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Miami-Dade County Tests Voting Machines

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MIAMI (CBSMiami) – The Miami-Dade Election Department began testing voting and tabulation machines Wednesday, a requirement elections offices across the state must do by law.

"State statute requires that we test a minimum of 5% of the units that we are going to be deploying for the election," said Christina White, Supervisor of Elections in Miami-Dade County. "In Miami-Dade, we go above and beyond. What we do is test every single ballot and variation that we can have in the election."

The test starts with a predetermined test vote.

The fill out ballots for certain winners, for overvotes - where you vote for more than one candidate, and undervotes - where you vote for no candidates.

They then run ballots through the machines and tally the votes.

Once complete these tests must match exactly the winners, overvotes, and undervotes they setup beforehand.

"What it shows to our voters and our department is that all the voting equipment is capturing the votes as it should and it's tabulating it accurately," White said.

After a few years of headlines of Russian hacking and conspiracies of stolen elections, elections offices across the state are sensitive to voter confidence.

On Wednesday, Miami-Dade assured us that not only is our system tested, it's ready.

"We want to make sure that our voters know that our voting equipment is performing exactly as it should," said White. "When you go to vote and place that ballot into the voting unit it's going to capture your votes exactly as you intended."

Early voting in Miami-Dade County for the primary election starts Monday and goes through August 26th.

In Broward County, early voting gets underway on August 18th.

For more on Campaign 2018, click here.

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