With a good portion of the state scrambling after a federal court agreement to update voting machines within the next two years, Montco has taken a proactive position to comply with the decision.

Pennsylvania has committed, in federal court, to updating all its voting machines by 2020.

The state settled a lawsuit Thursday that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed two years ago, arguing that voting machines that don’t leave paper trails are susceptible to error because they can’t be double-checked, writes Katie Meyer for witf.org. 

[uam_ad id=”54865″]

The state hasn’t admitted any wrongdoing, or that there were any issues with the machines used in the 2016 election.

Governor Tom Wolf first urged counties to get voting machines with paper records earlier this year.

Following the Stein settlement, the Department of State issued a memo to counties saying new machines should be in place for 2020 elections, and state funds would cover about half the cost.

However, (many) counties have said on no uncertain terms that they can’t afford to update all the machines themselves, and there is still no concrete funding deal between the Wolf administration and the GOP-controlled legislature. To read the complete WITF story click here. 

“In Montgomery County, we have been very  proactive about instituting a new voting system that will have voter-verifiable paper ballots and can be audited so that residents will have every confidence that their votes will be accurately counted,” said Montgomery County Commissioners Chair Val Arkoosh. “Our proposed capital budget includes up to $8 million to replace our aging voting machines and we anticipate voting on  which system we’ll use within the next month. Once the vendor has been selected, we will engage in an aggressive voter education campaign so that everyone will be ready to use that new system for the May 2019 primary election.”

[uam_ad id=”61456″]