By Terry Witt-Spotlight Senior Reporter
Despite the festering controversy over Dominion voting systems in many parts of the nation, Levy County Commissioners Tuesday expressed confidence in Supervisor of Elections Tammy Jones’ use of the Dominion system for the past eight years and unanimously approved her request to contact the company about purchasing the hardware in the elections office.
Jones told commissioners she was completely confident that the Dominion voting system she has been using since 2014 is hack-proof and that the extremely tight security procedures she uses before, during, and after elections to ensure no one can electronically change election results is working as designed to protect county voters.
She requested $38,000 to purchase the Dominion hardware she has been using for the past eight years through a service management contract that cost her about $37,000 annually. She said her budget next year will reflect a $17,000 increase to pay for licensing and warranty costs associated with owning a voting system that she basically leased for the past eight years with an option to buy.
“This is not an easy ask for me knowing how people feel about Dominion. Obviously eight years ago when we purchased the equipment there were no questions about Dominion,” she said. “But because I program my own database, because we’re not hooked to the internet, it really cannot be hacked into and any co-worker that works in Levy County can tell you how safe and secure we are. I really would be super shocked if any single person would tell you otherwise that our equipment isn’t 100 percent safe.”
Jones acknowledged that voting results in Levy County are transmitted by modem through conventional phone landlines to the elections office after the precincts close, which she said isn’t the same as using the internet, but she said the modem itself is used only briefly to transmit the results. She has thought about ending the practice of using precinct modems to transmit results to the elections office on Election Day but she said it would slow down the process of revealing the election results. She said the election results are transmitted to the state via the internet but the use of the internet is brief and lasts only as long as needed to make the transmission.
The elections supervisor said the tape showing the precinct results is checked by the canvassing board after the election to make sure the number of votes counted at the precinct level matches what the canvassing board counts at the elections office. She said it is an intense verification system to avoid any possibility of fraud. She said every audit of Levy County elections shows 100 percent accuracy. One precinct and one race are audited for accuracy using the current audit procedures.
She is in final negotiations with a company known as Clear Audit that she said will ramp up the vote verification process. She said all ballots will be tabulated separately through an independent system to ensure the vote counts are accurate. The upfront cost of the new system would be about $28,000.
Commission Chairman John Meeks said Jones’ presentation convinced him that Levy County’s voting system is safe.
“You heard Miss Tammy say she programs the (computer) chips themselves; these little SD cards are put in the machine. There’s no connection to the internet. No one has access to our machines. You can’t dial into them. They aren’t Wi-Fi compatible. They are hooked up on election night long enough to transmit that data,” Meeks said.
Meeks acknowledged that things are being said in the news about the 2020 general election that raised questions in some states.
“So questions are being asked, what is real and what is not? Some of these things you see in states where they just quit counting votes in the middle of the night; well that’s it, we’re out. There’s supposedly a water main busted in Fulton, Ga., one of the largest voting precincts in Georgia and they had to evacuate and then you find out later, no it was just the toilets overflowing,” Meeks said.
He noted that there are only two vendors certified to do business with election offices in Florida and one of them is Dominion. He said if the county commission were to rebid the contract, it could very well wind up with Dominion again, only this time with a half-million price tag on a new voting system. Meeks said the current Dominion voting system in Levy County didn’t break down in the 2020 general election. He said it wasn’t used improperly and there was no access to Levy County’s voting system from outside influence. He said he would be the first to tell Jones the county needed a new system if any of those problems occurred.
“I would be the first one to say we need to go in a different direction, but with the evidence presented today, having worked with the equipment hands-on for eight years now, I don’t have any doubt this is the best thing for the voters of Levy County,” Meeks said.
Spotlight Founder Linda Cooper said a lot of people are asking questions about Dominion software “and rightly so.”
“The State of Texas completely rejected them and in the state of Florida, of the 67 counties, 17 are using Dominion and the interesting part about that, these 17 counties are all rural and poor,” she said.
She said now the county is paying an additional $38,000.
“Everyone knows Dominion is in lawsuits, several lawsuits; if they no longer can provide service for their products, can these machines be used for something else or are we dead in the water?” Cooper said. “There’s a little problem here. There’s a reason why 50 Florida counties rejected Dominion. I have a lot of concerns. I don’t want to start throwing away good money after bad if they do have these lawsuits and the machines are no longer useful.”
Cooper said her concerns about Dominion are not a reflection on Jones.
“She runs a tight ship. That’s not what this is about. This is about what we’re up against as a nation and I just want to make sure we’re not throwing away money (on a Dominion voting system) that won’t be viable in a year,” Cooper added.
Jones said Dominion took over maintenance of Levy County’s Diebold Elections Systems election equipment when Diebold went out of business. She said the same thing happened with many counties. Dominion started servicing what had been Diebold’s old equipment.
“In some cases with the Dominion stuff on the county level they made a mistake; they didn’t program cards right, they didn’t make changes to the database,” Jones said. “I’ve done a lot of research. I hear Ms. Linda, trust me. I don’t want people to not trust our system. I can only speak for Levy County. I’ve outlined everything we’re doing to protect the vote. I wouldn’t do what I’m doing today if I didn’t feel 120 million percent confident that this current equipment is working. I will tell you today if I find out Dominion has any wrongdoing, if they’ve illegally done anything, I don’t want to be with the company. As of right now, the lawsuits are going on. We can always back out. We’re not locked into anything. We were locked in for eight years by doing a time purchase.”
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Board of County Commission Regular Meeting March 16, 2021; Posted March 16, 2021
