Election officials: Don't worry about voter fraud
In light of Donald Trump’s allegations of voter fraud, the seed has been planted that next week’s election could be rigged.
But, Carbon County voters can be rest assured that won’t be the case, according to Lisa Dart, director of the Carbon County Elections Office.Dart said Wednesday that while there aren’t any poll-watchers yet, they have a few applications for them, but they had not been processed yet.As for any safeguards, Dart said, “The machines are not connected to the Internet at all, so when the cards are taken out of the machines on election night, they get downloaded onto our computer, which is called a GEMS computer. Those cards are uploaded to the server, and we print out a paper copy and put it on a memory stick and we put it on my computer, and then we send it to the county website and it’s uploaded to the department of state’s website.”Concerning any risk associated with online voter registration, Dart noted that voter registration closed on Oct. 11.“We haven’t had any issues, no duplicates, no signature fraud, nothing like that,” Dart said.She said people who have called to say they aren’t voting on a Smartmatic machine need not worry, as the county does not have that type of machine.Instead, Dart said the county has a TSX machine, and, “we will only issue provisionals as necessary.”“There is new security numbers generated every election, there’s also a pin number which is given to the judges that actually shuts down the election at the end of the night and that’s also generated every election,” she said. “There is no Internet access to these (the TSX, and the GEMS) machines.”Additionally, Dart said there will be a sign telling voters to turn off their cellphones while at the polls.Carbon County Commissioners Chairman Wayne Nothstein attempted to alleviate any concerns.“I’m confident that our elections office have done their job, (and) I think the people of Carbon County are honest people,” Nothstein said.