The Agilis machine — which sorts and slices into vote-by-mail ballots — was installed at the county elections office on Feb. 2.
SLO County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano said the equipment will be a game changer when it comes to processing ballots during the primary and general elections this year.
“Really, it’s going to be a huge improvement to our efficiency in getting these envelopes prepped for signature verification,” Cano told The Tribune.
The SLO County’s elections office plans to implement the new system for the first time during the statewide primary election on June 2. How does new mail ballot processing machine work?
The new system is essentially a vote-by-mail ballot verifier, Cano said.
Hundreds of ballots are fed into the machine at once, zipping past a camera that snaps a picture of the signature on the envelope. It will then “talk” to the registration system and label ballots as green, yellow or red depending on how well the signature lines up with the voter’s autograph on file, according to Cano.
If ballots are not signed or have a major issue, the machine spits them into a separate tray.
Vote-by-mail ballots are then run through the Agilis a second time. This time around, the system cuts into the envelope, so the ballot can be easily extracted by employees who inspect the ballot for damage and prepare them for tabulation.
“We’ll still be doing human checking of each one of the signatures,” Cano said, but she added the system will dramatically speed up the verification process.
The nearly $500,000 system was paid for entirely through grant funds. And compared to the election office’s old equipment, it’s five times faster.
Cano said the two old mail-in ballot verification systems were work horses that were ready to be retired. Recently, the vendors discontinued support for the software program used in the equipment.
“So we really didn’t have a choice,” she said. “It was time that we had to move on from them.”
Previously, only 200 ballots could be fed into the machines at once. Now, they expect to process a thousand ballots in one go.
She called the Agilis a “much, much quicker” machine that will be vital ahead of new election result deadlines. New law requires quicker counting of vote-by-mail ballots
As of Jan. 1, all county elections offices across the state must finish processing, tabulating and reporting vote-by-mail ballot results within 13 days of the election.
The SLO County elections office will still have 30 days to certify results, and can continue to process provisional ballots and ballots where signatures need to be cured after the 13-day deadline imposed by Assembly Bill 5.
However, efficiency will be absolutely necessary to adhere with the new state law, especially in a county that mostly votes by mail-in ballot, Erin Clausen, public information officer for the Clerk-Recorder’s Office, told The Tribune.
“Over the last few years, the county has moved to where we have 95% of our voters are voting by mail ballot,” Clausen said. “That creates this bottleneck in processing that this (new system) helps get us through more quickly.”
“This brings us more in line with equipment that a county our size would need,” Clausen said.
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