August 11, 2020–3:51 p.m.
STAFF REPORTS
Some issues were reported at some Floyd County polling places at the start of voting Tuesday morning.
Floyd County Elections Chief Robert Brady said it was an issue with the poll worker cards.
Brady said the elections equipment is tested and then is turned off for security reasons.
Once the equipment is delivered to the polling places, there is a sequence you have to go through to get the machines up and running which includes a supervisor’s card, also called a poll worker’s card.
“It is associated with a password,” Brady said. “You turn the equipment on and it will not do anything at all until you insert the poll worker’s card and enter a password. Some of the poll worker’s cards that were made, we’d plug them in and we went to put in the password, the equipment did not recognize the password.”
Brady said they had to make a whole new batch of poll worker cards and then took them to the precincts.
“When we plugged the new cards in, the information that we already has that the equipment was looking for, was received, Brady explained. “So, what this translates to is there was something wrong with these cards. Once we got the new poll worker cards inserted and the equipment was brought up, we didn’t have any more issues.”
Everything was up and running at those polling locations by 9 or 10 a.m.
Brady said all of the original cards were made at the same time so he doesn’t know why some worked and others didn’t.
Brady was asked if all the kinks will get worked out in time for the November Election.
“We’re going to get better each time,” Brady stressed. “But as far as identifying the problem, until they pop up, we don’t know what they are, but we are prepared to fix them.”