The Bucks County Board of Elections will be moving to electronic pollbooks.
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After a successful pilot program, the Bucks County Commissioners have agreed to switch the pollbooks for the more than 300 election precincts in Bucks County to iPad-based e-pollbooks.
The pollbooks contain your name, precinct, address, and signature. Voters sign them when they arrive to vote in-person.
Kelly Gale, the assistant director of the Bucks County Board of Elections, said the cost for the e-pollbooks, including the iPads, licenses, and maintenance, will be $854,325 for three years, with a government election security grant covering $375,012.49.
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“With regard to replacement timeframes, it’s between four to seven years – whatever the typical lifespan of an iPad is because of course we’ll have speed and battery concerns as time goes on. I think we would plan to budget for gradual replacements rather than replacing them all at once,” Gale said.
The Bucks County Board of Elections staff presently prints 25,000 to 30,000 pages each election to prepare pollbooks. The process takes weeks of work and uses $81,000 in supplies each election.
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Bucks County Commissioners Chairperson Bob Harvie said the paper pollbooks only provide voter information for that precinct and that can make it difficult if someone shows up at the wrong polling location.
The new e-pollbooks will have voter information for the entire county and can be updated much quicker than paper books, said Harvie, who also serves on the Bucks County Board of Elections.
Harvie said the e-pollbooks will make it easier for elections staff to track address changes and other voter rolls updates.
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