Monroe County will be using new voting machines, due to Gov. Tom Wolf’s edict to use a voter-verified process. The system they chose is from Clear Ballot. The company specializes in voting hardware and software.

“It is a paper-ballot system,” county official Greg Christine said. “So, the voter would go to the polling place. They’d be handed a paper ballot. They would vote the paper ballot. They would walk to the machine and stick it in the machine. The machine grabs it and reads it and deposits it in the secured container. At the end of the night, the machine will be read to give us a tally. If there’s any issue that pops up, we of course have the paper ballot to verify any issues.”

Christine claimed that this is the best of both worlds, because it uses paper voting and electronic tabulation to verify the voting process. Despite this, he thought the old voting system was fine.

“I don’t think there was really anything wrong with the machines we had,” he said. “The technology was getting a little dated, but they still worked. Eventually we would have to buy new machines.”

Monroe County expects to have their new voting machines in a month.

Christine also said there is no threat for hacking or any other sort of cybersecurity issue.

“Nowhere is this voting machine connected to the Internet anywhere. So, there is no issue of hacking. The server that even serves the tally isn’t connected. We have all the safeguards in place.”