The Alamance County Board of Elections will recalibrate the voting machines at the Graham early voting site after a second-hand, anonymous complaint. A man claiming to be a concerned citizen called the Times-News and said that when a friend of his attempted to vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, it selected Republican candidate Donald Trump. The information was left in a voicemail with no return phone number or name of the individuals involved. Alamance County Board of Elections Director Kathy Holland said she received a similar phone call from one of the local political parties about a man claiming the machine had selected a different presidential candidate from the one he was attempting to select. No one, she stressed, has complained while voting. She said they would recalibrate the machines after voting ended Monday evening at the Youth Services Building.
“Our response to them and everyone is that if they think anything is not entering correctly, before they cast their vote, they are supposed to go to the person in charge,” Holland said. “That could be the chief judge on Election Day, or site coordinator in early voting, and let them re-create what happened. We calibrate all of our machines before they go out, and that’s not to say that they can’t come out of calibration, but I’ve talked to all the workers, and I’ve not had one person to say one thing about it.” She said she and her staff tell voters never to leave their voting machine unless they are satisfied with their ballots.
“We tell people that we want to make sure it’s right,” she said. “When we get this fifth-hand and fourth-hand information from a party or the media, there is nothing we can do. We don’t know what machine this person allegedly used and what time, and we’re not able to question that person to find out what happened. All we’ve got is accusations.”
In addition to the electronic machines, paper rolls record every selection cast by each voter, Holland said. “The voter can watch their vote being cast in ‘real time’ to verify that the candidate they select is actually being recorded,” she said. “This is the RTAL (Real Time Audit Log) paper trail required by N.C. state law.”
Full Article: Complaint spurs voter machine recalibration.