Ireland Wants Election Results Early and Without Problems

By JOSELYN KING
WHEELING — The eyes of the political world will be on West Virginia on Tuesday, but Secretary of State Betty Ireland doesn’t want the state’s election process to be the focus on election night.

“It is my main goal is to keep West Virginia’s name out of the news on Election Day,” she said. “West Virginia will run the election with the world watching or not. The last thing we want to do is to be in the national spotlight on election night.”

Voters across West Virginia will head to the polls Tuesday not just to select presidential nominees, but to choose state, county and school board officials as well.

Polls open at 6:30 a.m. on Election Day and close at 7:30 p.m.

And because of new technology being used statewide, election night returns could come as early as 10 p.m., according to Ireland.

“We have a brand new election night reporting system,” she said. “It will allow clerks to send the results over secure servers instead of faxing and our employees putting them in by hand. Anytime you take the human element out of the process, you minimize the chance of transposing the numbers.

“I believe we will have numbers even more quickly than before,” she added. “I’m not saying that something couldn’t go wrong, but we’ve been looking at problems other states have had and I don’t see that many errors happening.”

Ireland said the state has “a stringent testing mechanism that should help to find problems, and that there will be technicians stationed throughout the state to make certain nothing goes wrong.

The technicians are either employees of the Secretary of State’s Office or the Governor’s Office of Technology, according to Ireland.

Some counties also have contracted technicians from the manufacturer of the state’s voting machines, Elections Systems and Software.

“We have more technicians in the field than ever before,” Ireland said.

Local counties utilize “rovers,” election employees assigned to specific precincts who have been trained in how to make repairs to touchscreen voting machines.

Brooke County Clerk Sylvia Benzo agrees that election counts should be completed by 10 p.m. Tuesday.

“I don’t foresee being really late,” she said. “Hopefully, we will be done earlier than in the past — I expect no later than 10 or 10:30 p.m.”