TYLER — Smith County has been using "strictly electronic" voting machines since 2005, but what happens to the machines in between elections?
Smith County Elections Administrator Karen Nelson said.that the machines are stored at the office in a storage room.
"We have a moving company based locally J. A. Haralson, and they are the ones that pick up the machines and deliver them to the polling locations and then then they go and pick them up and return them back to the elections office after election day," Nelson said.
The machines don't just sit in storage until the next election though. Maintenance is done on them once a year.
"The tech people can come in and make sure that everything's working properly you know batteries, you know whatever you need for that, everything's in tip top shape," Nelson said.
This year, the voting machines won't be in storage for long.
"This is our last election using the machines currently that we have," Nelson said. "So going forward we're going to be using brand new equipment."
Smith County will be getting new voting machines in January that are a combination of electronic and paper.
"So the voter will be able to actually hold a piece of paper with their choices in their hand to look over before they feed that choice card into a ballot counter," Nelson said.
The old machines will be picked up when the new ones are dropped off.
Nelson said having the new machines at the beginning of 2019 will give them time to train polling workers on them and to have testing done.
"So it's not really a maintenance it's just more like you're checking to make sure everything's you know going according to the way the manufacture said," Nelson said.
The new machines will be used in May for the city and school elections.