PEORIA, Ill. – Peoria County is closer to getting a new voting system that could be ready to go for the midterm elections.
The County’s Finance and Ways and Means Committees, Monday and Tuesday, approved a $1.6 million expenditure to upgrade the count’s current system, first put into place 16 years ago.
“The system we have is at end of life,” said Thomas Bride, Executive Director, Peoria County Election Commission. “We can’t get parts for it. If we can get parts, they’re used parts. The software is at the end of useful life. We’ve actually got some components that we couldn’t get an update to it if we wanted to.”
Bride says the old system was one of very few in use in the state that was all electronic.
The new system will rely on paper ballots being automatically counted when they’re cast, something that has some County Board members wondering if the county is going forward, by going backward. Bride says a public education system will try to explain that.
“The nice part of it is there doesn’t have to be a lot of public education to fill in a box with a pen,” said Bride. “There will be a lot of education of why we’re stepping back, and using a scanner (-based system).”
Voters will get a paper ballot, which which when completed will be placed in an automatically locked and scanned container, similar to other systems.
Finding a new system, Bride says, was a little tricky.
“One of the other vendors notified that us they weren’t going to respond (to the county’s Request for Proposals), because they couldn’t meet the requirements needed for the City of Peoria City Council At-Large fractional cumulative voting,” said Bride. “They won’t be able to [tabulate the votes properly per city ordinance].”
Some county board members expressed skepticism, given that elections have at times received large amounts of criticism in recent years.
Bride says he gets it, but he believes there’s nothing about this system that can be subject to outside meddling or irregularities.
