Venango County’s 171 old voting machines were hauled away from the courthouse Monday.
In mid-March, the county commissioners, at the recommendation of the county election board, signed a contract with Election Systems & Services, of Omaha, Nebraska, to provide new voting machines.
The Department of State told counties last year that they must select new machines that provide a paper record, meet current standards of security and accessibility and can be audited more thoroughly than previous systems allowed.
The county first used the touch-screen electronic voting system in the 2006 primary election. It replaced the punch card system that required voters to poke a steel stylus through a dot next to their candidate of choice.
That system was beset with hanging chad problems and resulted in a national program to switch voting systems to an electronic method.
The punch card system was adopted in 1984 when the county abandoned its old paper fill-in-the-space ballots.
