The new electronic machines that utilized paper ballots were used in both the May primary and the November presidential election without many problems at all.
“We had more problems with the old machines than we did the new ones,” Harper said.
The old machines will continue to be used in upcoming elections because they are more accessible to handicapped voters.
But to make sure the new machines were doing their job properly, Harper called for some of the votes to be recounted by hand.
“It's not something we had to do,” Harper said. “It wasn't mandatory, we just wanted to do it to reassure the public about the electronic machines.”
Two of Logan County's 20 precincts were picked at random and the votes were manually tabulated.
The results came back exactly the same.
“They say there's about a one percent margin of error whenever you do a hand count, but we didn't have any problem at all,” Harper said.
Logan County wasn't the first to do the hand count to make sure the new electronic machines functioned properly.
“Some of the other counties did the same thing,” Harper said. “Christian and Daviess counties both did the same test and they were very successful.”
Harper said the process took about four and a half to five hours and was done by the staff from his office.
Logan County was one of just seven counties in Kentucky to use the new voting machines for the primary election. About 35 of the state's 120 counties used them in the November election.
The machines, called eScans, is a precinct-based voting system that digitally captures voter selections on printed ballots and integrates vote totals from absentee-by-mail and electronic voting systems to produce a single set of election reports.
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