Schools

New Electronic Poll System Will Be In Place for May 8 Vote

Absentee ballots for Hartland voters are now available at the township office.

Hartland voters will see a new electronic voting system when they go to the polls on May 8 for the special school election for the non-homestead tax renewal proposal.

Expecting a light voter turn out for the May vote, Hartland township clerk Larry Hopkins decided to implement the new electronic poll system and help election workers learn the new system during an easy voting day.

“Every time they put something a little bit out of the ordinary in the poll book it causes a little bit of heart burn for everybody,” Hopkins said. “It’s one thing for us to learn it because we’re here every day, but these election workers come in once or twice a year and they have to get up to speed pretty quick and do all this important work.”

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Transitioning from the old-style poll books to the new computer system may take some time to learn in the beginning, according to Hopkins, but eventually it will prove easier and more efficient for election workers to tabulate results and provide numbers at the end of the day.

“I like to think we don’t ever make mistakes,” Hopkins said. “But this one - it won’t let them do things (without safety checks popping up), where before there was nothing like that.”

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Hartland township received a grant to help fund the new system, which clerks across the country have been encouraging to avoid problems with election results such as those in the 2000 presidential election year.

Benefits of the new system include the ability to simply slide a drivers license through a card reader to receive voter information, print out reports at the end of the night and also to have precinct lists saved on flash drives which can be instantly uploaded onto the township computers and transferred automatically after voting has closed.

In the past, many of these things, such as recording and highlighting voters in poll books, were done manually on paper.

On the ballot for May 8:

HARTLAND CONSOLIDATED SCHOOLS OPERATING MILLAGE RENEWAL PROPOSAL 

The non-homestead tax renewal proposal is to generate more than $4,000,000 in revenue for the school district. This is a tax levy that has been in place since 1995 and affects businesses, vacant property and second homes.

The May 8 vote is a renewal of the 18 mills passed for one year in 2011.

Absentee ballots are now available at the office. 


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