Centre County voters will be seeing a change at the polls this year designed to make the process smoother and faster.
The county Board of Commissioners on Tuesday approved contract with KNOWiNK, LLC to purchase 211 electronic poll books — or poll pads — along with related licenses and software at a total cost of $465,815. An anticipated state Election Integrity Grant will fund $219,500 and the county will provide the remaining $246,315, though Elections and Voter Registration Director Melanie Bailey said the county still has $119,894 remaining from a 2024 grant that will further offset its cost.
The technology won’t change how voters cast their ballots or how they are tabulated, but rather how they check in when they arrive at their precinct.
Rather than paging through printed paper books to find a voter’s name, an election worker will type the first three letters of the voter’s first name and last name to retrieve their registration information. The voter then signs and receives a ticket that must be given to the minority inspector before they are provided a ballot.
“We trialed this at some of our larger precincts over the last election or so and it seemed to improve the process,” Commissioner Mark Higgins said.
Most polling locations will receive one, two or three poll pads, depending on size, although a few of the smallest precincts with only a few dozen voters will continue using paper books.
“[The poll pads] talk to each other, so if you check in on one, you’re automatically checked into the other one,” Bailey said. “So you can’t go around the building, come back in and try to check in again.”
Each poll pad will have the county’s entire Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, system, including information about Centre County voters’ active or inactive status, whether they’ve requested and received an absentee or no-excuse mail ballot and more.
If a voter shows up at the wrong precinct, Bailey said, a poll worker will be able to provide them with a printout of their correct voting location.
For election workers, the poll pads will help ensure that all voters are recorded correctly.
“Once we get all the poll pads back here, we can go through and they’re all timestamped of when they all voted,” Bailey said.
After voting ends, all of the information recorded by the poll pads can be automatically exported, instead of needing to scan each poll book, a process that Bailey said can take staff nearly a month in a presidential election year.
“When we demonstrated them [in] our office … it was very well received,” Bailey said. “I have been working with the poll pads since 2020 in my previous county and the poll workers love them. The voters love them.”
Poll pads will be rolled out to about half of Centre County precincts for the May 16 primary election, and the remainder will receive them for the general election in November.
“It’s definitely going to be beneficial for everybody in the long run,” Bailey said.
