The voting machines used to print ballots and scan them wait under lock and multiple seals before they're deployed. Fayette County Clerk Susan Lamb says they're kept in an undisclosed secure location where the seals undergo several checks.
"We actually take the County Board of Elections, our two commissioners, and our sheriff or sheriff's representative out to our warehouse and we actually go through and have to double-check every seal on every equipment that's out in our warehouse. There's probably over 400 machines," she explains. "And then it gets checked again once by the election officers once the machines are at the voting location."
All along the way the process has representatives from both parties involved.
"(On the) County Board of Election, we have a Democrat commissioner and we have a Republican commissioner and they go through and see every single thing that we go through, the process of inspecting all the machines. So everything's party parity," she says. "We never have just two Democrats or two Republicans on one machine."
Lamb says the scanners themselves are independent meaning they are not electronically linked and the machines are not connected to the internet.
Once votes are collected election officers close down the polls at the end of the night and the V-Drives that carry the vote tallies travel — again along with observers from both parties — to the clerk's office, where the drives are entered into computers and transferred to the state system.
For a more detailed conversation on Fayette County's election security, listen to our recent Voting Matters podcast on the subject.