Richmond Registrar puts pause on express machine voting

RICHMOND, Va. (WWBT) - Richmond Registrar’s offices are tweaking how voters cast their ballots again.

Richmond Registrar’s offices planned on using express voting machines to simplify the counting ballots, but now, they’re back to pen and paper as they could not get enough printers.

“The way it works is you have to have a printer-pro per book to generate the ballot,” General Registrar Keith Balmer said. Balmer says operations will return to normal.

Voters will take their receipts and hand them to the ballot officer in exchange for a ballot.

He says they hope to have these express machines ready by next year.

As for good news, Balmer says they were short a few hundred poll workers ahead of early voting, but they were able to close that gap.

“For us, it takes 700 poll workers to run a non-president election. We have reached our target goal for 2022,” Balmer said.

He says they anticipate bigger crowds of early voters to pour in as time goes on.

“The turnout so far has been pretty good. So far, in just a couple of hours, we had about 70 voters, which is pretty good. Early voting is 45 days long, so what tends to happen, voters are going to come in, it’s going to go up like a rollercoaster,” Balmer said.

Early voting ends Saturday, Nov. 5. The deadline to register to vote here in Virginia is Oct. 17.

Copyright 2022 WWBT. All rights reserved.