County Clerks’ offices across Missouri are testing voting machines in preparation for the April 4municipal elections. State law requires that each county tests machines before and after each election.
The Cole County Clerk’s office finished its testing earlier this week. Cole County Clerk Steve Korsmeyer said the process is in place to ensure complete accuracy.
“We want the machines to work 100 percent, and you know we want them to be accurate of course for the elections,” he said. “So this is the testing process to make sure they count accurately before the elections and they count accurately after the elections so we know that the process works.”
Korsmeyer said a Republican and a Democrat are present during the testing to ensure nonpartisanship.
“If one of the machines didn’t count properly, we would take it out of service,” he said. “We have a few spares, and we would reprogram another machine to take its place.”
However, Korsmeyer said all machines seem to be up and running properly.
“They all worked fine, we didn’t have any problems with any of them so we should be ready to go,” he said.
Boone County started its testing earlier this week. Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said the testing will be done by Friday. She is hopeful the tests run smoothly and that she knows the testing is necessary.
“We do have problems, you know, where they need to readjust the equipment and those kinds of things, so we’re just going through to make sure we test everything,” she said
Noren said errors are becoming exceedingly rare due to the thorough testing process.