New voting machines debut
Harris County’s new voting machine, which county leaders showed off Wednesday, incorporates old and new technology the county election administrator says will make voting easier and boost public confidence in elections.
The new Hart InterCivic Verity Duo has a touch screen interface that allows users to quickly make selections. It also produces a paper ballot which voters can ensure accurately marked their choices before submitting it into a scanner.
“I am ecstatic about the new machines,” Harris County Election Administrator Isabel Longoria said. “The touch screen process, the accessibility features, the paper ballot so that people can make sure the selections they made are the ones that are counted — this is all phenomenal for Houston.”
In the 2020 presidential election, Harris County was the largest voting jurisdiction in the country that used machines that did not produce a paper record, raising concerns among election security experts.
The Verity Duo replaces the eSlate machine, which Harris County voters used for almost 20 years. Many complained that the eSlate’s spinning wheel interface was clunky and slow.
With the end of straightticket voting in 2020, county officials looked for a new voting machine that was more secure and easier to use.
The Verity Duo stores a voter’s ballot in three separate locations, Longoria said: on two separate hard drives inside the machines and also on the paper ballot that is scanned. The hard copy ballots are kept for 22 months, in case a manual election audit is needed. The paper ballots are printed in English rather than a bar code, which allows humans and computers to read the same document, Hart’s Peter Litchenheld said.
The machines perform in the county’s four ballot languages — English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Mandarin — and also offer large text sizes for visually impaired voters.
The Harris County Election Administration Office is debuting the new machines in the May joint election. November will be the first countywide election in which they will be used. Harris County purchased 12,000 machines.