Luzerne County seeks voting machine proposals

Voting machine vendors have until Feb. 21 to submit proposals to Luzerne County, according to an online posting.

County Manager Romilda Crocamo has said the proposals will provide options on systems and pricing in case county council wants to make a switch for 2026.

This is an appropriate time to reconsider the voting system because the five-year maintenance and support contract with current voting equipment supplier Dominion Voting Systems expires at the end of 2025, Crocamo has said.

Another option for council would be negotiating a new maintenance and support contract to continue using the Dominion system for a set number of years.

A public search process will reveal the features and costs of all state-certified voting systems and determine if a change is warranted and feasible, the manager said.

Council had approved the purchase of Dominion’s system for $3.6 million at the end of 2019 as part of a state mandate for all counties to implement systems with a paper record that can be verified by voters and kept in case tallies are questioned.

There are two ways to meet the paper-trail requirement — filling in ovals on actual paper or making selections on a computerized touchscreen ballot marking device and then printing it out for review before feeding it into a tabulator to be cast and saved. The Dominion system uses ballot marking devices, but the county has used paper ballots at times that were then scanned into the Dominion tabulators to be tallied.

Because there’s no mandate to change systems, there may be little or no state and federal funding to offset costs. The purchase of a voting system is not eligible for funding through the county’s annual state election integrity grant, officials said.

According to the new posting under the purchasing department page at luzernecounty.org, the county is seeking proposals for an election management system and machines through the PennBid Program.