CRESTVIEW — With an election year’s first round of voting completed, Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux and his staff are focusing on the next balloting.
The News Bulletin chatted with Lux to see how the March 15 presidential primary went, and what voters face next.
How did last week’s voting go?
The primary we just had was the presidential primary. We had a 44 percent turnout. We had some polls where they still had people in line to vote by 7 (p.m.), so that was encouraging.
Were there any issues during the recent primary?
We had well over 270 people cast provisional ballots, and the vast majority of those were people who disagreed with their party’s candidates, and unfortunately, most of those we had to discard. As many people discovered, we are still a closed primary state. For people who don’t spend a lot of time in elections, some of the subtle nuances can sometimes be lost on people, especially given the mobility of our population and that many are coming here from other states that have open primaries.
How did the machines perform?
We had all new equipment, both for checking in voters and for tabulating the votes, and with just five months for getting it all in place and getting the poll workers trained, our poll workers did an absolutely exemplary performance. We didn’t have any machines fail, but we had a couple issues of poll worker errors issuing the ballot wrong, but that was quickly corrected.
Did the machines simplify voting or tabulating?
The difference for the average voter is kind of lost because it does function the same way as what they’ve been used to seeing. But on election night, when we were closing the polls down, the poll workers could close each polling place by hitting a single button, and it was a very quick time to transmit (results to Lux’s office). The new technology has cellular modems inside. There’s no more waiting for people to drive machinery in to produce the results. We had like 36 or 39 of the 43 polling locations reported by 7:20.
What are the new machines’ features?
With the old equipment, they had analogue modems in them, which we used to use regularly when we first got them. But then we had to stop using them to transmit the results. If you try to put an analogue modem on a digital phone line, it burns out the modem. In the south end of the county, they had to drive the equipment to a transmit center where they had an analogue phone line. I told all of the groups we trained with the equipment, this is a work in progress. I told them what we’re doing is laying the groundwork for tweaking the training so that, by the time the November election gets here, we’ll all be pros with it.
What’s next this election season?
The next thing coming is the actual August primary. We still have qualifying for the five constitutional officer seats, three county commission seats, two school board seats, and all the fire district seats. All those people file the week of June 20-24. Then we’ll have an identified slate of candidates.
Aug. 1: Registration books close for August primary election
Aug. 20-27: Early voting
Aug. 30: Primary election
Oct. 11: Registration books close for November general election
Nov. 8: General Election
WHAT'S NEXT?
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Q&A with Okaloosa's elections supervisor: How the primaries went, and what's next