PARKERSBURG — The Wood County Commission will be redoing the public test of the county voting system this week after a statewide problem was discovered that prevented the original test results from being sent to the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office.
Wood County Clerk Joe Gonzales informed the commission of the issue during their regular meeting on Monday.
“There was an error that was found in the export section of the software that is used to upload the results to the Secretary of State’s office,” Gonzales said. “This error was discovered after we completed our public test on April 29.”
Wood County was not the only county to experience the problem and a number of counties had called the Secretary of State’s Office after experiencing the same error, Gonzales said, adding the test results were supposed to be sent following the public test but the error occurred not allow the results to be sent out.
To resolve the issue, they need to upload a patch provided by the system’s vendor.
“In an abundance of caution I would like to load the patch and run the public test to ensure the software is working in accordance with the standards and the integrity of our election process,” he said. “They (the Secretary of State’s Office) want everyone around the state to run the public test and resubmit it.”
The early voting that has already taken place has not been impacted. The problem is with the software that sends the test results to the Secretary of State’s Office. This problem has nothing to do with the voting system and everyone who has voted during the early election period is fine, Gonzales said.
“In four days of early voting we had 1,014 voters,” he said. “It’s going well.
“There is no problem with anyone coming in to vote.”
Last week, the county ran a test of the vote tabulators with 858 test voters that were then zeroed out with the commission’s reports printed out and reviewed.
The second test is to maintain the standards and integrity of the system and process.
“We are going to do our due diligence,” Gonzales said.
The commission will conduct the public test on Thursday at 9:30 am
In addition to the early voting site at the Judge Black Annex which has been open for a week, community early voting sites will be open starting today and going through Saturday at the Williamstown City Building, 100 W. Fifth St., Williamstown; the Vienna Community Building, 1301 34th St., Vienna; the Mineral Wells Volunteer Fire Department, 1695 Elizabeth Pike, Mineral Wells; and the Lubeck Volunteer Fire Department, 1340 Harris Highway, Parkersburg.
All the early voting sites will be open 8:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday and 9 am to 5 pm Saturday.
The primary election for West Virginia and in Wood County is Tuesday, May 14.
All of the results, including the early voting votes, will be downloaded and tallied on election night. The early votes will be the first votes tallied.
The county will take absentee ballot applications through May 8.
Absentee ballots will be mailed out through May 8. Returned ballots have to be postmarked May 14 to be counted.
Brett Dunlap can be reached at [email protected]