County voting machines certified

Quay County Clerk Ellen White and her longtime voting machine technician took a few hours last week to certify Dominion vote tabulators for next month's general election.

They put the machines through their paces with a small mock election to ensure they are working properly. It took about three hours for White and Danny Wallace, the county's voting-machine technician since 1981, to test and certify eight machines that New Mexico has used for almost a decade.

A number of Republican Party operatives, including former president Donald Trump, have accused Colorado-based Dominion without evidence of changing the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Dominion, in turn, has filed multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against individuals and news outlets that made the allegations. That includes MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, whose $1.3 billion suit against him was allowed to proceed after the U.S. Supreme Court last week nixed an effort to toss it.

White said most previous voter-machine certifications had no one watching the process, though they always have been open to the public.

Last Tuesday afternoon, a woman who declined to identify herself except as "Suzie Q" watched the certification in the county commission chambers for about an hour, peppering White and Wallace with questions. The woman later was identified as Ann Hall, a key member of the Republican Party of Quay County.

Asked what prompted her to attend the certification, Hall said: "I want to see what's going on, see how it works."

At one point during the certification, Hall told White: "I trust you. I really do."

White and Wallace turned on each machine and inserted memory cards that record results from the inserted and scanned paper ballots. In one case, White twice couldn't get a card to read properly and used another card instead.

White and Wallace fed a half-dozen paper ballots designed to test the machine. One ballot was marked improperly. Another was contained too many marks for an election race. Another was missing a bar code. One was blank. Another contained undervotes, or no votes for certain races.

After the vote was closed, the machine printed a long tape listing the results. Wallace read the results from the tape, and White double-checked it to see whether they matched the ballots.

Both said the Dominion machines are highly accurate.

"We've counted numerous races by hand, and they never change," White said.

"Every time we do a recount, it's exactly the same," Wallace said.

Quay County performed a recount last year in a very close House Village Board race and affirmed those results.

Each machine contains two memory cards. One essentially serves as a backup in case the primary one fails. Dominion machines never are connected to the internet. Their memory cards are brought to a standalone computer.

White said the printed tapes are compared to the local voting judges' call-in results and the memory cards. In effect, the clerk's office gets triplicate results from its precincts.

Like in a real election, the mock results then are transmitted to the New Mexico Secretary of State's office. White said results from mock elections in Quay and other counties can be viewed on the Secretary of State's website before they are cleared at the end of the day.

After the certification, almost all of the voting machines are sealed with metal-lined zip ties until Election Day and are stored in the county courthouse's basement. One voting machine will be used to accept ballots from early voting, which began this week.

The following day, White certified three backup machines for the election.

Dominion was selected as New Mexico's vote-tabulation system by then-Secretary of State Dianna Duran, a Republican, when another Republican, Susana Martinez, was governor. More than 1,700 of the machines were distributed to counties. They first were used during the 2014 general election.