With Midterm Elections approaching, the 2020 Election and elections to follow seem far off. That is not the case for Tina Kiger, director of elections and voter registration for Greene County. Kiger not only has to be focused on the Midterms next week, but also on ordering new voting machines for the county for future elections.

As of now, Pennsylvania has only certified one system of voting machines for counties to use, Unisyn Voting Solutions out of California. But because Greene County is not interested in using Unisyn, Kiger will have to wait for more systems to be approved before making a decision on the county’s next voting machine.

“As of right now, we are not buying new ones because we have none certified other than Unisyn, those are the only ones certified,” Kiger said. “As soon as they get more certified then we will be buying new machines.”

The state has mandated that, moving forward, all purchased voting machines provide paper copies, and that all machines be moved to paper copy machines by the end of 2019. One possibility for the county would be to purchase a newer version of the voting machines that they already have, said Kiger, with the obvious addition of a paper backup.

“There is a chance we can buy machines from the company that we have right now, which is ES&S, and the only difference would be that there would be a paper backup,” Kiger said. “If we would go with one of the other ones, it would be and 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper. There will be a paper backup where there is not one right now.”

While Greene County’s current machines are very old, the county has had very few issues in the past. Kiger said that the county is not expecting any problems for the Midterm Elections.

“We have had [ES&S] since 2005 and we have had no problems other than a few calibration issues which is easy to fix,” Kiger said. “We are not expecting any issues.”

At this stage in the process, the county is putting the finishing touches on the election day process and testing equipment. This includes absentee ballots, which have a rather quick turnaround, with the deadline for applications being the Tuesday before the election and the deadline for the ballots themselves being Nov. 6.

“Our machines have been cleared and tested,” Kiger said. “Monday we will do an ‘L and A,’ which is a logic and accuracy test; we have all of our supplies basically ready to go and we are in the process of finishing up absentee ballot applications.”

While some across the nation may be worried about the operations of election day Nov. 6, Kiger is confident in the preparation she has put in before the impending elections. She said she has full confidence that elections will run smoothly in Greene County next week.