electronic ballot-counting machines, but it received new ones for this year.
"It will still accept the ballots if you orient the paper in a certain way," she said later on Election Day. "It won't affect anything."In Belgrade,Your proudest higher quality of your Hermes purses container would be that actually made to order towards trader. It has the unusual pain emanates from the many different themes they'll for making this approach sophisticated and classy bit of piece. some voters had similar issues inserting ballots into the machine; it would reject a ballot several times before accepting it. Executive Secretary Mary Vogel said she wasn't aware of any machine-related issues, and Town Clerk Cheryl Cook wasn't available for comment.Megan Sanborn, spokeswoman for the Department of the Secretary of State, said the office received some similar complaints on Election Day, but "if there were problems, they were few and far between."Staff members from the secretary of state's office held regional training sessions before the election for all municipalities that received new machines, she said.
Most of the 64 municipalities that received the machines had been hand-counting ballots before that, according to Sanborn.Maine is leasing the machines for five years for $1.4 million from Election Systems & Software with no additional cost to the municipalities, she said, besides any transportation cost incurred by election workers attending the training.Foye said the training she and three other town election workers received helped make Election Day go smoothly.The next phase of updating municipal election equipment will come in January, when the state begins to replace machines in the 120 cities and towns that already have them. The goal is to make sure all cities and towns are using the same machines, which will mean voters across the state will fill in ovals on their ballots, rather than connect arrows, Sanborn said.