LAFAYETTE — Voters who were frustrated in November by long lines, error messages and vote switching had their feelings validated Friday morning at the Tippecanoe County Election Board meeting.

The county's IT help desk manager Max Walling put it bluntly: the storage space on the e-poll books used to check in voters was "simply inadequate" to handle the 2018 midterm election. The issue was both in the hardware and the software, he said.

The hard drive space on the e-poll books was too small to hold the number of voter names that came through. Walling compared the hard drive space to that of "a good movie."

In fairness, the 2018 midterm election did see a large turnout. The final count came in at 52,037 votes. To put that into perspective, that's 68 percent more votes compared to the 2014 midterm election.

The problem of continuous error messages surfaced during the primary. It was a problem that was suppose to be solved in March, Walling said.

During public comment, there was criticism of the board for not fixing a problem they were aware of prior to the election and questions as to why each individual e-poll book was not checked.

The election management company the county has a contract with, Votec, had a "patch" fix in between the primary and general election. It was assumed that the fix would be installed in all the software moving forward. That did not happen, Walling said. Votec has since taken responsibility for the issue.

As to why each e-poll book wasn't checked, they were to the extent they could be.

For security reasons, the software doesn't install until just a few days before the election meaning the issue wasn't detected until then. The IT team varies between two and four people for the entire county, Walling said. Testing each machine takes about 16 hours — or two days' worth of work. There are 81 machines.

Simply put, the math was against them.

Moving forward, the board discussed its preparedness for the 2019 municipal elections and the 2020 presidential election.

The general consensus was no, there is not currently enough working equipment to handle the 2020 election.

The equipment will be satisfactory for this year's election as Voltec is expected to send new e-poll books for the November election but updating the overall system remains a top priority.

While check-in errors did cause frustration and even potentially discouraged impatient voters, it did not cause the same outcry from the public as the errors with the voting machines themselves.

Several voters reported that their votes were being cast incorrectly due to a touch screen calibration issue that would select the opposite name. The public trust in the voting machines flat-lined after a video showing the vote switching was widely shared.

