Dade Tests Voting Equipment Ahead Of Early Voting
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MIAMI (CBSMiami) - Early voting for the August Primary Election gets underway Monday, August 15th, in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.
But before that can happen the equipment used to process the ballots needs to checked and tested.
Miami-Dade elections workers brought out five percent of the county's voting equipment on Wednesday and began the process of performing three state required tests.
"I like to refer to it as a confidence test for our voters," said Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Christina White. "What we are doing is bringing our voting units from opening of the polls all the way through voting, transmitting of those results, and comparing them to make sure that the predetermined outcome that we put in place matches the tabulation."
While hackers breaking into sensitive emails and documents have headlines around the world, White said it's not something they are concerned about.
"Hacking elections in the state of Florida is not something our voters should be concerned about. We have a completely closed system, our election results are paper based, so after the election we are able to compare the paper record to the tabulated results to make sure that, again, the voting equipment did capture the results as the voter intended."
Republican president nominee Donald Trump has publically said that he fears the election will be rigged against him. White said she would like to have a word or two with the real estate billionaire.
"I would invite that candidate to come to the elections department and learn about all the quality assurance processes that we have in place and also become educated about the security of the system," said White.
Meanwhile, election reps say improvements are on the way.
"We are very excited about this election. We are offering 14 full days of early voting which was not in the last presidential election cycle," said White.
Primary election day is on August 30th. Florida is a closed Primary state. This means you must be a registered Republican or Democrat in order to vote. You can also be registered in one of the cities holding elections on that date.
Registered voters have the option of voting by mail, voting early or voting on election day.
In Broward, early voting runs from August 20th to August 28th.
