{"id":12887,"date":"2012-08-21T12:26:04","date_gmt":"2012-08-21T16:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raleighpublicrecord.org\/?p=12887"},"modified":"2012-08-21T12:26:04","modified_gmt":"2012-08-21T16:26:04","slug":"county-reaches-agreement-with-voting-machine-vendor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/news\/2012\/08\/21\/county-reaches-agreement-with-voting-machine-vendor\/","title":{"rendered":"County Reaches Agreement with Voting Machine Vendor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After months of negotiations, the Wake County Board of Elections has worked out a deal with its voting machine vendor that will save the county about $140,000 a year. <\/p>\n<p>A 2006 change in state law requires counties to maintain the hardware and software of their voting machines. Until July, the county had been using <img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.raleighpublicrecord.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/voting_machines-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"voting_machines\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" class=\"size-medium\" \/>[\/media-credit][\/caption]<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.essvote.com\/HTML\/home.html\" target=\"_blank\">ES&amp;S<\/a>, the county&#8217;s voting machine vendor proposed $193,000 per year for a three-year contract. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Wake County Board of Elections Director Cherie Poucher also wanted to train two of the county&#8217;s own technicians to inspect, fix and maintain the machines, rather than having ES&amp;S do it as it has since 2006. But certification would cost the county $30,000 per employee. <\/p>\n<p>The county was able to secure a shared maintenance agreement. <\/p>\n<p>In the contract, unanimously approved by the Wake County Board of Commissioners on Monday, the county will pay $15,000 for each certification and the training will occur in North Carolina instead of Oklahoma City as originally planned. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cAny minor repairs we&#8217;ll be able to handle because we will have the same training,\u201d Poucher said. <\/p>\n<p>ES&amp;S will still handle major repairs, but the company will only charge the county for parts. If there are any problems on Election Day, Poucher said ES&amp;S will have a representative on site within four hours. <\/p>\n<p>The new contract will cost the county about $52,000 per year. <\/p>\n<p>Prior to an election, Poucher said that the Board of Elections will inspect and test every voting machine. A week prior to the election, 10 percent of the machines are randomly tested again. <\/p>\n<p>During the public comment period, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raleighpublicrecord.org\/news\/2012\/03\/12\/voter-ed-group-questions-wake-voting-machine-certification\/\">Chris Telesca<\/a>, founder of the Wake County Coalition for Verified Voting, said he thought that the decision to enter into this contract with ES&amp;S was moving too quickly and it wasn&#8217;t the right election year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After months of negotiations, Wake County has reached an agreement with its voting machine vendor, ES&#038;S. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24029,"featured_media":10312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,15,23],"tags":[867,868,475,866],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24029"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}