INDIANAPOLIS — The 2024 presidential election is just over a month away. To prepare, the Marion County Election Board spent a good portion of Friday ensuring that voting equipment works properly.
The public testing of voting equipment is required by law. It helps the board ensure that every vote is tabulated correctly.
"We are looking to make sure that all of our equipment works as we anticipate it,” Kate Sweeney Bell, the Marion County Clerk, said. “If it doesn’t, we have the opportunity to fix it."
One member of the public who attended the test was Terry Provo. She will be a poll worker this year. She wanted to be sure she could answer any questions a voter might have.
"This may be the first time that they see printout and other things, and this will help me to tell them I saw the process happen and it's legit,” Provo said.
For some counties, the paper printout may be new for 2024.
The Indiana General Assembly passed a law in 2022 requiring all 92 counties in the state to have a paper ballot backup. It's something cyber security experts say makes elections more secure.
"The more layers that you put on top of each other, the harder it is to find a way through all of them,” Scott Shackelford, with the IU Center for Applied Cyber Security Research, said. “That's one of the benefits that paper brings to the table. You can only have so much confidence if it is a pure electronic voting machine that has no tangible physical record of the votes cast.”
As for the biggest threat to election security, experts say it's not voting and not having trust in our election system.
"The overriding goal of especially foreign advisories is to undermine trust in our democratic processes,” Shackelford said.
Marion County has nearly 2,500 voting machines to test before election day. For a list of polling locations, clickhere.
