Two Leflore County election officials said Tuesday that they do not think the removal of printers from the county voting machines will make the devices vulnerable to tampering.
Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill and Edward Course, chairman of the Leflore County Election Commission, spoke at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors.
Stockstill and Course asked the board at its Jan. 4 meeting for permission to remove the printers, saying that they are expensive to fix and that problems with them can hold up election results. The board voted to make the move, as more than 60 other Mississippi counties have done.
In a column Sunday, Commonwealth Editor and Publisher Tim Kalich said studies have shown that this brand of machine could be infected by a virus in less than a minute and there would be no paper record if results were affected.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Supervisor Robert Moore said he thought Kalich raised a valid question and wanted to know if hacking was a possibility.
“It didn’t occur to me at the time that you could actually hack into that thing and change the outcome of an election if you had the knowledge to do it,” he said.
Stockstill said that once the machines are tested, the votes are loaded onto a memory card. The card is placed in a sealed box, which is transferred to his office and given to a technician so the results can be downloaded.
“The memory card is the brain of the election, not the machine itself,” Stockstill said.
When Moore asked whether a voting machine could be hacked before the information is transferred to a memory card, Stockstill said, “In my opinion, it can’t, but I’m not the designer of that machine.”
Stockstill said he and others did talk to other clerks and to the Secretary of State’s Office before approaching the supervisors and were assured that the machines would be secure if the printers were removed.
Course said he went around the state to check the machines’ validity. He said several cards must be authorized before the results can be finalized and passed on to the candidates.
He said he was satisfied that altering the results would be “difficult, to say the least — not that it can’t be done, but it’s difficult for the election results to be tampered with.”
Moore said he appreciated their input but wanted to gather more insights on the subject.
Also Tuesday, the board:
• Agreed to request the release of funds for a pay raise for County Judge Kevin Adams. The Legislature created a fund four years ago for raises for all judges, to be funded through fees. The money was released starting three years ago. The supervisors had asked Adams to appear at a meeting so they could request the release by the Administrative Office of Courts.
• Granted access for the Democratic Executive Committee to hold caucuses Feb. 13 to choose delegates and alternates for its convention and for the committee to hold the convention March 12. The caucuses will be held at polling places, and the convention will be held at the courthouse.
• Agreed to program the road maintenance work to be done with state aid money. County Engineer Robert Willis also discussed work needed on two bridges: one out from Schlater and one on Blue Lake. He said the work on the first one can be done easily but that the Blue Lake one is more important. He recommended patching the Blue Lake bridge rather than replacing it because that would free up money for road improvements throughout the county.
• Approved making Kenneth Patterson, a part-time employee at the Juvenile Detention Center, a full-time employee so he could take the place of Jimmy Hemphill, who has re-enlisted in the U.S. Army. The board also approved hiring Jason Wallace of the Greenwood Fire Department as a part-time detention officer.
• Approved hiring Elizabeth Jenkins as a nurse at the Leflore County Jail.
• Approved hiring Violet Hudson as an E-911 dispatcher to replace Tasha Johnson, who resigned for health reasons.
• Approved reappointing Angela Curry, executive director of the Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Board, and supervisors Wayne Self, Anjuan Brown, Robert Collins and Sam Abraham to the Board of Directors of North Central Planning and Development District.
• Approved and executed the Statewide Mutual Aid Agreement, in which the county and cities within it agree to work together if there is a natural disaster. The supervisors and other department heads also must take classes and earn proper certification, or federal funding will be cut, said Emergency Management Director Fred Randle. The classes will be held Feb. 9-11.
• Agreed to allow the use of Little Round Park June 24-26, July 10, Aug. 28 and Oct. 16. Board members also discussed the risks of allowing the parks to host potentially dangerous events. Moore suggested that Board Attorney Joyce Chiles compile a list of activities that would be considered dangerous. Chiles said she could come up with such a list based on insurers’ opinions.
• Contact David Monroe at 581-7236 or dmonroe@gwcommonwealth.com.
